“People call me Clown, Willy, Willock and other silly names. I get it. I’m used to being laughed at, put down, sent up: the sea-cliff ragamuffin, country bumpkin, pompous boffin, stuffing in sand eel for tiffin, huffing and puffing and gossiping on. My portly belly, my dumpy waddle, my funny growl, my bright orange feet, my rainbow bill … they’re all ridiculous, right?
“Let me tell you a story about being a puffin. At six weeks old I swam from shore — and didn’t touch land again for three long years. I slipped from my burrow at night to avoid the skuas and gulls, left my parents behind, dropped into the sea where it sloshed in a zawn, put a mile between me and our island by dawn.
“I still spend each winter out on the ocean, alone. And one night each spring my mate and I return to the same cliff-patch to reunite, mate, lay, hatch. We’ve been together for twenty years now…
“So — look me in the eye. Call me Clown Bird … or plain old Puffin. I don’t really care. But know that behind those names lies a whole way of being, from egg to death, that would blow your mind — at once steel-tough and vulnerable, epic and lyric, a life lived right on the edge; mysterious, wild, quietly heroic.”
