One of the root cellars
We drove over to Elliston today, which is further up North on the coast, and saw some more puffins, and some root cellars. Since Elliston is the root cellar capital of the world, apparently, I’ll address those first. A root cellar is basically a basement without a house attached to it, dug into a hill. They look a lot like the hobbit houses from the Lord of the Rings movies, except that a gnome could live in them instead of a hobbit. Well, and they have no windows and only one door. In fact, they’re nothing like a house at all, other than the outer appearance. Inside they’re just single, dark rooms that stay nice and cool during the Summer underground. Some of them are centuries old, and now a lot of them are open to the public. They look nice and dark and cavernous, so I decided to go ahead and set up a couple of lights inside and take some shots.
A puffin in flight
More importantly, though (to me, anyways. I guess some folks are more into ancient refrigerators than I am), Elliston has an absolutely wonderful viewing area for puffins. They tend to settle on smallish islands out to sea (I guess so as not to be eaten by land predators), but in Elliston they’ve settled on one that’s maybe ten yards or so from a cliff that you can walk up to from the land. And when I say they settled, I mean that hundreds of them have settled: everywhere you look on the island there are puffins milling about, and there are even more of them down in the waters below fishing or just hanging out. To humans, of course, the gaping chasm between their home and the rocky outcropping is nigh impossible to cross. Puffins, however, can fly.
A puffin I caught with his mouth open
And fly they did. A good number of them liked to come over to the human-accessible side every now and then, and they’d often congregate in groups as big as seven or eight puffins before flying off again to go do whatever it is they felt like doing. After a little waiting, I had no trouble at all getting some of them to gather up nice and close to me. At first they were a little skittish, even shying from my flash, but they pretty quickly got used to me and my equipment. They got so used to me, apparently, that an entire crowd of other humans managed to come in close to see the puffin circus without them caring a whit.
Cuddly puffins
The trick was just sitting out by the cliffs long enough for them to get used to me. At first they’d fly by, turn towards the cliff, see me and turn away. Then one or two of them would perch on the cliff near me for a little while, as if checking me out to see if I was dangerous. Then eventually a whole bunch of them started gathering up by me, some of them coming over to look at me and others just going about their business as if I wasn’t there (I had puffins coming so close to me that I couldn’t focus on them with the 400mm f/5.6).
A roosting puffin
Eventually it got to the point where I’d collected about as many puffin portraits as I thought I could ever feasibly use, and I went over to the ledge to try and catch some puffins in flight. This proved challenging, but certainly rewarding once I started to get it down. They fly pretty quick, but I could follow them all the way from the ledges they took off from, so it wasn’t too hard to track them. Ironically enough, while I was trying to catch them in flight I had two or three of them come and settle on a ledge by my feet! I actually tried to shoo them away to catch them flying, but they’d have none of it—I actually got to within a foot or two of them without them seeming to care. I guess they figured out that if push came to shove, they could jump off the ledge…and I couldn’t.
The puffin headshot I've been looking for
I spent a while capturing the puffins in flight, and then we headed off for the long drive back to the room (Elliston was about three and a half hours away). I managed to sort out the photos along they way back (getting a power inverter to run my laptop in the car has worked out wonderfully on this trip), and then when we finally made it here I stuck another pizza in the oven (just pineapple this time, so much less hassle) and had dinner. And, of course, made a blog post, which concludes the day.