Home Penguins

 

Marine birds are animals that spend the majority of their lives in or near the sea and/or rely heavily on the sea for food. Animals like the albatross, penguin, puffin, pelican,  boobies, cormorants, and gannets are considered marine birds.

 
Waved Albatross  
The waved albatross (Diomedea irrorata) is a large bird endemic not only to the Galapagos Archipelago, but to the island Espanola. It can weigh up to four kilograms and has a wingspan of two and a half meters. Large wings help the bird glide easily over the water without expending a lot of energy, which is important because it only returns to land to breed. After spending six months out over the Pacific Ocean, the waved albatross begins to nest with its life-mate in April, staying on one particular cliff until mid-December when it returns to the open ocean (Wildlife-Marine World-Cormorants, 1996).
Albatross bills are stout and hooked at the tip and are covered with a sheath of horny plates. They use these to swoop down and nab squids, cuttlefishes, and other invertebrates, though their large wing size hinders their movement through this medium (White, 1998).
 

Puffin

  
Adult puffins mostly eat small fish, such as sand eels, herring, hake and capelin.  Puffin diets vary from colony to colony because of the variety of fish around the breeding islands.  During winter puffins may also eat crustaceans, but their preferred food is fish.  The young puffins are usually fed fish by their parents.  Parents carry fish in their bills and either drop them on the burrow floor or pass them to the chick.  Parents usually feed the chick several times each day. Puffins can carry several fish back to their nest at a time.  The average catch is around 10 fish per trip but the record is a whopping 62 fish at once!  The puffin’s beak is specialized to hold all these fish.  The puffin’s raspy tongue holds each fish against spines on the palate, while it opens its beak to catch more fish.
 

Pelican

  
The adult pelican is a large, dark gray-brown water bird with white around the head and neck. Adult pelicans can reach up to eight pounds or larger with wingspans of over seven feet. The adult pelican is a large, dark gray-brown water bird with white around the head and neck. Adult pelicans can reach up to eight pounds or larger with wingspans of over seven feet. Pelicans are endangered in some areas. The population in the East was affected by a collapse of thin-shelled eggs or another impairment of reproductive success. These problems were caused by ingestion of pesticide residues in the fish that they ate, namely DDT. Other factors include human disturbance of the nesting colonies and mortalities resulting from being caught on fish hooks or entangled in monofilament line.