The Tufted Puffin is a middle sized bird about the size of a pigeon weighing about one to two pounds and standing about 12.5 inches tall. They generally have black plumage with white stomachs with a white area on their face, a large thick beak and yellow tufts sticking out on the sides of their heads. Both the male and female Tufted Puffins have similar plumage and the young birds are like the adults but their beak is smaller and has darker coloring. The adult puffin's beak is mainly yellow at the base and has a red tip. Also it has a white, triangular face patch. It breeds from coastal Alaska to California and the Tufted Puffins are distributed in the northern Pacific Rim by the Canadian Province of British Columbia with a big population of about 26,000 breeding pairs. The Tufted Puffin is strickly a sea bird and only goes on land to breed. Many Tufted Puffins inhabit the main Japanese island of Honshu and is the largest puffin of the puffin species. Sometimes the Tufted Puffin is observed in the state of Maine and on Greenland.
During the winter months the Tufted Puffin is generally observed on the outer coast of British Columbia while some birds wander off to the inner coast. Also the people on the main Japanese island of Honshu see the Tufted Puffin.
The main diet of the Tufted Puffins is mostly fish. When sand lance is the main diet the puffin seems to thrive. Also the adult Tufted Puffins dine on squid and invertebrates. Theyfeed by diving, then flying under water using their wings like fish fins catching a small minnow like fish. Underwater they appear to "fly" through the ocean with their strong, pointed wings as they chase after their next meal. Puffins hold the fish in their bills until they return to the nest to feed the puffin chicks. Sometimes an adult bird will carry a dozen fish arranged head-to-tail in their beaks to feed to the chicks who only tiny fish from the parent puffin. Breeding: Tufted Puffins mate and raise their young in colonies on remote islands in the arctic waters of the North Pacific includes the Arctic, Bering, and Okhotsk seas. The largest colony is found on Talan Island in the Okhotsk Sea and has more than one million nests. Here on Talan Island thousands of pairs of birds gather to breed. The puffin breeds on islands occupied by gulls, guillemots, murres, cormorants and other sea birds.
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