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Horned Puffin
Fratercula corniculata
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My thanks to Carol and Jim Dory whom I met on flickr! :-)
Carol and Jim introduced me to many of the local community of Nome, a town which reminds me of my own childhood small town. Wonderful.
The owner of the local Skidoo-snowmobile, all-terrain-vehicle shop (a big business in Nome) had a 16 foot custom made skiff that took us out to seldom-visited Sledge Island.
The place is right out of an adventure story. It’s an island that’s 5 miles off of the coast, that even the locals never go to. Big mistake. I heard rumors that it had a puffin rookery. Wow. It was right out of a science fiction novel. It was right out of Survivors. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was simply awesome.
Razor sharp rocks, literally, on this weird island with towering spires and no place to come near, teeming with thousands of birds on the cliff, nesting and defending any flat space on these needles or cliffs.
I was speechless (except for saying “holy cow”, and “awesome” about every 5 seconds). Sometimes when the boat came near the cliffs HUNDREDS of murres would take off all around us. Arctic foxes, ravens stealing sky blue eggs, nesting kittiwakes, dizzying heights of rugged beauty.
And then I saw puffins. PUFFINS. Both kinds (the tufted was a lifer). In breeding plumage. In flight. In love. In everything..... I had died and went to heaven.
This shot unfortunately isn’t that good. I took 2000 shots from a rocking boat with my giant lens hand held. Most were really, really, blurry cause the boat was rocking so much. It wasn’t so much a matter of aim, as it was just hope the birds in the frame when you take the shot...Blind squirrel hunting for acorns...
This was the only one of two or three lucky shots I was happy with. It was taken near midnight - but being near the solstice, the sun never went down - it just stayed wonderfully low. One of the wonderful things about shooting in the arctic is it doubles or triples the amount of time in the day for good light :-)
Next year, the pribolofs, where apparently you can get so close to the puffins that you can do retinal scans.
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Focal length: 500 mm
fStop: 5.6
ISO: 500
Shutter Speed: 1/800
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Nome, AK - Sledge Island
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Jun 19, 2007
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