Puffins spend winter far out at sea, scattered across the cold North Atlantic and Arctic (and North Pacific for other species), roaming vast offshore feeding grounds instead of staying on their summer cliffs.

Winter life at sea

  • After the breeding season (late summer), Atlantic puffins leave their nesting cliffs and head into open ocean, sometimes thousands of kilometres from land.
  • They spend the entire winter riding waves, diving for fish, and even sleeping on the sea surface, perfectly adapted to a fully marine lifestyle.

Where Atlantic puffins go

  • Tagged puffins from the UK and west coast of Scotland migrate into the North Atlantic, with some birds travelling as far as Greenland and dispersing over huge areas of open ocean.
  • Puffins from Maine colonies first move north to rich feeding areas like the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then shift south to deep offshore waters along the U.S. continental shelf, hundreds of miles off New York and New Jersey, where they remain for most of the winter.

Different seas, different routes

  • In general, puffins “vanish” from coastal viewpoints because they spread out over the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, each regional population using its own distant wintering grounds still being mapped by scientists.
  • Winter puffins are usually found at very low densities (sometimes roughly one bird per square kilometre), which is one reason they were so hard to locate before GPS tagging.

How they survive the cold

  • Puffins cope with frigid winter conditions using dense waterproof feathers, a thick layer of insulating down, and superb diving ability that lets them follow schools of fish deep below the surface.
  • They can drink seawater thanks to special salt glands, allowing them to stay far from land for months until they return to their nesting colonies in spring.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.