Puffins: The Birds with Colorful Beaks

A wide variety of birds live along the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. One of them is the colorful puffin, which looks like a parrot and is often called the "sea parrot." Its pointed, parrot-like beak changes color with the seasons: it turns gray in winter and shifts to an attractive red once spring arrives.
A puffin is about 10 inches long and weighs around 500 grams. Puffins mostly stay on the ocean surface, sitting stably and comfortably on the waves. They are also skilled swimmers, using their wings like oars in the water. To hunt fish and small marine creatures, they can dive down to 200 feet, though they can barely stay submerged for five seconds at that depth.
Puffins are extremely fast fliers. Flapping their wings up to 400 times a minute, they can reach speeds of 88 km/h. During spring, around 60% of the world's puffin population migrates together to Iceland in the North Atlantic to lay eggs, building nests of grass and feathers on high cliffs