Toporiks (топорик - or little axe) are black, thick-chested birds with a big, decorated orange beak, two bright yellow tufts sweeping behind a white carneval masque. Their feet are bright and orange. They stand on the steep grassy hummocks of the cliff walls, alone or in pairs, with their chest puffed out, looking out on the sea, their tufts wafting in the breeze, with the severe, gaudily painted look of, maybe, a Sioux brave looking out over a canyon. Like a the brave, the toporik does not speak.
The toporik's English name, Tufted Puffin, is perfect.
I do not know how to sing the praises of the toporik's beak.
No seabird here flaps with the intensity and frequency of a toporik. When they take flight, the sound is the rattle of a muffled machine-gun, or perhaps the gallop of that very brave's steed suddenly spurred. The short black wings move so rapidly, the eye cannot quite grasp the motion. The wings appear to wiggle around a body driven forward like a locomotive.
With their wings, which are too short for gliding, but powered by great toporik chest-muscle, I imagine they are wonderful divers. When you watch them floating on the surface of the water, they regularly wink away and reappear up to two minutes later. In true semi-empirical naturalist fashion, I have timed them myself from the observation booth. In my small sample set (mean time 1:42 min, N=3), the toporik has consistenty trounces the chistik (mean 0:52) and baklan (mean 0:56, N=4) .
Like most of the birds here, toporiks spend their winters out at sea feeding. When they come to the island to nest, they lay their eggs in deep burrows. If you insert your hunting stick into its burrow, you will feel that they are not just deep, linear affairs, but that there are chambers to the side. The occupant, should there be one, will grunt and grumble and swipe at your stick with bold swipes of the mighty beak. Upon further harrassment, you migh that, thuka-thuka-thuka-thuka-thuka, your victim has scurried out a back-entrance and propelled itself into the sky.
For every ten or twenty or one hundred dull, grey gloopishes khe-khe-khe-ing on the green cliffs of this island, there is at least one toporik. In other words, it, too, is everywhere. Still, despite it's ubiquity, one feels special, or gladdened, to see a toporik. That is the nature of the toporik. The outfit might be clown-like, but there is the distinguished way it holds itself, there is the gnome-like burrowing, the proud posturing, the diving championship, the power of the wings, the singlular might of the beak.
I really have a lot of respect for the toporik. It is everything the gloopish is not.
Nonetheless, a toporik is the second warm-blooded animal whose death I am solely and deliberately responsible for.