The Creative Spirit Newsletter

August 12, 2001

We have two new members!  

Welcome to Barry Stevens, a very talented artist living in Wales.  He creates beautiful mandalas which also make perfect e-cards.  You can visit his extensive website HERE.

Welcome to Joan from Ontario, Canada.  Joan is a gifted poet with a gentle spirit.  Her website has many of her lovely poems and you can see them HERE.

 

Puffins!

This week we are featuring the photos of Dave Grant.  In 1990 he traveled to a tiny island off the coast of Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy to get these excellent close-ups of puffins.  In order to protect the privacy and ensure the safety of the puffins, there was a special wall made with tiny peek holes for photographers to get their shots.  Thus the puffins were completely unaware that there were people nearby.  

Puffins do not sit on their eggs. They move up against the egg and cover it with their wing and side. Under water, puffins use their wings to swim while guiding themselves with their feet. Atlantic puffins weigh about one pound and stand one foot tall. Horned puffins weigh just over a pound and are also one foot tall. Tufted puffins weigh about one and three-quarter pounds and stand fifteen inches high. The males in all three groups weigh slightly more than their female counterparts. The puffins live together in a very large group called a "raft".

Puffins are not color blind. If an animal is brightly colored, especially in the breeding season, it can see color. Otherwise there would be no point in having bright orange bills and feet.  It takes five years for puffins to mature and breed.  The female lays only one egg a year, and both parents take turns incubating the egg and feeding the puffling. When the baby pufflings leave the puffinries, they will not touch land again for two years.

 Not very many animals prey on puffins. The chicks can be eaten by foxes, large species of gulls and other birds like skuas.  The adult puffins can be eaten by orcas or hawks.  Puffins can dive at least 80 feet deep. While at sea, they protect themselves with a camouflage technique know as countershading - black backs and white stomachs. When the puffin dives under water anything swimming above them will have a tough time seeing them because their black backs blend in with the bottom of the sea.  Also, anything below them will have a hard time seeing them because their white stomachs will blend in with the light coming down from the surface.  They can hold up to about 28 fish in their beaks, but an individual puffin was observed with 61 tiny fish in its beak. What they eat depends upon where they live.  Their most common foods are small fish, such as hake, capelin and herring, and some invertebrates, like shrimp.  This information was gathered from this Puffin Page.

         For those of you who think puffins are irresistibly cute, you can even join a puffin club:  International Puffin Lovers Club   

 

1.    Puffins can live for more than 30 years, if they're lucky!
2.    A puffin can fly about 40 miles an hour, and will beat its wings about 300 to 400 times a minute.
3.    Puffins usually return to the same burrow and nest with the same mate year after year.
4.    Where soil conditions permit, puffins can tunnel eight feet or more underground when excavating a burrow.
5.    It is estimated that there are about 6 million pairs of puffins in the world.
6.    In Iceland puffins are part of a long-standing cultural connection to the sea. They are eaten in restaurants and homes.
7.    The puffin's number-one enemy is the Great Black-backed Gull, which kills and eats adult puffins and chicks when it can catch them.

 

Quote of the Day

"Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything."
~ Muhammad Ali ~