Visiting the Puffins on Skomer Island

As a novice bird-watcher looking at the picture of a puffin, I thought “No, surely we don’t have anything that colourful and exotic-looking in Britain!” But I saw my first puffin from the boat on my first trip to a Welsh Island, and so began a forty-year love-affair with these charming birds and their island homes.

Getting there

Skomer is reached by a 15-minute boat ride on the Dale Princess (more detailed info about getting the boat here). As the Princess leaves the sheltered inlet of Martin’s Haven, Pembrokeshire, there is no real hint of what is to come. A few herring gulls hanging around, perhaps a fulmar or gannet further out to sea, but that is about all.

The boat chugs alongside Marloes Deer Park – a park that has never actually seen any deer, but the name has stuck since a wall was erected to keep the deer in the early eighteenth century. Beyond the Deer Park is Jack Sound – a narrow channel with a rocky ridge across the middle causing turbulent water that has seen the demise of many boats. It is not until we are well across the Sound and approaching Middleholm (also known as Midland Island) that the first puffins are seen.

They sit on the water, smallish birds with black backs and triangular orange beaks, contrasting with their cousins: the plainer razorbills (black backs, black beaks in the shape of an old-fashioned cut-throat razor) and guillemots (brown backs and pointed brown beaks). As the boat gets too close for their comfort, a few might scurry along the water surface and take flight, but most will dive – it takes less energy to escape that way.

Middleholm has no fresh water supply and is difficult to climb onto, so humans have never lived there, leaving it for the birds and rabbits. And that is fine by the birds. Puffins sit on the grassy slopes, while razorbills and guillemots crowd the ledges. It is the main nesting site for shags too, and these small relatives of cormorants sit placidly on the rocks as the boat passes. Herring, and lesser and greater black-back gulls also become more obvious here.

We cross another small fast-flowing channel – Little Sound – and now Skomer Island is ahead. The name Skomer comes from the Viking word Skalmey, or split, and the island indeed seems to be split into two parts joined by a narrow isthmus. There are more puffins, and more of the other birds plus kittiwakes now, nesting low along the vertical cliffs and calling their name to tell us who they are. Fulmars sit on small ledges, or glide along on the updrafts.

On the island

As the Princess crosses to the landing stage in North Haven, the term seabird city comes to mind. It seems that every piece of rock is home to somebody, and the grassy slopes show the entrances to thousands of burrows. The burrows are occupied by puffins, Manx shearwaters and rabbits, with the puffins standing around outside theirs, socialising with the neighbours, or just watching the world go by.

Next to the landing stage, a group of razorbills and guillemots sit on a rock like a welcoming committee. Sometimes there is a puffin or two with them. More puffins are seen at close quarters as we ascend to the top of the island, and stop to listen to the warden’s introductory talk. He tells us that the island is a honeycomb of burrows, and that we must not stray off the footpath or we risk collapsing a burrow, perhaps killing a bird or its egg or chick inside, not to mention that we might twist our own ankle or break a leg.

At the top of the slope, there are no more puffins. They nest only on the cliff tops and steep slopes from where they can easily take flight. Their wings are small and flying is hard work. They can reach speeds of 50mph (80kph) by flapping 300-400 times a minute. But although they are fast, they are not very manoeuvrable, so they choose to nest in places where they can easily gain airspeed by running downhill or jumping off a cliff.

There are more burrows on the top of the island, but these are inhabited either by the rabbits that were introduced around 700 years ago, or by Manx shearwaters (above). The shearwaters are medium-sized relatives of albatrosses, and Skomer is home to about 120,000 pairs, or a third of the known world population. They are the most numerous bird species here, but the chances of seeing one alive during the day are slim. They are very clumsy on land, and in order to evade predators (large gulls mostly) they nest in burrows and come to land only at night when the gulls are asleep. On most nights, a few birds get caught out at dusk or dawn, or by moonlight, and the island is littered with corpses, testimony to the success of the gulls. The numbers killed are, however, a minute proportion of the total population.

But back to puffins, and the best place to see them on Skomer is at the Wick. Yes, there really is somewhere better than what we have seen so far.

