The Puffin by Mike Harris & Sarah Wanless

Puffins are up there at the top of the list of charismatic and recognisable British birds; but ask me what I actually know about them and I'm afraid the answer would, until recently, have been painfully brief. Thankfully, The Puffin soon changed that. Billed as "a revised and expanded second edition...of [the] 1984 title", one might expect the addition of some colour photographs and inclusion of some footnotes detailing updates to the main text. In actual fact, the text was stuffed full of recent findings, with much of the content coming from research as recent as 2010, and the book now includes detailed sections on, for example, tracking using geolocators and the effects of offshore wind farms. It feels like a whole new publication; the publishers are perhaps selling the book short when they describe it as "revised and expanded"!

The work covers just about everything you could care to know about the Atlantic Puffin; from an overview of its taxonomy to a study on the length of sandeels brought back by birds compared with the average lengths of sandeels being landed by fishery surveys in adjacent waters on the same days. There's no doubt that The Puffin is a highly informative book; but what I found most appealing was not simply the amount of knowledge held between its covers but the extremely readable way in which the work is presented. In contrast to some other similar publications, I found myself reading chapter after chapter rather than just dipping in to the relevant section to retrieve a piece of data before placing the book back on the shelf. There are many facts presented in The Puffin that both enlighten and entertain; my favourite is the inclusion of "palatability scores of North Atlantic seabird eggs", part of a broad discussion on Puffin–human interactions, including hunting and egg harvesting — Puffin eggs are, in case you were wondering, tastier than Shag eggs but not as tasty as Fulmar, Roseate Tern or Black Guillemot eggs.

The book is liberally sprinkled with maps, graphs, tables and a collection of beautiful illustrations by Keith Brockie, and contains a selection of carefully selected colour photographs giving visual reference to many parts of the text. Though built on a bedrock of solid scientific findings, this book presents the work in an accessible way that anyone with an interest in Puffins with find fascinating — and who amongst us could fail to have an interest in Puffins?