Orange You Glad It’s Breeding Season

The puffins are probably most famous for one very prominent feature – their bright orange beaks. Not only is their bill very fashionable, but it is also functional. Just like a dress with pockets! 

The first thing you notice when you see a puffin is the bright colours on their beak. These are vital for the breeding season as a sign of health. The brighter the beak and legs, the healthier the puffin and the better they will be as a parent and partner. Spring is showing off season! As the puffins arrive back from wintering at sea, this is when their beaks will be the   brightest all year. The puffins do have high standards – if their partner falls ill and has a duller beak, divorce is more likely. In which case they will both have to move on to new, more attractive partners with brighter beaks. 

The puffins only need these colourful accessories during the breeding season, so what happens in the winter? They don’t like to keep up the orange appearance over their months at sea because being bright orange makes them a lot more obvious to potential predators from the sea and sky. The puffin bill is made of different bill plates. At the end of the summer breeding months, the bright orange plates will shed, leaving the puffins with much smaller and duller beaks that are great for incognito fishing in winter. 

After a relatively recent discovery in the puffin world, we now know that puffin beaks glow under ultraviolet light! Although we can’t see this with our naked eyes, a lot of birds can see UV light so the potential meaning of this glow is still unknown. One theory is more flirting! Similar to the orange colour, perhaps if the beaks have a brighter glow, they are also more attractive. Another theory is individual identification. To us, all the puffins look exactly the same and we have no idea how they recognise their partners. Maybe the pattern of UV is different for each bird? We will have to wait and see what the research says! 

These big mouths are not just for show! The puffins also need to use them to hunt and eat, and they are also perfectly designed for this – the best of both worlds. During the busy breeding season, the puffins will be constantly flying out to sea to fish for themselves and their pufflings. On the inside of their large beaks, the puffins have lots of little hooks that they use to trap the small fish they catch in their mouths. Once they catch the fish, it’s not coming out again unless they drop it on purpose! These hooks are so good that the record for the most fish seen in a puffin’s beak at one time was over 60 fish!