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.