8:44am Friday 9th July 2010By Faith Eckersall
WITH their tangerine legs, striped beaks and crisp, monochrome plumage, what’s not to like about the puffin?
The enthusiasts, twitchers and members of the public who wouldn’t know an eagle from a budgie who have made the boat-trip to glimpse the Dorset colony of these avian celebs, certainly agree.
“People seem to love them,” says senior Ranger for Durlston Country Park, Katie Black, who helps care for the colony on Dancing Ledge.
Katie’s more of a guillemot woman herself but acknowledges: “They are very striking to look at, with their painted beaks and black and white plumage. Their walk is very comical too.”
Unlike the Farne puffins, whose numbers dipped alarmingly five years ago, the Dancing Ledge group have stayed remarkably stable at around 25 birds.
“They are very hard to spot because there’s not many of them and instead of living in burrows, like most puffins, they live in a split in the cliff,” says Katie.
They’re also difficult to see because they are actually much smaller than people imagine. “Only about the size of a human hand,” she says.
Despite proudly caring for what is the South’s most easterly puffin colony, the Durlston Rangers are happy to admit there’s still a lot they don’t know about them.
“We try to count accurately but it is tricky until you can actually see a chick,” says Katie.
“For us, even two more breeding puffins would be a good increase in the colony’s size.”
But there’s no shame in not knowing as scientists who attached GPS trackers to the Farne puffins have revealed this week that lots of the things they thought they knew about them were completely inaccurate.
Their birds don’t dive to 25 metres, they just go down five, and instead of going 60 miles out to sea they stick closer to land, homing in on ‘hotspots’ of fish.
The Dancing Ledge puffins are the remnants of what would have been a string of small colonies along this part of the South Coast.
It is thought that human activity has possibly lead to the demise of the rest.
They may even have been the inspiration for the characters Huffin and Puffin in Enid Blyton’s Sea of Adventure novel.
The author lived in Purbeck and was a keen visitor to Dancing Ledge, using its pool as the model for the one in her Malory Towers books.
Despite their Disney-esque appearance, puffins have a long and mysterious folklore.
It is claimed they were often referred to as ‘half-fish, half-flesh’ and people believed they were born from rotting pieces of wood, and not eggs.
During the Middle Ages it is thought that Muslim and Jewish scholars could not determine if various birds such as geese and puffins were fish or humans and called for them to be killed – warning the faithful not to eat them as they were creatures of unknown origin.
Now the only human eaters of puffins are the Norwegians and the Icelanders, who catch them in nets before killing them and turning them into dinner.
The rest of the human race, of course, just want to adore them.
http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/8263208.Why_do_we_love_Puffins_/
(Submitted by Mark North)
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