274 
The Tufted Puffin 
ever sees is the accidental shaking of the pendent plumes when the bird i 
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 alighting; and it may be that they And 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 flsh. 
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. Elere 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- 
. piades, by placing a foot in the entrance of a burrow 
Burrows ‘Tetching 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. 
