Atlantic Puffin

The Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica) is a small seabird in the family Alcidae, recognizable by its triangular, vividly colored bill, which it uses to carry multiple small fish crosswise in a single dive. It spends most of its life on the open North Atlantic Ocean, coming ashore only to breed in clifftop or grassy-slope colonies across Iceland, Norway, the British Isles, and the northeastern coast of North America. Puffins are pursuit divers, propelling themselves underwater with their wings to hunt sand eels, herring, and capelin, and they nest in burrows they excavate themselves or take over from rabbits and other animals.

The Atlantic Puffin is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with the global population having declined significantly over recent decades. The primary drivers of that decline are the collapse of prey fish stocks due to commercial overfishing and climate-driven shifts in sea surface temperatures, which push forage fish away from traditional breeding grounds. Predation by introduced mammals such as rats and American mink at colony sites compounds the pressure, and at-sea mortality from bycatch in gill nets remains a documented concern across parts of the range. Iceland hosts the largest single breeding population in the world, and the productivity of Icelandic colonies is used as a key indicator of broader North Atlantic ecosystem health.