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There is one thing that primates and elephants have in common with puffins of all places: They are probably the only species of animals that have been seen using a tool to scratch themselves in the wild.

Puffins are birds that resemble penguins but can fly.

They live in parts of the Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean.

And although the puffins are classified as an endangered species, you can observe them well as a tourist, for example on vacation in Iceland in spring time.

Source: Getty Images / Cultura RF / Oscar Bjarnason


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Sea bird researcher Annette Fayet herself spent a lot of time watching the birds.

She told us that it must have been "a total of thousands of hours" that she has spent with the puffins so far in her life.

In 2014 she made an unusual discovery on the island of Skomer in Wales: a puffin floating in the water scratched its back for about five seconds with a wooden stick that he wielded with his beak.

Laypeople would probably not even have noticed this short sequence, but Fayet knew what an unusual situation it was:

I was surprised because I wasn't expecting it, and at the same time happy and excited to witness something so interesting.

Annette Fayet, sea bird researcher


Probably never before had anyone seen a sea bird use a grooming tool.

Some birds are known to use tools to get at sources of food.

It is known about parrots that they can scratch themselves with sticks - but such observations have only been made in captivity.

The only known use of tools by birds for grooming their bodies in the wild has so far been that some of them peck their plumage with ants - probably as a defense against parasites.

It had not yet been observed that they use a stick for this.

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However, it would be five years before Fayet made her observation public.

After all, she did not take a photo of the brief situation in 2014.

In 2018, however, on the island of Grímsey in Iceland, she happened to discover another puffin who was working its plumage with a stick - this time in the chest area.


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She had installed cameras so that she could observe the behavior of the birds in detail, and so this time she managed to obtain video evidence.

At the end of 2019, together with a research team consisting of scientists from Oxford University and the South Iceland Nature Research Center, she published her findings in a study that was published in the specialist medium "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences".

Source: Annette Fayet / PNAS


It is not yet clear why the puffins scratch themselves with wooden sticks.

The research team believes that it is unlikely that the movement of the stick occurred by chance, for example during nest building, and that it was misinterpreted by the scientists.

For one thing, puffins typically seek soft materials like grass for their nesting site, not hard sticks.

On the other hand, the researchers noticed that the branch that the bird used to scratch in the video was then placed on the ground and not used any further.

It is more likely that the birds wanted to defend themselves against parasites, for example, with the observed behavior.

At the time of the video recording, there were many seabird ticks on Grímsey.

So everything indicates that the puffins actually use the sticks to scratch themselves.

The authors write that behavior should be clearly defined as the use of tools.

And this realization changes the view of puffins:

Their brains are comparatively small, and they are not generally known to have sophisticated cognitive skills.

Research team, Oxford University and South Iceland Nature Research Center


But the birds live in unpredictable environments where they have to process a lot of information in order to be able to make complex decisions about time and space.

And the creative use of tools is also usually associated with high cognitive abilities.

The authors conclude:

So the cognitive abilities of sea birds may have been significantly underestimated.

Study authors, Oxford University and South Iceland Nature Research Center

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This article was first published in January 2020.