A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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puffin
A puffin is a small black-and-white seabird with a deep triangular bill that goes brilliantly striped in red, yellow, and blue-gray for the breeding season and is shed back to a plain dull bill for the winter. It nests in burrows on turf-topped islands and cliffs, flies with very fast wingbeats, and swims underwater with its wings, catching small fish and holding a dozen or more crosswise in its bill at once.
Etymology
The name did not originally belong to this bird. Puffin was a Middle English word for the cured salted carcass of a young shearwater, which was a traded food, and the word appears to be built on puff, for the fatness of the fledgling. It transferred to the puffin later, apparently because the two nested in burrows on the same islands and were confused.
Notes
The bill can hold so many fish because backward-pointing spines on the tongue and palate pin each one against the upper mandible while the bird opens the bill to take another. The bright plates are shed after breeding, along with the colored eye ornaments, so a winter puffin at sea looks like a different and much duller bird.