The Secret Lives of Puffins

Puffins are among the most instantly recognisable, iconic and well loved of birds. For many they are a highlight of the UK's summer coastline and their colourful appearance, comedy antics and approachability just add to their popularity. Several 'hotspot' are attracting high levels of interest in visits to their colonies. In spite of the high level of interest in, and appeal of, these birds there has been a surprising lack of books focused on Puffins as a species.
Award-winning wildlife photographer Mark Sisson has spent several years photographing Puffins and this new book combines images that beautifully encapsulate their charm and visual appeal with an accessible text written by leading wildlife writer Dominic Couzens. The book covers the birds' life cycle, behaviour, habitats and the current and future challenges that they face, along with many surprising facts and anecdotes.

Project Puffin

Project Puffin is the inspiring story of how a beloved seabird was restored to long-abandoned nesting colonies off the Maine coast. As a young ornithology instructor at the Hog Island Audubon Camp, Dr. Stephen W. Kress learned that puffins had nested on nearby islands until extirpated by hunters in the late 1800s. To right this environmental wrong, he resolved to bring puffins back to one such island―Eastern Egg Rock. Yet bringing the plan to reality meant convincing sceptics, finding resources, and inventing restoration methods at a time when many believed in “letting nature take its course.”
Today, Project Puffin has restored more than 1,000 puffin pairs to three Maine islands. But even more exciting, techniques developed during the project have helped to restore rare and endangered seabirds worldwide. Further, reestablished puffins now serve as a window into the effects of global warming. The success of Dr. Kress’s project offers hope that people can restore lost wildlife populations and the habitats that support them. The need for such inspiration has never been greater.

Puffins (Wildlife Monographs)

The comical and colourful faces of puffins have earned them the popular name 'clowns of the sea'. On land they waddle and hop amongst rocks to and from their burrows, but once in the air, they wheel and turn with great agility and grace. The author portrays the multifarious activities of these lovable seabirds during their breeding season and reveals how they live and survive at high altitudes.

Puffins (Pocket Books) 

The Atlantic Puffin is the UK's most recognisable seabird. Take an intimate journey with award winning wildlife photographer, Drew Buckley, as he observes the trials and joys of this charismatic creature through the lens of his camera. Featuring stunning photography, Puffins provides an amusing insight into the daily struggles of this tenacious little bird.

RSPB Spotlight: Puffins

Enduringly popular, Puffins are perhaps our most iconic species of bird, and are the most immediately identifiable of seabirds with their decorative bills and clown-like gait. Yet when they take to the air they wheel and turn with great agility and underwater these stocky little birds use short specially adapted wings to propel themselves through the water in pursuit of small fish.
Surprisingly little was known about Puffin ecology until recently thanks to their preferred breeding habitat being underground on remote islands or hard-to-reach coastlines. Now Euan Dunn discloses all we have learnt about them as a result of technological advances, and provides a revealing account of their life cycle, behaviour and breeding, what they eat, how they interact in their busy colonies, and where they migrate to in winter. Euan also exposes the mounting threats Puffins face and offers advice on the best places to see them.
Each Spotlight title is carefully designed to introduce readers to the lives and behaviour of our favourite birds and mammals.

The Atlantic Puffin

• Publisher : Blandford Press; First Edition (17 Nov. 1986)
• Language : English
• Hardcover : 128 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0713717343
• ISBN-13 : 978-0713717341

The Puffin (Poyser Monographs)

With its colourful beak and fast, whirring flight, the Atlantic Puffin is the most recognisable and popular of all North Atlantic seabirds. Puffins spend most of the year at sea, but for a few months of the year the come to shore, nesting in burrows on steep cliffs or on inaccessible islands. Awe-inspiring numbers of these birds can sometimes be seen bobbing on the sea or flying in vast wheels over the colony, bringing fish in their beaks back to the chicks. However, the species has declined sharply over the last decade; this is due to a collapse in fish stocks caused by overfishing and global warming, combined with an exponential increase in Pipefish (which can kill the chicks). The Puffin is a revised and expanded second edition of Poyser's 1984 title on these endearing birds, widely considered to be a Poyser classic. It includes sections on their affinities, nesting and incubation, movements, foraging ecology, survivorship, predation, and research methodology; particular attention is paid to conservation, with the species considered an important indicator' of the health of our coasts.

Atlantic Alcidae:

A study of the ecology, biology and conservation of all the species of auk of the Atlantic Ocean.

• Publisher : Academic Press Inc; First Edition (1 Dec. 1985)
• Language: : English
• Paperback : 574 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0125156715
• ISBN-13 : 978-0125156714
  

The Last Great Auk

• Publisher : Jesse Stuart Foundation (1 May 2003)
• Language : English
• Hardcover : 176 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1931672164
• ISBN-13 : 978-1931672160
• Dimensions : 15.24 x 1.27 x 22.86 cm
  

Who Killed the Great Auk?

The Great Auk is one of the world's most famous extinct birds. It was undoubtedly a most curious creature: a flightless bird with tiny wings, it stood upright like a human, and sported an enormous beak. On land, the Great Auk was clumsy and awkward, but it was perfectly adapted for swift and efficient movement in the sea, where it spent the large part of the year. In its heyday, it populated the North Atlantic, from Western Europe across to North America, and was a familiar sight to islanders and coastal dwellers when, each May, it would climb ashore for the short breeding season. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century sightings of the bird were but rare occurrences, and just a few decades later even the most assiduous Victorian explorers could not find it. So what happened to the Great Auk? What - or who - caused it to disappear from the northern oceans?

