UKC

Puffins. 

Those are terrific photos.

mbh (Joined Puffin Club on his birthday in 1970)

Saw loads of these on Friday evening as we did a trip to the farne islands. My photos are nowhere near as good.

Great shots Mick...thanks for sharing...

I'm heading off to Seahouses on Saturday to go hunting Puffins. Hope my shots are half as good as yours.

Yay.

So gorgeous! I have once seen puffins, on Skomer, where you could hardly see the ground for them.

Beautiful shots! Thanks for brightening my day 😁

Did you know that:

1. They ringed a Swedish puffling and found it alive and kicking 38 years later!

2. The pufflings fly/dive into the sea as soon as they can (fav food of skuas and big gulls so the sooner they are in the sea the better) and live in the open sea for 3 to 4 years before heading to dry land to find a mate.

3. They mate for life. 

4. The female only lays one egg

5. The record number of sand eels in one beak is 61 (or 63, can’t remember)

6. The weather in the East Neuk is much better then most folk think, with 303 days of sunshine.

Facts curtesy of the Anstruther to Isle of May  boat trip skipper. Apart from the last one which I just made up  

Enjoy your trip and looking forward to your photos. 

all the times I've been to the Farnes, friday was the first evening / sunset cruise i'd done. Well worth it for the birdlife and seals (although for seals its better on ross sands or doing a longstone landing trip......).

Edit - take a mat, Bowden is only 15 mins from Seahouses.........

Thanks for the stunning stats, especially the wall to wall sunshine. 😂

Out of curiosity what kit did you use for those shots, as a 35mm equivalent.

I have a MFT camera.

I went up there once, in the height of nesting season and the other way way out of season.

I think I've got a good time slot to go out to play this year.

Cheapo Nikon dslr with sigma 600mm zoom. All the photos are taken from the footpaths. Puffins make excellent models ! All JPEG’s, don’t have much spare time to work with raw (I try  and be outside as often as I can).

This is a good, honest thread. The title offers puffins and the first post delivers. Chapeau.

That's good to know. My 100-400mm lens should do well.

Cheers

From what I remember of visiting the Farne Islands, you could almost reach out a touch some of the puffins! Much much closer than when we visited Skomer.

Really nice photos. I wish my pictures of Puffins had come out half as well.

Need to go back out to the Farne Islands, been ages since we went. I remember that the terns were nesting right up to the ropes on the edge of the paths and when my wife sat down on a bench, she didn't notice the Eider duck that was happily sat underneath.

Top tip - take a decent hat to protect your head for if the terns get a bit defensively aggressive - then you can just stand there rather than having to duck 😁

The hat is a good top - almost essential. The tern colony is very near the boat landing.  On the way back to the boat I put my hat on and held my phone on my shoulder pointing upwards to try and capture a video. Two screenshots….they are not cropped. 

Just to add to the hat advice - hard hats are not permitted, so no climbing helmets.

I visited the Skerries yesterday (off the NW corner of Anglesey).  Felt very privileged to do so, as always, as it's generally not a place you can visit easily.  Landing is not allowed while the terns are in residence, but sea kayakers arriving under their own steam can get away with a leg stretch and a bit of lunch below the high water mark on a little pebbly beach by the lagoon without disturbing any birds.

While I was there a couple of the volunteer bird wardens who stay in the lighthouse through the nesting season wandered by and stopped to say hello.  Apparently the puffins are doing very well there this year - they've counted 750 breeding pairs so far.  (About 2200 pairs of mostly arctic terns.)  One of the wardens was wearing a hat with a seriously impressive amount of tern poo on it.