The Tufted Puffin 
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, in¬ 
cluding “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. Theipplace 
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 observation, become pale 
bluish. 
A forty-five-degree slope of soil is the characteristic nesting-site ot 
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- 
piades, by placing a foot in the entrance of a burrow and “fetching a com¬ 
pass,” 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. Elsewhere the top soil 
on precipitous clinging ledges may be utilized, or else crannies, and rock- 
hewn chambers. Upon the Farallon Islands, these birds have little oppor¬ 
tunity for digging in the earth, and little necessity for providing fresh 
burrows, for crevices and cubby-holes abound. These are, for the most 
part, of an ample and substantial character, as though well maintained, 
and most of them have, doubtless, seen use measured by cycles rather than 
by generations. Many eggs, and sitting birds as well, are visible from the 
outside; while some of the nesting-sites are nothing more than the inner¬ 
most recesses of niches and caves occupied by the Murres. On the Faral- 
lons, also, there is a fierce, albeit silent, competition between these silent 
I5 11 
