Search flights to the Shetland Islands
Where do puffins go between mid-August and March? They leave the Shetland Islands in the height of summer and return to their breeding grounds in the spring.
If you’re going puffin spotting, mornings and early evenings are the best times to visit a colony. During the day, the puffins fish. To feed their young, they’ll make several fishing trips. Each puffin can hold more than 20 fish in its colourful beak.
These wonderful images by Danny Green are from the June issue of National Geographic magazine and here’s an extract:
“Here they come, wings beating like a manic pulse, bodies a blur of black and white, a flash of orange from beaks cartoonishly large. Cliff tops, empty and dark for months, turn to commotion near the beginning of April with the arrival of antic, adorable-looking Atlantic puffins.
“Smallest of the four puffin species, they have come en masse to breed on Britain’s rumpled islands and coasts, the more remote, unpeopled, and predator free, the better. No one is certain precisely how and where Fratercula arctica (‘little friar of the Arctic’, so named for its monkish, dark-colored hood) spends the rest of the year. They are somewhere in the vast northern seas, solitary, almost never seen, as they fly, feed, and float.”
Read the full article and see more pictures on the National Geographic site.
