I still have some other great pictures from my trip to share but I couldn't wait to get to the puffin pics and so I have jumped right in with this cute little couple.
There are over 42,000 pairs of puffins on Skomer at this time of year. At the moment many of them are inside their burrows sitting on eggs or out on the water feeding so while I got to see lots of birds there were not as many on display as at other times of the breeding season. In fact this was the only pair I saw together the whole time I was on the island. It was so cool to catch them preening each other and making gentle "growling" sounds before one went back underground to their egg. I figured it was a changing of the guard situation, perhaps one is relaying information about the best fishing spots while the other is giving an update on the egg.
Did you know that the average lifespan for a puffin is 30 years but the oldest recorded age is 41 years although it is thought likely that birds could live longer than that it is just that the bands used to tag the birds don't last as long as the birds do. They reach maturity and start breeding from 5 - 6 years old and remain with their mate for the rest of their lives. Outside of the breeding season they spend about 8 months apart out at sea, they return to the same nesting sites each spring and somehow from among the thousand of other birds they manage to find each other to raise the next generation of their family.
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