Everyone knows what a puffin looks like – an almost clown-like creature with a beak so enormous and round it seems to be an extension of its entire head. But very few people would have seen one in its natural habitat, unless they’ve spent time either at sea, or on an off-shore island, in the Atlantic region somewhere above about 50 degrees north.
If you ever find yourself in Northumberland, though, which is that bit of England just above Newcastle and south of the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, you can take a marvellous day trip that will let you get up-close and personal with puffins, one of the world’s most famous (and surely most photogenic) birds.
The journey involves taking a fishing boat from Sea Houses (no, not “Sea Horses”, although this being Britain a name like that might very easily be on the cards!). Sea Houses is a totally unremarkable coastal village.
Or rather it’s actually quite remarkable in that while at least 2000 tourists from all around the world pass along its very narrow main street every day, it has done nothing, apart from some upmarket fish and chips shops, to tidy and make itself attractive as a seaside destination.
I even found it difficult trying to book a ticket, although I was for some reason looking for a storefront kiosk, rather than the more obvious approach of just going down to the wharf itself. Regardless, I got there in the end, and selected one of about six different trips on offer.
At the appointed time I came back down from the still quiet town and was amazed to see hundreds of people waiting at the quay. Sure enough, as soon as one vessel departed another appeared, and there was a quite confused assembly line as the passengers coming and going negotiated the narrow gang way.
Finally ours arrived, and once the crew had packed about 50 Germans and Dutch and English onto what looked like a boat built to handle about 40, we were off out the breakwater and heading for the Farne Islands (aka The Farnes).
The Farne Islands are just south of another world-famous place, Lindsfarne, now known (it seems) as Holy Island. Lindisfarne was a monastery in the Dark Ages, founded by St. Cuthbert, that was attacked and destroyed by invading Viking hordes.
It’s not much of a place, but while that spot was forbidding enough, the Farnes are actually where St. Cuthbert went to live as a hermit because he found Lindisfarne (before it was laid to waste) to be far too comfortable!
That being the case, I wasn’t surprised to find that the Farnes were wind-swept, rocky, and supported virtually no trees whatsoever. What they did have, however, in their millions were birds. There were terns and cormorants and guillemots and kittiwakes, all nesting and feeding their young and squabbling. And then, of course, there were the puffins.
The puffin has a hard life, really, although when you watch them up close you can’t help but think they handle it all with remarkable stoicism. They dig themselves a burrow, make a nest, and when the eggs hatch, they fly off to collect thin, silvery fishes to feed to their young.
What we all know, because we’ve seen so many pictures, is that they do an excellent job foraging in the sea. So good in fact, that their enormous beaks are usually crammed with little fishy heads and tails hanging out on either side.
Being a good fisher on an island full of all kinds of other birds has a major down-side, however, and this is where the burrows come in very handy indeed. Gulls in particular hang around, waiting for a fish-filled puffin to return. If they can catch one before it makes it underground, they’ll give the puffin a bit of a thrashing and steal a ready-to-eat dinner.
The puffins are round and squat, and when they make their landing approach, they actually drop their webbed feet down and use them to slow their speed. The trick is to spy their own personal burrow hole, and then make as good a direct hit into the entrance as they possibly can.
Success means feeding a clutch of hungry wee puffin mouths below. A bad landing, on the hand, means probably losing the lot and being knocked around by a gull.
Getting to see all this, for us humans, requires running a bit of a gauntlet as well. The boat lands you at a small wharf on an island run by the wonderful National Trust. They’ve set out a nicely-marked path up through the rocks and onto the grassy top.
They also keep track of nesting birds, and particularly the terns, which seem to almost purposely place their nests right along where you put your feet.
But of course, the terns don’t realise you’re just there to look at them, rather than harm their chicks. Either that or they’re fed up with all the attention their puffin neighbours are receiving at their expense. And so at what would appear to be very random and unpredictable intervals, the mother terns dive-bomb the tourists along the path.
That being the case, it’s pretty important to wear something on your head while you’re on the island. But as I found out fairly quickly, having just a hat isn’t any guarantee. An especially persistent tern decided to latch on to my left earlobe (ouch!), not once but twice (double-ouch!). After that, my hat and my ears were strategically covered with the hood of my raincoat.
Thankfully the terns and the puffins live on opposite sides of bird town, but when we finally came to a patch of soil where the puffins had their burrows, there was another slight problem. The place was packed…with people.
You can’t be a pin-up bird without having your groupies, and at times it was difficult to actually stand your ground because there were so many tourists on the track. And of course, none of us were looking where we were going. We were too transfixed by the constant sorties of puffins trying to elude the unscrupulous gulls.
That was nothing, though, compared to what awaited at the end of the path. Here along the edge of the rocks was a promontory that gave a wonderful view of a range of nesting birds not just on the island’s cliff face, but on a whole series of rocky outcrops as well.
My wife quickly dubbed the chaos the “puffin paparazzi”. There were hundreds of people, many of them Germans it seemed, with hugely expensive digital SLR cameras, and even more expensive (and definitely enormous) telephoto lenses. For some reason almost all the lenses were covered with camouflage material, although the colour and pattern were far more “Desert Storm” than “North Sea”.
And attached to every camera and lens (along with the photographer, of course) was a massive tripod. It was these jumbles of metal legs that really created the headaches. Each time someone moved their camera, a leg caught and moved someone else’s.
And if a photographer picked up their whole apparatus and walked a little way further along the track, it banged into nearby walkers. It was remarkable to observe (a bit like a Charlie Chaplin movie, in fact), but a lot less enjoyable to be involved in yourself.
Unfortunately, however, the only way to see the puffins truly close up, and on the very best and most photogenic outcrops, was to enter the melee and push and prod up to the front.
The puffins, for their part, were perfect performers. Not once did we see them squawk at each other, or try to steal each other’s fish. And they never dive-bombed anyone, not even the Germans poking massive round things under their very prominent noses (sorry, beaks!). No wonder they’re some of the animal kingdom’s most illustrious stars.
~originally composed in June, 2011~