Atlantic puffins are returning to shore. Here’s how to see the fleeting spring spectacle.

Atlantic puffins spend most of their lives out on the ocean, but each April the urge to breed draws the black-and-white creatures back to land by the score. These large coastal colonies breed, nest, and raise a single puffling while socializing and fishing to feed their young.

“It’s something which I find absolutely magical, because you can almost see the conflict in the puffins’ heads about what they’re doing,” says Kenny Taylor, conservationist and self-described puffinologist who’s been studying the birds in Scotland for half a century. “They’re a seabird, an ocean bird. If they could raise their young on the sea, they would. But now they have to come to shore.”

You can watch as the birds start to congregate in the waters off the North Atlantic coast, first by the dozens, but then by the hundreds and thousands. While Iceland is home to 60 percent of the puffin population, you can also find them on the coasts of Maine, Norway, and the British Isles. Canada's Newfoundland and Labrador is home to the largest Atlantic puffin colony in North America, with over 350,000 puffins visiting the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve every year.

Then, as if by consensus, the puffins will lift off the water and start doing flyovers to check out the rocky cliffs and tussocks below. 

Fascinatingly, the puffins are quite punctual—so much so that the Norwegian island of Lovund celebrates the occasion with the April 14 holiday known as Lundkommdagen, or Puffin Arrival Day. And while Taylor says the puffins don’t always arrive exactly on that day, he did happen to witness Atlantic puffins arriving en masse precisely on Lundkommdagen about 15 years ago. 

Because they nest underground, however, there are times when the hillsides appear eerily lifeless, even when tens of thousands of birds have returned to the land.

Being out of sight means it has taken scientists a lot longer to study what happens during the puffin nesting season. Yet cameras placed inside puffin burrows have started to reveal that secret world.

The secrets of puffin burrows

Once they arrive on land, puffins set to work looking for a burrow and a mate.  A puffin might keep both for the rest of its life—and the animals live surprisingly long lives, with many  reaching their 30s and the oldest pushing into their 40s.

“There is a very small amount of divorce,” says Taylor. It usually only happens if a pair fails to breed in their first few attempts. And when it does happen, he notes that while the female will take another mate and move to another burrow, the male tends to just keep returning to the same empty hole in the ground. 

Unlike some animals that simply use holes dug by other creatures for shelter, puffins use their powerful beaks and sharp claws to excavate their own cavities under boulders and in the soil. 

For instance, cameras can reveal what predators might be invading the nests—rats are a particular problem when introduced onto islands—as well as what kinds of fish the parents are feeding their young. As an example, this video shows a puffling trying to gulp down a much-too-large butterfish, perhaps because the surrounding ocean has become too warm or too overfished for the more-preferred herring.

Even still, much of the puffins’ lives remain a mystery.

“It’s only been in the last 10 to 15 years that we’ve had any idea where puffins are during the winter,” says Don Lyons, a seabird biologist and director of conservation science at National Audubon Society.

(Adorable puffins are tougher than they look.) 

How transformative bills help puffins find mates

If you have seen pictures of puffins carrying rows of fish tucked neatly in their bright orange bills, then you can probably guess that the puffin’s bill is critical to the species’ success. But what you might not realize is that the vivid color is only temporary.

“The bill is really important, but only during the breeding season,” says Jacob Ligorria, a seabird ecologist and National Geographic Explorer. 

Puffins look to each other’s bills as a sign of physical fitness. The bigger and brighter it is, the better mate a puffin will make, in other words.

“There’s also a behavior known as billing, where both birds in a pair will meet each other and then they knock their bills together audibly,” says Ligorria.

But once the breeding season comes to a close, the keratin plates on their beaks actually slough off, altering the bill’s shape, while their eye ornaments disappear, their faces darken, and their legs fade from bright orange to pale yellow. And by the time winter comes back around, the puffin will have shed its orange parts entirely leaving a smaller, sleeker, blacker bill that it will use for most of the year. One study notes that the transformation is so striking that early observers once believed summer and winter puffins were entirely different species.

(Puffin beaks glow in surprising discovery.)

Small birds, big personalities

While most of what we know about puffins comes from the short period of time they spend on land, out at sea, tiny puffins must overcome many obstacles.

For instance, the black-and-white coloration that sometimes earns puffins the nickname “penguins of the north” is actually a bit of high-seas camouflage known as countershading. 

 “It’s pretty common in the ocean, because if I’m hunting something or being hunted, if you look down on me, you can’t see me because the black is black and it blends into the abyss,” says Ligorria. “And if you look up towards the sun, your belly is white and you blend in with the light.”

At about the size of a football, puffins have to watch out for their own predators, too, such as a gyrfalcons from above and fish and sharks from below.

“They’re a relatively small bird, and yet, they do some pretty big things in terms of survival in the oceans,” says Taylor. 

While Atlantic puffin populations remain stable, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the species as vulnerable to extinction. And historically, some populations have been extirpated by overhunting—something the Audubon Society has worked to overcome by reintroducing puffins to islands that the species had previously called home. Furthermore, scientists are still learning how climate change may impact the charismatic creatures, as well as the smaller fish species they depend on. 

“We have the ability to really help puffins through good management of the ocean and by protecting the places where they nest,” says Lyons, who has been integral in the National Audubon Society’s project to return puffins to their ancestral nesting islands. “We’ve had real success in bringing puffins back to places like Maine. So they’re both a cautionary tale and a hopeful tale.”