Stick-toting puffins offer the first evidence of tool use in seabirds
Annette Fayet was scanning a colony of Atlantic puffins off the coast of Wales when something caught her eye. A puffin, gently bobbing on the sea, held a stick in its orange-black bill. Then, the seabird used it to scratch its back. “I was surprised and excited,” says Fayet, an ecologist at the University of Oxford who studies puffin migration. Puffins (Fratercula arctica) had never been seen using tools. In fact, no seabird had. Fayet recorded the unusual behavior in her notebook, but it would take four more years before she got photographic evidence. In 2018 on Grimsey Island in Iceland, one of her motion-sensitive camera captured a puffin snatching a stick from the ground and using it to scratch its chest feathers. Those observations, described December 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, represent the only known example of a bird in the wild using a tool to scratch itself. A remote motion-sensitive camera captured a puffin on Grimsey Island in Iceland...