RSPB Spotlight by Euan Dunn

Author:Euan Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472903556
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Puffins are essentially mariners who traverse the boundaries of sea, air and land in the breeding season.

Wings must work hard to generate the lift needed for getting a stocky body airborne.

As noted in Chapter ‘Vital Statistics’, Puffins are not the most manoeuvrable of fliers, compared with, for example, terns and skuas. They are not alone in this as they share a body design that is fundamental to all the auk family. To what do we attribute this lack of aerial dexterity? In their treatise The Auks (1998), Tony Gaston and Ian Jones put it eloquently when they say:

More than any other birds, they [auks] are a product of both sea and air. The only other birds that have travelled so far in adapting to the marine environment, the penguins, have forsaken flight completely. The auks now . . . teeter on the brink between flying and flightlessness, squeezing the last ounce of underwater performance commensurate with retaining the ability to fly.

As a result of the combination of the Puffin’s stout body and its stubby wings, resulting in what is technically called a heavy ‘wing loading’, Puffins need a fast, whirring wingbeat to generate enough lift and air speed. A Puffin can beat its wings at up to 400 times per minute, generating a forward speed of up to 80km/h (50mph). The Puffin’s flight style is thus aptly described as ‘beetling’, as if the bird is a clockwork toy hurtling along as fast as it can just to stay airborne. The inertia a Puffin has to overcome to get airborne is especially evident from its foot-pattering take-off from the sea’s surface in calm conditions when there is no wind-assisted lift.

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