Puffins

The rough weather continued on Thursday and even the ferries were cancelled. Ironically the big car ferry could go anywhere in the roughest of seas but high cross-winds made precise manoeuvring impossible in the harbours. We had witnessed a some tense moments in the wheel-house after several attempts to line up the ramp for the cars to exit. It is a highly skilled job and the penalties are high for a mistake.

So, for a treat we all made a visit to Puffin Island which lies in a relatively sheltered cove beyond the Seven Sisters, off the village of Bleik. From the shore the island looks like a huge, conical whale-tooth rising almost perpendicularly from the sea. My guess is that it is the stump of a volcanic plug.

The Laura

Our boat was a beautiful, traditional tub of a vessel called "Laura".  It bounced and swayed it's way out of the harbour and inched along the edge of the mole (harbour-arm) in a well marked channel between treacherous rocks . Some passengers were moved to the stern to prevent the bow from nose-diving into the swell. If that happened a lot of expensive cameras would have been drenched with salt water.

We had been seeing bee-like swarms (rather than flocks) of puffins off the lighthouse every day. They often flew surprisingly high in the air and we even found them over 30 km out among the whales. All of them originated from this one Puffin Island, Bleiksøya. Even so, the sheer number of birds sitting in the water and milling round the island was a revelation. So many birds!

Razorbill.

I had trouble focusing on any one puffin; they were all so cute, but by placing myself low down and only looking at the birds closest to the boat I managed to get a few pictures. (As a matter of fact I took over 500 photos!)

Dotted among the puffins we found a few razorbills, black guillemots and shags but this was really "puffin central". I suppose the reason for this was the shape of the island. It had only a few really precipitous cliffs for ledge-nesting seabirds to lay their eggs but it had a thin covering of soil and vegetation where puffins could dig their burrows. All the same, I would have expected a few more of the bigger auks and perhaps some kittiwakes and fulmars? Please?

"I can't see any puffins."

The reason for their absence was soon obvious. At least 6 white-tailed eagles were methodically working the island over in shifts. They even had a rest area on the end of the island where they could take a break from eating puffins. The skipper explained that kittiwakes had attempted to nest on Bleiksøya but the eagles had driven them off to nest on the houses in Andenes.

Two methods were used by eagles to catch puffins: We saw the "grab and snatch" method, which just meant flying around the island to intercept a puffin that was getting airborne from the slopes. The eagles would drop their undercarriage and put down their flaps, grab a puffin with one talon and make a landing. The result was a mini snow-shower of black and white feathers. The other method was "loitering with intent". The eagle would just follow a puffin home and then stand by his front door until he came out. The last thing that the unfortunate tenant would see was the inside of that huge, cruel yellow beak.

Eagle chasing a puffin

The young puffins were still in their burrows so the loss of an adult would also mean the death of the single chick. It takes both parents to rear the sooty-coloured fluff-balls until they can jump down to the water, which they do even before they can fly. The main food they eat is sand-eels that the adults bring in, several at a time, draped in their bills like a silvery moustache. As the folks come home with the shopping they are mugged by a bunch of thug-birds that chase them, scream at them and even beat them up until they drop the goods. It's a bad neighbourhood.

Iva and Richard.

Large gulls will have a go at mugging and some even behave like eagles, snatching whole birds at the entrance to their burrows, but the experts are the skuas. We saw dozens of Arctic skuas (Parasitic jaegers) attacking the puffins. They behaved like falcons, approaching in steady, level flight and then accelerating into a high speed chase that was over in seconds.

The "Laura" proved to be an ideal vessel for it's job and the skipper did a fine job of pointing out all the birds to us, in at least three languages. My only objection was when he used the ship's horn to frighten an eagle away from a burrow. He said that this was to save a puffin's life and that of it's chick, but my ideal is that we should slip in quietly as observers in order to witness as natural a spectacle as possible, then leave with the minimum of fuss. Tooting the horn may also have scared shags and razorbills from their nests so that gulls could steal the eggs.

Returning to Bleik.

I supposed the eagles would have chicks to feed too, possibly in an eyrie on the island, but was told that most of them were immature birds and that the adult pair nested miles away on the big island of Andøya. I am sure he was right as I saw one fly across from the sheer cliffs at the back of the bay, above Bleik.

I mentioned my sighting of a rare Long-taiked skua the day before and the skipper told me with confidence "We don't get those here."

"You do now", I said to myself.