PUFFIN. 155 
cipitous rocks, and at some distance from the aperture ; sometimes, 
where no such nest-sites are available, on the bare ground, 
under or between fragments of rock or large stones. They 
are most commonly white more or less tinged with blue, speckled, 
spotted and blotched or marbled with chestnut brown, very dark 
brown and a kind of neutral tint.—T. 3, plate X. 
283. LITTLE AUK—(HMergulus melanoleucos). 
have rarely seen any bird, much more a very small bird like 
this, whose whole air and deportment conveyed to me more com- 
pletely the idea of entire independence. Only under the pressure 
of severe storms or long continued hard weather do they leave 
the deep sea in order to seek the comparative shelter of some 
land-sheltered bay or reach. It breeds on the Faroe Isles and in 
Iceland, but not in Britain. 
984, PUFFIN—(Fratercula arctica). 
Sea Parrot, Coulterneb, Tammy Norie.—This is, one may safely 
say, the quaintest-looking of all the host of our English birds. 
The young Owl is grotesque enough, but more by reason of its 
deliberate, solemn-seeming and yet laughable movements; but 
the Puffin, with its upright attitude and huge ribbed and painted 
beak—reminding one somewhat strongly of the highly-coloured 
pasteboard noses of preposterous shape and dimensions which 
decorate the windows of the toy-shop—strikes us as more laugh- 
ably singular yet. They breed abundantly about many of our 
rocky coasts in all parts of the kingdom, depositing their one egg 
—a large one, again, in proportion to the size of the bird—some- 
times in crannies or rifts in the surface of the cliff, often very far 
back; at other times in rabbit-burrows where such excavations 
are to be met with sufficiently near the coast and otherwise sutt- 
able to the wants of the bird. It does not follow that because 
the Puffin occupies the hole, that the rabbit had forsaken it or 
