Introduction

Tufted Puffins are cool. Unlike their familiar brethren—Horned (Fratercula corniculata) and Atlantic (F. arctica) puffins, whose appearances convey comic charm and innocence—Tufted Puffins exude stern confidence. With all-black body plumage, striking white robber’s mask, chunky orange bill, and streaming golden head-plumes, this is one member of the auk family whose appearance—like that of a biker in leather regalia—says, “Don’t mess with me!” Their status as seabird tough-guys is not unwarranted. Few other seabirds breed over such a vast geographic range and extreme of climatic regimes, from cactus-covered rocks in southern California to frozen cliffs of the coastal Alaskan Arctic. And few other seabirds range so widely at sea, from icy waters of the Chukchi Sea to the warm, subtropical expanse of the Central North Pacific Ocean, and east to west from the California Current to the Kuroshio Current of Japan.

While known for carrying bill-fulls of small fish to young and for breeding on continental-shelf habitats that teem with abundant forage fish such as sandlance (Ammodytes hexapterus) and juvenile pollock (Theragra chalcogramma), this species has many life-history attributes that remind one of the more pelagic shearwaters (Puffinus spp.). Adult Tufted Puffins are the most pelagic of the Alcidae (Bent 1919, Kuroda 1955, Shuntov 1972), ranging widely from colonies in summer to find fish for their young, but feeding themselves largely on invertebrates, especially squid and euphausiids. During the nonbreeding season, adults migrate far south to oceanic waters of the Central North Pacific, where their diet consists largely of squid, euphausiids, and pelagic fish. Juveniles migrate south to the Central North Pacific after fledging (Shuntov 1972) and may not return to coastal breeding areas for several years. Thus, the Tufted Puffin, even more so than the Horned Puffin (Piatt and Kitaysky 2002), is a pelagic species that spends most of its life at great distances from land and has a diet more similar to shearwaters and petrels (Pterodroma spp.) than to most other alcids (Sanger 1987, Vermeer et al. 1987).

Wehle (1976, 1980, 1982a, 1982b, 1983), Amaral (1977), and Vermeer (1979; Vermeer and Cullen 1979; Vermeer et al. 1979, 1987) conducted the earliest directed studies on Tufted Puffins and collected wholly new information on breeding biology, behavior, chick growth, diets, and habitat use in the Aleutians, Gulf of Alaska, and British Columbia. Much incidental information is also available from early general field investigations of seabird colonies (compiled in Baird and Jones 1983, Byrd et al. 1993). Several more recent studies have added substantially to our knowledge of Tufted Puffin breeding biology (Boone 1986; Hatch and Hatch 1990a, 1990b; Kitaysky 1996, 1999; Kitaysky and Golubova 2000; Bertram et al. 2001; Gjerdrum 2001) and feeding ecology (Sanger 1983, 1987; Baird 1990, 1991; Hatch and Sanger 1992; Springer et al. 1996); in particular, monitoring studies conducted by the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) on several large colonies provide continuous long-term data on breeding biology and diets (Byrd et al. 1989, 1991; Dragoo and Woodward 1996; Roseneau et al. 2000; Williams and Daniels 2001). The pelagic distribution and ecology of the Tufted Puffin has also been reasonably well documented throughout its range (Kuroda 1955, 1960; Shuntov 1972, 1986; Hunt et al. 1981, Gould et al. 1982; Wahl et al. 1989, 1993; Piatt et al. 1990a, 1992; Gould and Piatt 1993; Piatt 1993, 2002; Tyler et al. 1993). For the future, studies of adult sur-vival and recruitment would complement long-term monitoring of populations at key colonies. More attention should be directed toward conservation of dwindling and threatened populations in Japan, California, Washington, and Oregon.