Horned Puffin with a bill load of Pacific sand lance.

These rolly-polly clown faced birds are the best-known auks of the Pacific Ocean – any gift shop in Alaska will offer an array of Horned Puffin postcards and "No Smoking!" signs stating "No Puffin’!" signs. And why should they have such outrageously colored bills in the first place? One answer is that the world is just a beautiful place. A biologist might suggest hypotheses – maybe puffins advertise their quality to potential mates by maintaining physiologically expensive decorations. Or maybe those bills are just an accident of genetics that got fixed in the population. But no one knows for sure.

Horned Puffin on Duck Island.

About 1.2 million Horned Puffins breed in the North Pacific, almost exclusively in Siberia and Alaska.  Unlike Tufted Puffins, Horned Puffins find cozy crevices in rocky cliffs to lay their eggs and raise their chicks.  Horned Puffins lay only one plain white egg.  Like all others members of the Alcidae family, both parents incubate the egg and raise the growing chick.  Each parent shares mealtime duties by carrying up to 15 fish at once back to the chick.  Both the adult and chicks like feast on small fish, squid, and sometimes krill.  It can take Horned Puffin chicks as long as fifty days in the nest to grow big enough to go to sea!

A one day old Horned Puffin chick in its burrow.

Listen to the voice of an adult Horned Puffin, click on one of the icon below.
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