World Puffin Day: Atlantic Puffin

The 14th April 2026 is World Puffin Day. To mark this, and the 350th anniversary of the publication of Francis Willughby’s Ornithologia, this post will focus on part of the description of the Atlantic Puffin from Ornithologia.

In Francis Willughby’s time, the bird that is known as the Puffin today was not known as it in England. Confusingly, what was known as the Puffin in England in his time is today known as the Manx Shearwater. Ornithologia provides many British folk names that the Puffin was known by. He wrote that: in the Farne Islands and in the north of England in the area around the river Tees, it was known by the name of Coulterneb; in the area around Scarborough, it was known as the Mullet; in Cornwall, it was known as the Pope; in Jersey and Guernsey, it was known as the Barbalot; in South Wales, it was known by the names of Gulden-head, Bottlenose, and Helegug; finally, in North Wales, it was actually known as the Puffin. Puffin did not become the formally accepted standard common English name for this species until the late 18th century. The other names Willughby had for this species were Carolus Clusius’ Anas arctica and the Pica marina vel Fratercula of Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi. In 1758, Carl Linnaeus gave this species the official binominal name of Alca artica. In 1760, it received its current taxonomical name of Fratercula artica, when the genus Fratercula was introduced by Mathurin Brisson.

Image of the Atlantic Puffin in Francis Willughby's Ornithologia

In Ornithologia, what is known as the Puffin today, was described as 12 inches (about 30cm) in length from bill to feet. Its bill was short, broad, compressed sideways, of a triangular figure, and ended in a sharp point. The upper mandible was curved and crooked at the point. Where it joined the head, a callous substance encompassed its base. The bill was of two colours, near the head it was cinereous (ash grey) or livid (the blue-grey colour of a fresh bruise), and toward the point it was red. It had three grooves impressed in it, one in the livid part, two in the red.

The claws were of a dark blue colour inclining to black. However, the feet of some were yellow, but in others red. Willughby supposed that those with yellow feet were juveniles. However, it is now known that in winter, the non-breeding season, the feet are yellow, whilst in the breeding season of spring to summer, they are a reddish colour. In Ornithologia, it was also written that the feet were situated backwards, almost in the same plane as the belly, so that the bird stood and walked almost perpendicularly erect.

The feathers of the top of the head, neck, and back were described as black and the breast and belly were white. A rind or muffler of black feathers produced from the neck encompassed the throat. The sides of the head from the crown to the muffler were white, or of a very pale ash colour, so that the eyes and ears were included in these white spaces. Their wings were small, made up of short feathers. Nevertheless, they flew very swiftly near the surface of the water. The tail was two inches long (about 5cm), made up of 12 feathers and was all black.

Atlantic Puffin, 2021, by Charles J. Sharp from Sharp Photography, CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading: John Ray, Francis Willughby's Ornithologia, 1678, p.325, T65.

Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 10th edition, p.130.

Author - Debbie Jordan, Middleton Hall Volunteer.

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