Puffins Deny Colour-Coordinating Their Beaks for the Summer Season

The sun came up over the grassy clifftop this morning to find several hundred puffins standing about in neat little groups, their beaks gleaming a bright, cheerful orange, and a press conference already under way beside the largest burrow. The colony had called it, a spokesbird explained, to respond to what it described as persistent rumours.

The rumours are these. Every winter the puffins leave the cliffs and head out to sea with small, greyish beaks. Every spring they come back with large, triangular ones striped in orange, yellow and blue-grey, as if they had all visited the same salon on the way home. Observers on the neighbouring cliffs, mostly gulls, have suggested that the colony coordinates its look.

"We do not coordinate anything," said the spokesbird, a puffin who gave its name only as Burrow Seven. "Each of us simply happens to arrive in April with exactly the same beak in exactly the same colours. That is a coincidence, and frankly a very good one." Asked whether there was a group chat, Burrow Seven looked out to sea for a long time and did not answer.

Pressed on why the orange beaks disappear again in late summer, the colony's position was that they are put away rather than lost, and that doing so is basic seasonal housekeeping. A second puffin, standing slightly behind the first and holding several small fish crosswise in its beak, nodded firmly, which was all it could contribute under the circumstances.

The press conference ended abruptly when two puffins nearby began tapping their beaks together, a greeting the rest of the colony seemed to find far more interesting than the questions. By the time the gulls had finished writing things down, most of the puffins had waddled back into their burrows, and one had fallen asleep standing up.

Behind the denial sits a real and rather lovely piece of puffin biology. The Atlantic puffin's famous beak really does change with the seasons. As the breeding season begins in spring it becomes bright orange, with a blue-grey patch edged in yellow at the base, and the display is thought to help puffins attract a mate. After breeding, the birds shed the colourful outer plates of the beak during a moult, which leaves them with a smaller, narrower and much duller beak for the winter they spend out at sea.

So in a way the puffins are right: nothing is painted on, and nothing is gone for good. The colourful parts simply grow back the following spring. The story even has a bonus twist. In 2018 researchers noticed that the yellow ridges on a puffin's beak glow when lit with ultraviolet light, something people cannot see without a special lamp but other puffins may well be able to notice. The colony, when asked about this, declined to comment.