A tufted puffin races with purpose, her leathery, webbed feet plap-plap-plapping toward a hidden burrow tucked into a rocky cliff inside the Oregon Coast Aquarium’s seabird aviary.
Nestled within that burrow, her chick is hatching.
The egg wobbles as cracks begin spreading outward from a hole in the shell, revealing the tiniest of puffin bills. Male puffin TP156 has spent the last few hours atop the egg, but now moves aside to watch. After more wobbling and cracking, the egg careens to one side and breaks in half, the hatchling within springing forth into the world.
As the mother puffin enters her burrow, she’s greeted by low groans and high pitched peeps: a joyful duet by her mate and newly hatched puffling. Shortly after, her mate exits the burrow. He’s been sharing in attending the egg for about 39 days, and this shift has come to a successful end. Inside the burrow, the mother puffin sidles closer to the downy ball of fluff, repositioning until the chick is nestled close to her skin.
Stationed just above the feathered family, a live camera captures it all. In anticipation of the chick’s arrival, staff mounted an infrared camera to the burrow’s lid, allowing viewers to watch the puffling’s debut and progress via live stream.
In nature, puffins spend most of their lives on the open ocean, only coming ashore to mate and rear chicks on isolated islands and rocky outcroppings. The Aquarium’s outdoor aviary is outfitted with hidden burrows, each custom-made to accommodate the nesting habits of OCAq’s seabirds. From the outside, they seem like simple holes bored into the stone. But a closer look reveals more: each burrow consists of a 5-gallon container embedded in the rockwork — accessible to the birds from the bottom, and to their caretakers from the top.
For the next several weeks, TP169 and TP156 will take turns foraging and bringing whole fish back to the burrow as they share in parenting duties. During this time, their new arrival, listed as TP175 but affectionately dubbed “Inigo Montoya” by Aquarium aviculturists, will begin venturing out of the family burrow for short excursions before, eventually, joining the rest of the flock in the seabird aviary.
And hopefully, someday, finding his own princess bride to share a puffling with.
