Where Do Puffins Live? Colonies and Winters at Sea

Breeding range: islands across the North Atlantic

The Atlantic puffin breeds on both sides of the North Atlantic and around its Arctic edge. In North America the colonies stretch from Maine through Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to Labrador and western Greenland. In Europe they run from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Svalbard and the Murmansk coast of Russia south to Britain, Ireland and a few small colonies in Brittany, France.

Maine and Brittany mark the southern edge of the breeding range. Farther south the water is too warm for the small schooling fish that puffins need to raise their chicks.

Puffins strongly prefer islands. Islands usually lack foxes, rats, stoats and other ground predators that would dig out eggs and chicks, and a colony on a steep island slope also gives birds an easy take-off over the sea. Where people have brought rats or cats onto islands, puffin colonies have often collapsed.

The biggest puffin colonies

More than 90 percent of all Atlantic puffins breed in Europe, and Iceland alone holds well over half of the world population. The Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast are generally described as the largest single colony. Other famous colonies include:

Witless Bay, south of St. John’s, holds the largest colony in the western Atlantic, estimated at more than 260,000 pairs. Britain’s population was put at about 580,000 pairs in the national seabird census of 1998–2002, with St Kilda and the Northern Isles holding the biggest numbers.

What does a puffin colony look like?

A typical colony is a grassy slope on top of a sea cliff or on the side of a small island, honeycombed with burrows. Each pair digs its own tunnel with its bill and feet, or takes over an old rabbit or shearwater burrow, and the same burrow is reused year after year. Where the soil is thin, puffins nest in cracks among boulders and scree instead.

Colonies can be crowded, with burrow entrances only a meter or two apart. So many tunnels can undermine the turf, and on some islands, such as Grassholm in Wales, erosion eventually left too little soil for burrows and the colony disappeared.

Where do puffins go in winter?

After the chicks leave in late July and August, adult puffins head out to sea and spend the next seven or eight months on the open ocean. They are solitary and widely scattered, so they are rarely seen, and for a long time little was known about where they went.

Small tracking devices called geolocators, which record daylight to estimate position, have filled in much of the picture. Puffins from Maine were found to travel north to the Labrador Sea and then out into the central North Atlantic; one bird covered about 7,700 km (4,800 mi) in eight months. European puffins winter over a huge area of the northeast Atlantic, from the Norwegian and North Seas to waters west of Britain and Ireland and south toward northwest Africa, with some reaching the western Mediterranean.

Different colonies tend to winter in different areas, and birds often return to the same general region each year. The longest journeys are not always the best: tracking of puffins from Skomer in Wales found that birds that traveled farthest used more energy and tended to breed less successfully the following summer. Why many birds make such seasonal journeys at all is explained in Why do birds migrate?

When do puffins come back to land?

Adults return to their colonies in spring, from about late March in Britain and Ireland and later farther north, in April or May in Iceland and Norway and as late as June in Greenland. They gather on the sea near the colony for a few days before landing, then clean out their burrows and lay a single egg.

Young puffins behave differently. After fledging they stay at sea for two to three years, then start visiting colonies in summer, often the one where they hatched, and usually begin breeding at four to six years old.

Other puffins: the Pacific species

The Atlantic puffin is the only puffin in the Atlantic. Two relatives live in the North Pacific: the horned puffin, which breeds from northeast Siberia to Alaska and British Columbia, and the tufted puffin, which nests from Japan and the Russian Far East across Alaska and down the American west coast to California. Both have the same burrow-nesting, fish-carrying lifestyle.

All three species, along with the rhinoceros auklet, are found only in the Northern Hemisphere. Pressures on their colonies and at sea are described in Are puffins endangered?