Puffins In Norway: All You Need To Know

Smartly dressed in black and white finery and sporting a colorful beak and expressive black eyes, the Atlantic Puffin is one of nature’s most adorable creatures. Traveling nature lovers and birdwatchers go to great lengths to spot the lively sea birds, and their cute looks and antics have earned them nicknames like “sea parrot” and “clown of the sea.”

But the puffins, weighing 19 ounces or less and measuring around 10 inches in length, aren’t putting on a show for travelers to North Atlantic countries. They’re showing off their colors in the warmer summer months to find a potential mate. After finding the love of their life, their beaks fade to a duller hue for the winter.

Like most sea birds, puffins have long life spans. Most live to be between 15 and 20 years old with the oldest on record, a chick in Norway, making it to the ripe old age of 41!

Even more amazing, puffins are monogamous and spend their lives together laying one egg per year with both parents raising their young together. They wait until age three to six years to breed, and their young, called pufflings, take several years to mature.

Puffins are picky about where they live and the happy couples return to the same burrows each year. The cozy burrows are lined with feathers, seaweed, and grasses.

Puffins live mostly on the water and are excellent fliers, swimmers, and divers. They flap their wings 400 beats per minute to reach speeds up to 55 mph. They dive up to 200 feet below the water’s surface still flapping their wings while hunting for fish. Their large, orange feet help them steer.

So where are the best places to go to get a glimpse of these elusive birds? They’re the official bird of Labrador and Newfoundland Canada, and, with more than 60 percent of the world’s Atlantic Puffins, Iceland is the puffin-watching capital.

Around 30 percent can be found in Norwegian territory, and looking for them on a summer holiday in Norway when they come ashore to breed is a popular sightseeing adventure.