Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) stick scratching

Watch a puffin standing on a rock, or at the edge of a cliff—you’ll see a stable, seemingly calm bird. Now watch as it takes flight, transformed into an unstable, wildly flapping burst of energy.

In today’s post puffins are both subject and metaphor, as we dive into their first reported tool use. Instead of calm and well-established facts, we enter a world where small actions over mere seconds have different and disputed meanings, more akin to wild flapping than stable science. It’s a chance to look beneath the surface of animal behaviour research, into a process that resembles less the steady accumulation of reliable knowledge, and more a courtroom drama of claim and counter-claim.

Do wild puffins use tools? I’ll lay out the evidence, you be the judge.

Exhibit #1

Our first witness is Annette Fayet, of Oxford University. The scene is Skomer Island, off the west coast of Wales. Each June since 2012, with dusk approaching, Fayet settled in with her scope to watch the Atlantic puffins as they socialised and prepared for sleep. From a 2020 paper published with colleagues, this is the complete report of her first sighting of puffin tool use:

On 18 June 2014 on Skomer Island an adult puffin was observed holding a wooden stick in its bill and using it to scratch its back for ∼5 s. The bird was sitting on the sea under the colony’s cliffs, among conspecifics. Shortly thereafter the bird took off (still holding the stick, albeit it is unclear for how long) and was lost from view.

There are no pictures or video of this 5-second incident. It is essentially an anecdote, a term for one-off behavioural observations. The word has Greek and then French roots, meaning ‘not published’ or ‘private story’—a meaning that it retains today in the stories that people tell at parties. On its own, an anecdote may help disprove a hypothesis (the Australian black swan famously refutes the idea that all swans are white), but it is rarely accepted as definitive data that proves a proposition.

Which brings us to exhibit #2.

Exhibit #2

The second—and to date only other—report of a puffin using a tool comes from the same paper led by Fayet. This is the critical piece of evidence in the case, since it is a video recording captured by a remote camera on Grimsey Island, Iceland. On 13 July 2018 this happened:

That’s the complete recording. You can see an adult puffin pick up a short stick, wander closer to the camera, and duck its head. The stick bumps against the animal’s body. The film ends.

The camera trap settings were triggered by movement and had an automatic cut-off after 10 seconds (to preserve memory). The behaviour wasn’t seen again when this camera next switched on, but there was a short stick near where the puffin had been. This image from Fayet et al.’s report shows the key moments from the video above, along with a frame from the following morning, with a stick on the ground:

The researchers noted that while puffins regularly pick up objects to line their nests, they haven't seen sticks used for that purpose. Further, the first (unphotographed) sighting was out on the water, not near a nest. They then go on to discuss what the tool might have been used for, and settle on bodily care: scratching to remove a tick or alleviate an itch. From there, they build a model of overlooked cognitive prowess in puffins (and maybe seabirds in general), driven either by flexible behaviour or a genetic predisposition. They note that seabirds

feed in patchy, unpredictable environments, where they must integrate multiple sources of physical and social information to make complex decisions in space and time. Solving such problems requires behavioral flexibility and skills in multiple domains including learning, memory, and planning, also evidenced by high levels of fidelity in migration and foraging routes in numerous species.

You now have all the information that the scientists had when they wrote their paper, which they titled ‘Evidence for tool use in a seabird’ and published in the well-known scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (abbreviated to PNAS). Take a moment to assess the evidence again, and form your own initial conclusion. And then let’s hear a different perspective.

Objection

In a letter to PNAS, a team of bird researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria questioned the conclusions of Fayet and her team. Led by Alice Auersperg, they offered a sympathetic but contrary view:

While we believe that the puffin observation…deserves mention, its impact on the present view of animal tool innovation depends on the strength of its evidence. We fear that the presented observations do not sufficiently exclude simpler explanations.

There is no dispute over the fact that in July 2018, a puffin on Grimsey Island picked up a stick and briefly touched its body. The earlier report—from Skomer Island in 2014—is also undisputed but also unverifiable.

What is rejected is the explanation that the Icelandic puffin was deliberately scratching itself with that stick. Auersperg and her co-authors note that bird beaks are adapted for looking after their feathers, especially on easily-reached areas such as the breast. They point out that puffins do collect and carry sticks, as shown by images such as the following captured by Tim Taylor:

Auersperg and her colleagues are uncertain that the stick-touch can be used as a basis for constructing a quite complicated edifice of cognition that goes well beyond the two birds observed. The conclusion of Fayet et al.’s report grows to encompass seabirds in general as complex problem solvers and likely under appreciated tool users. They are not talking about local puffin innovations so much as a shift in how we should think about seabird thought processes.

The dissenters conclude that until more evidence of the same phenomena is gathered, the puffin video runs a high risk of being a ‘false positive record’—a report of behaviour being present when it is not. The most likely explanation, according to Auersperg et al., is that

the bird simply accidentally touched its plumage with the stick while bringing it toward its breast during a breeding display or was simply trying to scratch itself while still holding the object.

Case closed. Or is it?

Rejoinder

The final word goes to Fayet and her team, also responding in PNAS. They reassert that the videoed puffin was deliberately using a tool:

careful viewing of our footage shows that the bird’s movements were precise and delicate: Its head stops in time such that the stick neither bumps against the body nor shifts/dislodges from the beak, and upon contact the head moves side to side in a scratching motion [i.e., the bird is not simply “touching” its chest as Auersperg et al. (1) wrongly recount].

I recommend watching the video again, with this new description in mind:

In their response, Fayet and her colleagues also raise an interesting point. Auersperg et al. noted that maybe the stick-wielding puffin was involved in a courtship display, to which the original team respond:

displays with sticks have never been seen in puffins on our colonies (nor, to our knowledge, elsewhere).

Replacing ‘displays’ with ‘tool use’ in that sentence gives a fair description of the situation prior to the Fayet et al. report. Instead of discounting the courtship possibility, it seems that this line of argument opens up the possibility that it was in fact courtship—the choice is between two never-before-reported behaviours in puffins. There is no evidence of an outcome that would favour either interpretation, either removal of a tick or attraction of a mate.

In the end, however, Fayet et al. double down not just on the fact that two birds might have used sticks as tools, but on the wider importance of that action, asserting that:

Our observations widen the known tool-use repertoire of wild birds and expand its taxonomic breadth to another avian suborder.

Verdict

The published reports cited here all come from 2020, with the most recent from June of that year. This makes the puffin tale very much an ongoing one. Which opens an opportunity not just to watch science in action, as the definitive record on puffin tool use is debated and decided, but to actually take part. If you live near a puffin colony, and it doesn’t break local laws, then why not set yourself up with a camera and binoculars and see if you can resolve the debate with more evidence?

Remember: if you capture more than six seconds of evidence for puffin tool use that will be the largest dataset ever collected. Do puffins use tools? You tell me.

Sources: Fayet, A. et al. (2020) Evidence of tool use in a seabird. PNAS 117: 1277-1279. || Auersperg, A. et al. (2020) Do puffins use tools?. PNAS 117: 11859. || Fayet, A. et al. (2020) Puffin tool use is no fluke. PNAS 117: 11860–11861.

Main image credit: Atlantic puffins, Papa Westray, Orkney Islands, Scotland. || Second image credit: Fayet et al. (2020) Fig. 1 || Third image credit: Tim Taylor, https://wildimaging.co.uk/puffin#he3057566. || Video credit: Science News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i7wFLF0UJE.