From Issue Two of Hidden Scotland Magazine

Savouring Scottish Puffindom

Where to see puffins in Scotland each spring.

Words by Kenny Taylor · Photographs by Kevin Morgans

Printed in Issue Two of Hidden Scotland Magazine, Spring and Summer 2021.

In just a few places around Scotland, spring comes with the whirring of thousands of wings. At the edges of some islands and a scatter of mainland cliff tops, sudden bursts of colour and contrast speckle winter-browned turf, vibrant as flowers unfolding on a woodland floor.

Tangerine feet are part of it, pattering over grey rocks, scuffing soil from the entrances of burrows that pock the slopes. So too are bodies feathered in black and white, dapper as serving staff in an old-school restaurant, but walking with the roll of sailors newly come ashore. And bills of carmine, blue-grey and cream, beak parts connected at the base by a rosette of buttercup yellow. The puffins are back.

The annual homecoming of puffins to their breeding places is one of the seabird wonders of the northern world. From the Gulf of Maine to Iceland, Brittany north to Svalbard, flocks funnel in from wider seas. The birds have spent the previous seven months there, far from land and scattered as singletons or in very small groups. Some could have ranged as far as waters off Greenland, others gone south to the Bay of Biscay.

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