Seeing a puffin usually ranks high on an Alaskan visitor's must do list. There is just something about them that inspires a smile on one's face. Perhaps it is the way their outlandish looking headgear contrasts with the formal tone of their black feathers. Earnest yet comical at the same time, they seem completely at ease with that juxtaposition. While we marvel and delight in their appearance they go about their business, oblivious of the flying improbability they present to us. This tufted puffin was photographed taking a break from nesting duties near South Marble Island in Glacier Bay National Park. This tiny island is an important piece of real estate in these food rich waters for it provides suitable nesting sites to over eight species of marine birds. The three species pictured here each utilize different portions of the island's geography for their nesting sites and range far and wide when foraging for food in the cold waters of Glacier Bay and Icy Strait.

The tufted puffin burrows a tunnel into patches of soil near the tops of cliffs. The elevation allows them to launch their portly bodies into the air with ease and the burrow provides safety from their neighbors, the glaucous-wing gull, seen in the center of the right hand photo. This large gull with pink legs and grey and white wing tips is a voracious predator on any smaller, helpless bird. It nests on open rock ledges in the same cliff-top vicinity as the puffin burrows. Below the puffins and the gulls, on the vertical face of the cliff, hundreds of black-legged kittiwakes sit on nests of vegetation glued to the cliff with guano. This medium-sized gull has jet black wing tips, black legs and a yellow-green bill. Here we see several resting on a piece of floating ice in the company of a lone glaucous-wing gull.

Our day also included humpback whales, loons, mountain goats, grizzly bears and calving glaciers but visiting the home of the puffin was a highlight hard to beat.