The Tufted Puffin 269 



again and again to satisfy his curiosity, employing for the purpose great 

 horizontal circles or ellipses, and slowing up a little at perigee. Or, if the 

 nesting island be a small one, the Puffins will circle it a score of times. You 

 know that the birds are justly apprehensive, but there is something so 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 of alight- 

 ing; and it may be that they find it difficult to effect this exchange of medium 

 without a spill. Rising also requires an effort, desperate if the sea is smooth, 

 but easier in proportion to the increasing strength of the wind. Once the in- 

 vader has left, or else 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 though 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 reduce bivalves. Moreover, in the breeding season 

 it seems to subsist upon small fish, which are as easily taken by the slender- 

 billed Murre. And, if the bill were designed to cope with some stubborn 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, 

 are deciduous, — they fall away, that is, at the end of the breeding season. 

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

 underlying horny plate of a deep brown color; and the basal dimensions of the 

 bill are much reduced. Accompanying these changes is a disappearance of 

 the white facial mask with its plumes, and the entire head becomes a uniform 

 blackish color. The vermilion eyelids fade to a sickly salmon-color; and the 

 irides, if we may trust scanty observations, become pale bluish. 



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 Olympiades, by placing 

 a foot in the entrance of a burrow and "fetching 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. Hard or rocky 

 soil is not shunned in prosperous colonies, but many efforts here are baffled 

 outright, and "prospects" are at least as numerous as occupied burrows. Else- 

 where the top soil on precipitous clinging ledges may be utilized, or else crannies, 



