Puffins Are A Lot Like Humans: They Use Tools to Scratch Themselves

We humans used to think that our ability to use tools made us superior to all other animals. But chimps use twigs to gather termite snacks and rocks to hammer open nuts. They also use tools to groom, scratch, or wipe themselves. People have thought that crows were different from other birds because they know how to use tools. Brainy New Caledonian crows can assemble multipart tools to solve puzzle boxes presented to them by researchers, yet studies suggest they are not alone among super-intelligent avians.

Puffins are tool-wielders according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States of America and a 2014 study by researchers from the University of Oxford and the South Iceland Nature Resource Centre.

In Wales, University of Oxford scientist Annette Fayet spied floating on the seawater beneath a cliff, holding a stick in its beak. The puffin then scratched its back with the stick.

Fayet, who studies how the birds migrate and feed, wrote about the crafty bird in her notebook with no photo evidence as she was "busy doing something else."

The ecologist was studying another group of puffins at Grimsey Island in Iceland in July 2018. She had set up a camera trap that did not provide the clues she had hoped initially to find about puffin diets and nesting behavior, but it did provide some of the first evidence of tool use by puffins.

The puffin was using a stick as a tool to scratch an itch in the camera footage. It reached under its chest to scratch itself with the tiny branch. The footage has created speculation that several other species that may be using tools for purposes other than foraging for food.

They saw another puffin, in a separate colony, using wooden sticks to scratch their bodies, publishing the findings on Monday in a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The seabirds exhibited the same behavior on different islands -- so while it may be rare for the swollen-chested birds to scratch themselves with branches, the behavior isn't restricted to a single population.

Aside from scratching, puffins groom themselves and possibly dislodge ticks with the tool.

Tool use is an activity largely confined to primates and perching birds when engaging in complex, often feeding-related, tasks.

Seabirds were considered "previously thought to lack the ability, need, or opportunity to use tools" by researchers.

The researchers are not sure just why the puffins picked up sticks, though they assume it needed to knock off seabird ticks that plague coastal populations.

The evolution of tool use is one of the most enduring puzzles in behavioral biology and investigating the distribution of tool use across taxa is key to understanding its adaptive value.

Puffins often have to suffer parasites like ticks on their bodies, so some of the observed birds appeared to have figured out that a stick could scratch hard-to-reach parts of their bodies.