Puffins Of Skomer Island
I've just spent a few days on the Island of Skomer, a short boat trip from the most south-westerly point of Wales. Every summer, Skomer becomes the temporary home to thousands of breeding Atlantic Puffins. There are no predatory mammals on the island, so the Puffins can safely nest in their burrows, leaving frequently to collect sand eels and small fish for the young Pufflings. I thought I'd share a few of the photos that I captured on the Island.
THE CLASSIC
If it’s the puffin, you will want it to pop out of the image by rendering it sharp but with your foreground and background diffuse and creamy, the classic wildlife portrait.
Atlantic Puffins are classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with numbers of the species worldwide declining. Meanwhile, Atlantic Puffin numbers are growing on Skomer Island off the coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales, making this a wildlife photographers dream!
Looks To Be Happy With His Morning Catch !
Located just a mile off the Pembrokeshire coast, Skomer has a large population of the wonderful ‘Sea Parrot’, the puffin, with around 40,000 birds that magically whizz above your head or waddle past your feet.
These attractive birds arrive on Skomer Island in April to begin nesting and leave again at the end of July. You’ll need to time your visit to Skomer Island during these couple of months if you want to see the puffins.
May – Best month to see Puffins among Bluebells, Red Campion & Pink Thrift
Skomer Island comes to life, in terms of Puffin photography appeal, a month or so after the seabirds arrive in April to start nesting. For a few weeks around mid-May, blankets of bluebells and red campion adorn the paths as the puffins prepare and perfect their nests.
As the weather warms up, pink thrift blooms on the coastline in late May and early June. These flowers usually add something extra special in the foreground of your puffin images.
June – Best month to see Puffins with mouthfuls of sand eels
Adult puffins will begin bringing in sand eels for their newly hatched young during the first week of June and you will continue to be able to see them bringing this food source into their burrows to feed the puffin chicks, commonly known as pufflings, throughout the rest of the month.
July – Best month to see Pufflings
Around the first week of July, a few Pufflings will start to emerge from their burrows and stretch their wings. As the month progresses, the number of Puffling sightings increases until all the birds finally leave in early August.
BEHAVIOUR SHOTS
The puffin has such a great range of expressions and interactions that are crying out to be captured. Look for male and female bonding, puffin fights (they can be quite feisty), face contortions, feeding, mouths full of sand eels etc. Look out too for attacking gulls trying to nab their sand eel catch.
The puffins themselves are fascinating. There are far more than you’ll expect, realistically, and they pay almost no attention to the humans who have come to view them from the island’s well-defined paths. They come and go from the clifftops constantly, occasionally arriving back in their trademark inelegant way with a beak full of sandeels after a successful fishing trip.
Being Patient And Watching The Behaviour Of The Puffins Can Be Very Rewarding
Isolating subjects from there surroundings is a theme I like for my wildlife portraits, and although the images can lack context because of that, I love the fact that they are captured against a soft and creamy background.
‘The Wick’ is probably one of the best places to photograph the Puffins returning with food for their chicks. Photographing them in flight is extremely difficult as they can fly very fast; they also fly very low and straight to their burrows so as to avoid the marauding gulls. This area can get quite busy with visitors to the island.
Puffin In It’s Burrow
Flight shots
Puffins don't like to hang about. They are the lead-footed boy racers of the bird world. While sleek, sporty birds like falcons might ultimately be much faster in a dive, Puffins make up for this by flying everywhere (and I mean everywhere) flat out, as fast as their little wings will propel them. I don't think they really know the meaning of the phrase 'careful flyer'. If a Puffin were a car, it would be a GTI hatchback with oversized wheels, a dayglow paintjob and an exhaust the diameter of a water main. This makes photographing them on the wing fun, but very tricky.
