Many esteemed members of the fishological community laugh unguardedly when they first learn that, once upon a time, puffins were considered to be fish. Caught up with Linnean cateloguery and their kings playing chess, these scientific autocrats do no service to the community at large in their vain attempts to silence the courageous few who see puffins as, not another bird, but a link between air and water, a bridge between the aquine and ornithological communities, as a precious evolutionary gem not unlike the pygmy humans just discovered off the islands of Paupa New Guinea, a race previously unimagined, alive no more than a few thousand years ago, as mysterious as the sea, and proof that there are greater things than are dreamt of in any
Puffins like fish
philosophy. So, too, the noble puffin, day in and day out, performs its magic act for the precious few who care to notice, diving in to and out of and straight through the waves.

The case for puffins is neither open nor shut. A scientist's natural predilection towards certainty and its black and white categorization often propells him or her to overlook nature's abundant array of anomalies. Take, for instance, the duck-billed platypus, or my father's dog, Sammy, proof if there ever was that evolution's primary tool is the mutation. Had Carl Linneas ever laid eyes on such animals, he would have been given pause.

The puffin presents similar challenges. Here, one onlooker describes puffinian locomotion:
Puffins are built for swimming underwater rather than for flying. They swim underwater using their wings to propel them and their webbed feet only for maneuvering. On land, puffins are agile and can stand and walk nimbly on their toes. It is in the air that the dignified, agile puffin becomes a bit awkward. Getting airborne is always a touch-and-go matter. They must run along the water surface for a long way, sometimes flying right through waves before they can take off.
At home in the water, puffins feed in large groups called flocks or schools, and when they dive into the sea to nibble on tiny fishes and zooplanktons, they flap through the deep with their half-folded wings, or fins, using also their tiny fishy-birdy feet as paddles. Many a fisherman has cursed a crafty puffling for stealing the fish bait right off the hook. Retaliating, ancient Norwegian tribesman go about catching puffins with a device that resembles a lacrosse stick, a long pole capped by a net.

Puffin properties, taken together, add up to a bird that, like its fishy cousin the penguin, seems more than just "aquatic." Witness the change occuring within the medical field, where millions of people are
A herd of fishbirds
driven by something like curiousity, spitiruality, or the high cost of technocrat medicine, to explore the multi-faceted world of traditional medicine, unearthing the wisdom of generations of ancestors. The brave scientists exploring the vast new worlds, people just like Darwin and Da Vinci, once believed that the puffin was half-fish, half-bird, and represented the best of these two communities, long considered to be at odds in the natural world, trapped in a food chain "cold war" of predation and prey. I say the time has come to blow the dust off the puffin fishbird, sitting for decades neglected in the back of some zoological historical archive. The time has come to resurrect this noble animal, and bridge the chasm that has long divided the great variety of life. Climb aboard the puffin, so that three species -- man, fish, and bird -- can ride forward into the future of natural cohabitation.




 


 
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