What animal does this eye belong to?
The Clown’s Eye: What a Puffin’s Face Is Really Telling You
Look close enough and it stops being a bird. The image you sent — credited to “Unknown Facts” — is not a painting. It is a macro photograph of an Atlantic puffin’s eye, so tight you can see individual feather barbs like white fur.
What grabs you first is the color. A perfect ring of neon orange-red skin, almost wet-looking, frames a dark slate iris. Above and below that ring are two small, smooth patches of powder-blue skin, shaped like teardrops. The whole structure forms a triangle pointing toward the beak, giving puffins their permanently surprised, slightly sad expression.
It looks like makeup. It is, in a way — seasonal makeup.
Why the eye looks like that
Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica) are famous for their big, striped bills, but the eye ornament is just as important, and just as temporary.
The red orbital ring is bare skin that flushes bright in breeding season (April–August). The color comes from carotenoid pigments in their diet — mostly small fish like sand eels and capelin. Healthier birds display deeper orange, which signals fitness to mates.
The blue-gray plates above and below are specialized horny growths called “eye ornaments.” They swell and become vivid blue during courtship, then shrink and dull to gray in winter. No other auk has them quite this developed.
The dark iris looks black, but in this photo you can see it is a deep smoky gray with a tiny, keyhole-shaped pupil. Puffins have excellent underwater vision; that pupil can constrict quickly to protect the eye from glare off the sea and to focus while diving up to 60 meters for fish.
That reflection in the pupil — a tiny silhouette of the photographer — is why wildlife photographers love puffins. You are literally seeing yourself in the bird’s eye.
More than a pretty face
Puffins are pelagic for eight months of the year, living alone on the open North Atlantic. They only come to land to breed on rocky cliffs in Iceland, Norway, Newfoundland, Maine, and the UK.
During that brief summer, the facial colors are a billboard:
Mate choice. Both sexes grow the ornaments, and studies show pairs with matched brightness have higher chick survival.
Species recognition. In a crowded colony of 100,000 birds, that triangular eye pattern helps puffins find their partner in a second.
Age signaling. Young puffins (under 3 years) have dull, brownish eye rings. The bright red and blue you see means this bird is at least four or five — an experienced breeder.
In winter, they shed it all. The colorful bill plates peel off, the eye ornaments shrink, the face turns dark gray, and the puffin becomes a completely different-looking, much drabber seabird. It is one of the most dramatic seasonal transformations in birds.
For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.
