9 | WILDLIFE
Pick up a puffin
Well, they’re more colourful than penguins. Wendy Evans explains how to photograph these eye-catching little birds
If you’ve never seen a puffin before, you may be surprised by their diminutive size, impressed by their diving capabilities and amused by their colourful beaks and sad eyes. The UK has 580,000 breeding pairs of Atlantic puffin, one of the three types of Fratercula, as the genus is known. The other two are the Horned puffin, found off the coasts of Siberia, Alaska and British Columbia in the summer and California in winter; and the Tufted puffin, also found in the north Pacific. At 32cm long on average, the Atlantic puffin is the smallest but, thanks to its orange feet and brightly coloured beak, also most distinctive.