A wick is a tongue of water pushing its way into a narrow gully. There are several small wicks on Skomer, but the main one, known as The Wick, has a 200-foot (60m) cliff on one side with razorbills, guillemots, fulmars and kittiwakes nesting on every ledge, and a grassy slope on the other side, honeycombed with puffin burrows. At the inland end, puffins nest right up to the rope barrier at the edge of the footpath.

You don’t need long lenses or camouflage clothing to get close-up photos here. The birds are well used to people, and seem to watch us as intently as we watch them. In fact, I’m sure that one day a puffin is going to whip a camera out of its back pocket and take a picture of the humans! If a puffin lands near the rope, and looks a bit lost, the voluntary warden will ask the humans to move back to give it room to cross, which it does at some speed before disappearing into its burrow on the far side of the path.

Puffin ecology

Now, a puffin is fully capable of digging its own burrow, and occasionally you do see soil being tossed out as a puffin does some house-keeping. But it does take half a season to dig a burrow about 3 feet (1 metre) long, so puffins will quite happily take over a rabbit burrow. The rabbit doesn’t put up much resistance when faced with a large beak that can be used as a pick-axe and strong webbed and clawed feet that are used as shovels. Sometimes one burrow entrance leads to several chambers, each of which may be home to either puffins, or rabbits, or shearwaters.

The burrow is a very safe place for the puffin’s egg or chick. Safe from the weather, and safe from the marauding gulls. There are no ground predators on Skomer – no rats, cats, foxes, badgers, stoats or weasels. That is why it is such an important place for seabirds. As the puffin chick grows, the parents can leave it alone at home while they both go searching for food, often bringing back fish from several miles offshore.

While the chick is safe from the gulls, the parents bringing in fish are not. Herring and lesser black-backed gulls loiter around the puffin colonies, waiting for a bird to return with fish. Then they give chase, hoping to scare it into dropping the fish before it reaches the burrow entrance. Sometimes a puffin will circle time and time again, waiting for a gull to move further from the burrow entrance, before bringing in its precious load of fish. If the gull succeeds, the puffin just has to go out again to find more fish. Even worse, some greater black-back gulls specialise in predating the adult puffins, which they are able to swallow whole, regurgitating the bones, beak and feathers later.

It is easy to spend several hours at The Wick, just watching the puffins. Perhaps it’s something to do with their upright stance that makes them so attractive to humans. They are sociable birds too, visiting each other, seeming to chat with the neighbours and move on. They are much smaller than most people expect, being about 10 inches (25cm) tall and weighing less than a pound (about 400g).

Typically for seabirds, the puffin invests a lot of effort in producing a single chick each year. It takes six weeks to incubate the egg, which hatches in late May-early June, and a further six weeks before the chick is ready to leave the nest. Although the puffins are on the island from early April, the time to see them bringing fish to the chicks is in June and July.

In June and July, the number of puffins on Skomer seems to increase quite a lot, from perhaps 7,000 pairs to 10,000. Like most seabirds, puffins take several years to reach maturity, and may live to 25 or 30 years of age. When the birds first return to the island to breed, they have to find a mate and a burrow. So their first return is made late in the season, when the older birds are established in their burrows. The young birds, teenagers, can then sort themselves out with a mate, find out which burrows are empty, or dig their own if necessary. The following spring, they return at the same time as the older birds, and are immediately ready to get on with the business of breeding.

And then in early August, all the puffins disappear. They are gone, well out to sea for the winter. We know, from birds that have been ringed on Skomer, that they can go as far as the Canadian coast. We know, from surveys of seabirds at sea in winter, that they are scattered in ones and twos across the north Atlantic. But we don’t know much about what they do out there. The new research, on Skomer and other islands, is to use geotagging (recording devices fitted to the birds’ legs) to record where they go, and how long they spend there.

But next spring, they will be back. And so will many people – back to watch their antics, photograph them, and generally enjoy their company.

To visit Skomer:  visiting arrangements have changed for 2021.  You must book on-line, in advance.  Details and prices on this website.  This avoids the need to queue from some unearthly hour in the morning.

Another Skomer post – about a visit in May 2018