274 The Tufted Puffin 



ever sees is the accidental shaking of the pendent plumes when the bird 

 turns its head. 



If a hillside colony is approached suddenly from shore, the standing 

 population, presumably males, pitches downward to sea by a common 

 impulse ; while the occupants of nests come shelling out by twos and 

 threes and dozens, as one traverses the honey-combed earth. Once 

 a-wing, the Puffin returns again and again to satisfy his curiosity, flying 

 in great horizontal circles. There is something weird and funereal about 

 the whole performance ! 



Later the Puffins settle upon the surface of the water until the sea is 



black with them. Each bird dives, if only for a moment, upon the instant 



Diving f alighting; and it may be that they find it difficult 



and to effect this exchange of medium without a spill. 



Balancing Rising also requires an effort, desperate if the sea is 



smooth, but easier in proportion to the increasing strength of the wind. 



Once the intruder has left, or has secreted himself, the Puffins return 



rapidly to reclaim the cooling egg, or to take up the sober vigil at the 



burrow's mouth. Each alights with uplifted wings held well back. The 



wings are also lifted from time to time as if to rest them, and they 



are brought into requisition as balancers whenever the bird attempts to 



walk. Be the going ever so easy, the Puffin shifts about as gingerly as 



a slack-wire performer. 



A Puffin's bill is so remarkable a creation that a glance at its structure 

 may not be out of place ; though as to what may be the necessity of this 

 powerful crushing organ we are frankly ignorant. The bird is not a 

 shallow-water feeder, and so has no need to crush bivavles. Moreover, in 

 the breeding season it seems to subsist upon small fish, 

 Food which are as easily taken by the slender-billed Murre ; 



and, if the bill were designed to cope with some stub- 

 born viand of the middle sea, why reduce its size in winter? We do not 

 know. But we do know that the Puffin's bill is wonderfully contrived of 

 some eighteen plates (with underlying membranes), and that of these, 

 sixteen, including "rosettes, lamellae and selvedges," but chiefly the olive- 

 green basal plates, fall away at the end of the breeding season. Their 

 place is taken partly by underlying feathered tracts, and partly by an 

 underlying horny plate deep brown in color; and the basal dimensions 

 of the bill are much reduced. Accompanying these changes, the white 

 facial mask with its plumes disappears, and the entire head becomes 

 uniformly blackish. 



A forty-five-degree slope of soil is the characteristic nesting-site of 



the Tufted Puffin. Here tunnels are driven at random to a depth of three 



or four feet, and so close together that once, on Erin, one of the Olym- 



Nestin piades, by placing a foot in the entrance of a burrow 



Burrows anc * " fetcnm PT a compass," I was able to touch with the 



hands the entrances of twenty-five others, apparently 



occupied. This may have been an unusually populous section, but, if we 



reckoned at half that rate, an acre of ground would carry 2,700 burrows. 



