Top 7 Adorable Facts About Puffins - Page 4 of 9

Their English name was originally used to define another bird

If you look closely at the face of a puffin, you can indeed see that it appears to be a bit swollen, which is why they are referred to as such. This name wasn’t initially given to puffins though, but to the Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), a type of bird of which the meat is prone to swelling. The “Manks puffin,” as it used to be referred to, is completely unrelated to the birds we now simply call “puffins.”