Auks: An Ornithologist's Guide 

In this book Ron Freethy has provided a comprehensive study of the auk family-the Alcidae-which comprises over 20 species. With the exception of the Great auk (Pinguinus impennis )the auk family is confined to the seas and coasts of the Northern Hemisphere from the ice of the high arctic seas to the south coasts of Britain and France. Here they fish by diving and gather to breed mostly in huge colonies along rocky shores. Fossil evidence places an ancestor of the auks in the Eocene epoch,70-54 million years ago, and naturalist Ron Freethy considers their long history and evolution together with a detailed account of the behaviour and life-cycle of several species. The text is illustrated with maps, drawings and both black & white and colour photographs of these fascinating and attractive birds.

The Auks: Alcidae

This work is intended for professional and amateur ornithologists; birdwatchers; zoologists; student and researchers in animal behaviour and behavioural ecology; and members of Ornithological Societies in all countries, especially the Canadian Nature Federation, American Ornithologists' Union, and American Birding Association. The text covers: auks and their world; systematics and evolution; social behaviour; chick development and the transition from land to sea; and distribution and biogeography.

The Great Auk

This is a wonderful and remarkable book by an extraordinary wildlife artist. Fuller's creativity and imagination illuminate what might otherwise be a somewhat gruesome account of an obsessive quest in search of all that can now be known about this extinct bird. Highly recommended.
Perhaps the most curious of all vanished birds, the Great Auk commands an enormous following among naturalists and its strange and mysterious story is told in the pages of this book. Not reliably seen since 1844, this remarkable bird has become one of the great icons of extinction.
With more than 200 colour plates and a similar number of black and white pictures, this beautiful book brings together almost every known archival image of the species, along with dramatic photographs of the lonely islands it once inhabited and intriguing pictures of the many fascinating characters involved in the Great Auk's tragic story.

The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk

A For hundreds of thousands of years Great Auks thrived in the icy seas of the North Atlantic, bobbing on the waves, diving for fish and struggling up onto rocky shores to mate and hatch their fluffy chicks. But by 1844, not a single one of these magnificent birds was alive.
In this stunningly illustrated non-fiction picture book, award-winning author and illustrator Jan Thornhill tells the tragic story of these birds that “weighed as much as a sack of potatoes and stood as tall as a preteen’s waist.” Their demise came about in part because of their anatomy. They could swim swiftly underwater, but their small wings meant they couldn’t fly and their feet were so far back on their bodies, they couldn’t walk very well. Still the birds managed to escape their predators much of the time … until humans became seafarers.
Great Auks were pursued first by Vikings, then by Inuit, Beothuk and finally European hunters. Their numbers rapidly dwindled. They became collectors’ items — their skins were stuffed for museums, to be displayed along with their beautiful eggs. (There are some amazing stories about these stuffed auks — one was stolen from a German museum during WWII by Russian soldiers; another was flown to Iceland and given a red-carpet welcome at the airport.)
Although undeniably tragic, the final demise of the Great Auk led to the birth of the conservation movement. Laws were eventually passed to prevent the killing of birds during the nesting season, and similar laws were later extended to other wildlife species.

The Great Auk: The Extinction of the Original Penguin

Since the total vanishing of the species, the great auk has become an icon of extinction alongside the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the moa. More than any other extinct bird, the Auk has been prized as a trophy, and all its attributes - from its eggs to the oral history of its demise - were voraciously collected until fairly recently. Its protean appearance in almost every artistic and visual form, from cigarette boxes to bronze and marble statues, has immortalised one of the most tragic man-made extinctions. "The Great Auk: The Extinction of the Original Penguin" recounts this tale of destruction and reminds us what we, as a species, have done and are still doing to the world around us.

The Great Auk, or Garefowl

The great auk (Pinguinus impennis, formerly Alca impennis), a flightless bird of the north Atlantic, became extinct in the mid-1850s because of over-hunting - apart from being used as a food source and as fish-bait, its down was used for feather beds, and efforts in the early nineteenth century to reduce the slaughter were not effective. The last breeding pair was killed in 1844. This 1885 work by Scottish naturalist and scientist Symington Grieve (1850–1932) collects together 'a considerable amount of literature bearing upon the 'History, Archaeology, and Remains' of this extinct bird'. The material includes articles on the historic distribution of the great auk, its known habits, its various names, and information on all the surviving specimens, whether stuffed, skeletal, bones, or eggs. The book is illustrated with drawings and lithographs of auk remains, and an appendix supplies historical and contemporary documents on the auk from all over Europe.

An Alphataxonomic Revision of Extinct and Extant Razorbills

Alca (Aves, Alcidae) has a comparatively rich fossil record with respect to other Charadriiformes, consisting of thousands of specimens. Despite the abundance of fossil material, species richness in this clade has remained poorly understood, primarily because of the paucity of associated specimens. To address this issue, a combined morphometric and apomorphy-based method was developed that would allow referral of fragmentary and isolated specimens, which constitute ~97% of the Alca fossil record. Measurements of multiple variables from >2000 Alca fossils were categorized by hierarchical cluster analysis and resulted in the recognition of species clusters. Discriminant function analysis was used to assess statistical support for these clusters and to identify the most informative measurements with respect to discriminating between species on the basis of size. The reliability of this method was tested using the same measurements taken from 13 extant alcid species and was found to be robust with respect to the accurate recovery of species-correlated groups of measurement data. With the exception of the similarly proportioned Alca carolinensis sp. nov. and A. olsoni sp. nov., the holotype specimens of all Alca species were recovered in separate, statistically supported clusters. 

The Thick-billed Murres of Prince Leopold Island

• Publisher : Available by mail from Printing and Pub. Supply an (1 Jan. 1981)
• Language : English
• Hardcover : 350 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0660108577
• ISBN-13 : 978-0660108575