“A baby puffin is called a puffling! It stays hidden deep inside its dark underground burrow until it is ready to fly out to sea at night.”
Atlantic puffins spend most of the year at sea and return to North Atlantic cliffs and islands to breed in burrows. Grooved bills and backward-pointing mouth spines let adults carry several small fish at once to a waiting chick.
By An Nguyen · Published · Updated
Measured against the 176 species profiled on this site. Each figure is converted to one unit system from the published range on the page, so the ranks are computed, not quoted.
| Measure | This species | Rank here | Exceeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body mass | 480 g | #142 of 176#24 of 28 Aves | 19% |
| Body length | 29 cm | #147 of 176#26 of 28 Aves | 17% |
| Top speed | 88.5 km/h | #5 of 75#4 of 16 Aves | 93% |
| Lifespan in the wild | 30 yr | #34 of 169#8 of 28 Aves | 74% |
Closest in body mass
Ranks use the upper end of each published adult range, so they compare typical large adults rather than records, and metrics with no published number are left out rather than estimated. The full table is downloadable from the species dataset, and any two species can be put side by side in the comparison tool.
Browse photographs of Atlantic puffin across habitat, behavior, anatomy, and life stages.
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Core article
A closer look at habitat, diet, behavior, reproduction, and conservation.
The Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) is a small, sturdy seabird with a colorful beak and an upright, waddling walk — nicknamed the "clown of the ocean" or "sea parrot." For most of the year it is a pelagic bird, riding out winter storms alone on the open North Atlantic, and only in spring does it return to the coastal cliffs of Europe and North America for a densely social breeding season. It is a specialized diver, able to "fly" hundreds of feet underwater to catch fish for its burrow-bound chick.
The puffin is about 26 to 29 centimeters long and weighs 380 to 480 grams. Its countershading is black above and white below. During the spring breeding season, the flattened bill develops orange, yellow, and slate-blue plates and a yellow rosette at the base; these outer plates are shed after breeding, leaving a smaller grey winter bill. Backward-pointing structures in the upper bill and a rough tongue help a puffin hold several small fish while it continues foraging. The wings beat up to 400 times a minute in flight and act as flippers underwater, while webbed feet steer dives that can reach 200 feet. Puffins belong to the auk family Alcidae.
The Atlantic puffin is endemic to the North Atlantic, between eastern North America and western Europe, with major breeding populations in Iceland (over half the global total), Norway, the UK, Ireland, Greenland, Atlantic Canada, and down to Maine. Its habitat flips with the season: from late summer into the following spring it lives entirely at sea, resting and sleeping on the open ocean far from land through Arctic storms. In the breeding season (April to August) it comes to remote, predator-free rocky islands and clifftops topped with deep, soft, grassy soil — a non-negotiable requirement, since puffins are burrowing nesters that need soft earth to dig their homes above the waves.
Atlantic puffins are active marine carnivores dependent on small, oily, silvery schooling fish, above all the sand eel, plus capelin, sprats, juvenile herring, and occasional crustaceans or squid. They hunt entirely by sight in cold, clear water, plunging in from the surface or from flight and then "flying" through the water on their wings, agile enough to twist and chase down evasive schools. In the breeding season foraging demands soar as parents shuttle constantly between ocean and cliff burrow, and the ability to carry several fish at once is a crucial efficiency, cutting the number of high-energy trips back to the colony.
Through winter at sea puffins are largely solitary or in loose flocks, but on land to breed they form massive, dense colonies — "puffinries" of tens of thousands of pairs, noisy and bustling. Puffins typically mate for life and show strong site fidelity, returning to the same burrow year after year, and a reunited pair performs a "billing" ritual, rubbing their big colorful beaks together with low grunts. Both sexes dig burrows up to three feet into the turf with claws and beak, and while generally peaceable they fiercely defend the burrow entrance from neighbors and from kleptoparasitic skuas and gulls that try to steal their fish.
The female lays a single, relatively large white egg deep in the burrow, and both parents share the roughly 39-to-45-day incubation. The chick — a "puffling," covered in soft black down — stays hidden underground for its whole rearing period, safe from aerial predators and weather, while the parents make continuous trips for about 45 days to bring back mouthfuls of fish. Near the season's end the parents simply stop feeding and head back to sea; driven by hunger, the fully feathered puffling emerges at night, scrambles down the cliff, and plunges into the ocean to swim, dive, and hunt entirely on instinct. It then spends 3 to 5 years wholly at sea before returning to breed. Atlantic puffins are long-lived, often 20 to 30 years.
The Atlantic puffin is Vulnerable with a continuing decrease, and repeated years of widespread breeding failure have alarmed ornithologists even where huge colonies remain. The gravest threat is the climate-driven collapse of its food web: warming sea-surface temperatures shift currents and move forage fish like sand eels and capelin deeper or farther north, out of commuting range of the colonies, starving pufflings in their burrows. Overfishing of those same forage fish deepens the shortage, oil spills destroy the feathers' waterproofing (causing hypothermia and drowning), and invasive rats, mink, and foxes introduced to breeding islands can gut a colony in one season.
Kingdom
Animalia
Phylum
Chordata
Class
Order
Charadriiformes
Family
Alcidae
Genus
Fratercula
Species
F. arctica
A baby puffin is called a puffling! It stays hidden deep inside its dark underground burrow until it is ready to fly out to sea at night.
Puffins can beat their wings up to 400 times a minute and fly at speeds up to 55 miles per hour.
They are also amazing divers, using their wings to 'fly' underwater to depths of 200 feet (60 meters) to catch fish.
A puffin's beak has special spines on the roof of its mouth and a flexible hinge, allowing it to carry up to 60 small fish at once to feed its baby!
Puffins spend the entire winter alone on the open ocean, far away from land, sleeping on the water's surface.
To show affection and renew their lifelong partnership, a mated pair of puffins will rub their colorful bills together in a behavior called 'billing'.
Select a question to reveal the answer.
They spend their winters on the open waters of the North Atlantic Ocean and return to rocky coasts and grassy clifftops in countries like Iceland, Canada, and the UK to breed in summer.
They are carnivores that eat mostly small fish like sand eels and capelin, diving deep underwater to catch them.
They nest in burrows or rocky crevices on sea cliffs and islands around the North Atlantic.
Their beaks become brighter during breeding season and help adults display to potential mates.
Atlantic puffins are listed as Vulnerable because warming seas, prey changes, and some fishing pressures affect colonies.
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