Last week we wrote about the rare Henslow’s sparrow (or maybe two?) that has been singing reliably from a field over in Brunswick for the last 10 days or so. That’s not the only unusual bird that has been around in the last few weeks here in Maine. An exceedingly rare tufted puffin was sighted over an Machias Seal Island and Petit Manan Island in late June and then, presumably the same bird was sighted closer to our area at Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge off Matinicus on the 6^th and 7^th of July. There have even been rumors (unconfirmed, as far as we know) of the bird being sighted near Eastern Egg Rock. We certainly had our eyes open for the possibility when we were out there a few weeks ago!

To get the full sense of how unusual it is to find a tufted puffin here in the Gulf of Maine, consider its known breeding range. That range extends from the coast of northern California to the coast of northern Alaska and across to the coast of Russia south to northern Japan. Incidentally, the Russian and Japanese parts of its range overlap with that of another ultra-rarity that visited Maine—the Steller’s sea-eagle. It’s a straight-line distance from the Gulf of Maine across the country to the Pacific Coast, the closest breeding area for tufted puffins, is roughly 2,500 miles.

But it’s highly unlikely that a marine bird like the tufted puffin could or would have flown across the decidedly non-ocean interior of the continent to arrive here on the Maine coast. If instead, the bird had flown through some portion of the famed Northwest Passage of Arctic Canada, the distance from its northern Alaska breeding range to the Gulf of Maine would be something closer to 4,500 miles! Intriguingly, a well-known Canadian birder has three times (in 2017 and 2019) spotted single tufted puffins flying past a coastal location on the Beaufort Sea coast of Yukon in summer, about 400-500 miles from the nearest known breeding location in Alaska. And for what it’s worth, two of the three times the birds were flying east. Is there a regular eastward migratory movement of small numbers of tufted puffins that was previously undetected?

John James Audubon himself made a painting of a tufted puffin from a specimen that he wrote had been obtained by a hunter at the mouth of the Kennebec River in the winter of 1831-32. That record had always seemed rather dubious for obvious reasons until a tufted puffin was discovered and well-photographed at Machias Seal Island in July 2014. That bird and the one found this summer are the only records of the species along the Atlantic Coast of North America.

Incredibly, however, single tufted puffins have been documented once in Sweden, once in the UK, and once in Greenland!

With its all-black body and dramatic golden tufts to go along with a spiffy orange puffin beak, you won’t have to guess if you see one—it should be pretty unmistakable. If you are on the water, keep your eyes open for the possibility of this flashy super rarity.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Tilbury House) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).