Travelling Hopefully - Disturbing Puffin Fetish Edition

I touched down in St Johns with a feeling of déjà vu.  This all seemed terribly familiar.  The security staff greeted me by name and demanded to know when I would pay them the money I owed them after an ill judged poker session in the arrivals lounge.  But I was a man in a hurry and I raced through the airport leaving a cloud of curses and insincere promises in my wake.  I had a date with puffins.

After hurling my bags at the jet lagged unfortunate who would be hosting me tonight I dashed downtown, nothing would interfere with my viewing of puffins.  Arriving in plenty of time I paused for breakfast, I was lingering over coffee when I got a call from the tour operator; where the hell was I?  Those puffins weren’t going to pester themselves, at least not without being paid considerably more than I was prepared to offer (if you’re interested there is a subscription only website www.puffinfap.com which will cater to your requirements.  I think it’s run by some guys in Belarus).

Snatching my belongings and snorting coffee out my nose I dashed up the street and managed to grab hold of the minivans bumper as it sped off, destination puffin.  After a few kilometres they pulled over and let me get inside.
“Most of the puffins have already left,” were the words that greeted me as I picked gravel out of my face.  You see the puffins don’t actually live here, they are creatures of the open ocean.  The only time they come ashore at all is to breed (experiments with floating eggs having so far proved unsuccessful).  Once the ensuing baby is old enough (or has been eaten by predators) there’s no reason for them to hang around.

I howled and raged inwardly, at least I think it was inwardly although I did notice that the other passengers were cowering at the other end of the van.  Surely I wasn’t going to miss out on puffins too?  I was in a fine state of nervous tension by the time I got on the boat and I ground my teeth while the guide droned on about the interesting rock formations we would see.  Eventually he got onto the puffins, there were about a dozen still here yesterday, if we were lucky a couple might still be here.

The boat ploughed through fortunately not very rough seas while our guide babbled on about rock formations and the fact that Newfoundland comes from Morocco or some such.  As we approached the island where all the puffins had been until recently the frustrated geologist with the microphone told us to keep a sharp eye out for puffins.  He then literally ended that speech with, “oh there’s one.” Everybody oohed and aahed except me, naturally I had managed to miss it.  The problem was that while I had a pretty accurate idea of what a puffin looked like I was completely off when it came to scale.  Puffins are actually quite small and I had to mentally adjust what my eyes were looking for.  Also I expected to see them on the island and we actually saw them everywhere but.  Because, yes, the puffins did come out to play.  I saw puffins on the water and I saw them flying past.  One of them flew so close I was able to pick out it’s features as it went by.  I’m probably biased but to me no puffin ever looked more puffin like.  This puffin could have been the centrefold for the September issue of Puffin Monthly (a wholly owned subsidiary of www.puffinfap.com).  So yes I saw puffins and I’m ridiculously pleased by the whole event.  We also saw bald eagles.  There was one standing proudly on a cliff in its best e pluribus unum pose and another took flight directly above our boat allowing us to see it in full wing extension.

I have no idea what I did for the rest of the day but when I woke up the next morning there was a stuffed puffin on the pillow next to me.

DISCLAIMER:  This blog does not recommend visiting www.puffinfap.com and accepts no responsibility for any malware, spyware or viruses downloaded as a result nor for the attention of any law enforcement agency.