Goldsmith on Puffins

 Last Wednesday was half term and a gloriously sunny day so my parents and I went to Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire to see the nesting seabirds.

The place was packed with guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes. We saw gannets performing their strange bowing, head-shaking and beak-fencing behaviours, and we also looked for puffins. Those adorable, colourful beaked fellas are really quite hard to see. They’re smaller than many of the other birds, have a tendency to nest deeper in the crevices and didn’t gather the same way the others did, scattered among the rest. I hear this isn’t the case in ‘puffin islands’ like Anglesey and Lundy, but it was the case at the cliffs in Bempton.

We looked and looked, enjoying the antics of all the other birds, the bright, blue sky and the turquoise sea and eventually our patience had results, we saw puffins. A few were chilling on the cliffs, whilst others flew around, their hurried flapping noticeable against the more relaxed flying of the other birds. It was pretty magical. 

Oliver Goldsmith, in his An History of the Earth and Animated Nature describes puffins, and it seems, unlike some of the other entries, that he might have even seen some before. He says that, “words cannot easily describe the form of the bill of the puffin,' before giving a paragraph on the size, shape and colour of it, warning that it “bites most terribly”.

Goldsmith describes how the birds nest in burrows and holes situated up large cliffs but that they aren’t terribly good flyers and sometimes need to make several tries to fly up to their nests. He also describes how a small number of puffins appear to scout out an area before the larger force comes (maybe it was these scouts we saw).

He says how puffins descend on Anglesey, kicking rabbits out of their burrows and making a nuisance. He then talks about a subject which never ceases to amuse me in his natural history book, whether puffins make good food or not. He describes the meat as rank, unless well salted and pickled and says how the church exempted the puffin from being described as meat on feast days.

Moving away from the description of puffin-meat, he celebrates their indefatigability, that after being preyed on and hunted by humans and other animals, they always come back in as many numbers as before.

I love reading An History of the Earth and Animated Nature for the odd and outdated details some of the entries contain, like the description of their meat, but (if Goldsmith’s sources are correct) I did also learn a little of the hard life of a puffin.

It was a pleasure to meet a few.