Readers’ wildlife photos

It’s been a while since Bruce Lyon has sent us photos, but he’s been off the in the wilds of Alaska studying birds. Here’s the first part of his odyssey, starring everyone’s favorite seabirds: puffins and auklets.  Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

I spent the summer researching songbirds on St Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands way out in the Bering Sea in Alaska. On a few different days I took a break from our study of songbirds to enjoy the fabulous seabirds. St. Paul is famous for it seabirds and a lot of naturalists visit the island to see several seabirds that are endemic to the Bering Sea. By my count, 13 species of seabirds breed on St Paul.

Here is a video to give a sense of the seabird cliffs. At some of the best cliffs one can see most of the seabird species at at single location.

The light often sucks on St Paul (dense fog) but on a few days the light was nice for photography (cloudy bright) so I rushed out to the seabird cliffs to try and get some nice photos. I find it particularly fun to get photos of seabirds in flight. Landings are particularly tough for the auks (Alcids; puffins, murres and auklets) because they are very heavy relative to their size of their wings and thus have to fly faster than most birds to stay in the air. Landing during strong and unpredictable gusts is  even more of a challenge and it is not uncommon for an individual bird to have three or for failed attempts at landing before success. If they don’t stick the landing, they loop out over the ocean in a huge circle and try again. Sometimes the airspace off the cliffs looks like an airport with a bunch of planes circling, waiting their turn to land.

Tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) coming in for a landing

Tufted puffin heading out to sea:

Tufted puffins nest in burrows and apparently line their nest with plant material:

I’ll be damned if this puffin doesn’t look like Boris Johnson, the former wacky British Prime Minister! The gusty winds sometimes make for a bad hair day for the tufted puffins:

Horned puffin (Fratercula corniculata). It gets its name from the horn-like fleshy projections above the eyes

One puffin is nice, but two are better! Note that the sexes are similar—both molt into somewhat fancier plumage for breeding and grow colorful extensions on the bill.  In one seabird species, this mutual ornamentation has been attributed to mutual sexual selection, an idea Darwin proposed and then instantly rejected (he thought males are too randy to show mate choice):

Turning away from the cliff after a failed attempt at landing:

Parakeet auklet (Aethia psittacula). St Paul has three of the world’s four auklet species—auklets are endemic to the Bering Sea:

Parakeet auklet after an aborted landing:

Crested auklet (Aethia cristatella), a personal favorite. They smell like tangerines but I have never smelled one:

The tangerine scent is apparently strongest on the neck and here a courting group sniff each others’ necks (from a previous year):

One of my favorite photos from the summer—I like the dark auklet emerging from the dark background:

The crests play a role in the mutual sexual selection and both sexes prefer a mate with a large crest:

The crested auklets are often in quite large flocks—they always make my heart skip a beat! Here is a small group, which is better for photography that a large group that is not all in one focal plane:

This crested auklet liked to hang out with the least auklets. Perhaps this makes its crest seem more magnificent:

Least auklet (Aethia pusilla), a tiny (the smallest) auklet. About the length of a robin but chunkier. Small but very feisty and there is lots of fighting in the groups that perch together on boulders: