The Ocean’s Wing-Propelled Divers
Every other family in this series — albatrosses, shearwaters, storm-petrels, boobies and their relatives — belongs to the tubenoses and their tropical cousins, birds built for gliding over vast distances on stiff, narrow wings. Auks are something else entirely. The roughly 25 species that make up the family Alcidae are Northern Hemisphere specialists, built stocky and short-winged for a completely different problem: flying underwater. Where a shearwater’s wings are optimised for effortless gliding, an auk’s short, whirring wings are a compromise between flight and propulsion — auks “fly” through the water using the same wingbeats they use in the air, chasing fish and krill to depths that would be extraordinary for a comparably-sized seabird.
That trade-off is also why auks are, cliff for cliff, the most spectacular colonial seabirds most pelagic birders will ever see. Where a shearwater colony is often a remote island glimpsed once at dusk, an auk colony can be a wall of sound and motion — tens of thousands of birds packed onto ledges, ferrying fish, and pouring off the rock face in continuous streams. Several of the trips below are built specifically around visiting these colonies by boat, making auks one of the few pelagic target groups you can reliably photograph at point-blank range rather than through binoculars on a distant swell.
Here’s where to find puffins, guillemots, murres, murrelets, and auklets on pelagic birding trips around the world.
Puffin, Guillemot, or Murre? A Quick Primer
Puffins (genus Fratercula) are the family’s most recognisable members — stocky, upright auks with oversized, vividly-coloured bills in breeding season. Atlantic Puffin is the widespread North Atlantic species; Horned and Tufted Puffins take its place across the North Pacific, with Tufted Puffin distinguished by its cream-coloured head plumes.
Guillemots and murres (genus Uria) are the family’s cliff-nesting specialists — slim, dagger-billed birds that breed shoulder-to-shoulder on narrow ledges in the Northern Hemisphere’s largest seabird colonies. Common Guillemot and Common Murre are the same species under different regional names (guillemot in Europe, murre in North America); Brünnich’s Guillemot (also called Thick-billed Murre) is its darker-billed, high-Arctic counterpart. Black Guillemot is a smaller, distinctly different-looking relative — all-black with white wing patches and coral-red feet.
Murrelets and auklets are the family’s smallest and least-known members, mostly restricted to the North Pacific. Ancient, Marbled, and Kittlitz’s Murrelets and Parakeet, Least, Cassin’s, and Rhinoceros Auklets are all genuinely difficult birds outside dedicated Pacific pelagic trips — small, fast-flying, and easily missed unless you know exactly where to look.
Razorbill and Little Auk (Dovekie in North America) round out the family. Razorbill is the heavy-billed, black-and-white North Atlantic auk often seen alongside guillemots; Little Auk is the tiny, dumpy high-Arctic species that gathers in the largest numbers of any auk on Earth at a handful of Svalbard colonies.
Arctic Norway: The World’s Great Auk Colonies
No destination on this list rivals Arctic Norway for auk abundance. At Svalbard, high-Arctic expedition cruises from Longyearbyen — Birding Ecotours’ Svalbard Mammal & Birding Cruise, Field Guides’ Spitsbergen & Svalbard Archipelago Cruise, and Oceanwide Expeditions’ North Spitsbergen Explorer — all reach bird cliffs where Little Auks gather in the millions at the famous Alkefjellet colony, alongside enormous numbers of Brünnich’s Guillemot, Black Guillemot, and Atlantic Puffin.
On the Norwegian mainland, three very different boat trips put visitors within metres of comparably vast colonies. In Varanger, at Norway’s northeasternmost tip, Skua Nature’s Around Hornøya Boat Excursion circumnavigates an island holding nearly 80,000 breeding seabirds, with Common Guillemot, Brünnich’s Guillemot, Razorbill, and Atlantic Puffin all viewable at close range from a heated Zodiac. On the Vesterålen archipelago, Puffin Safari’s Bleiksøya trip runs daily 1.5-hour crossings to a single island hosting roughly 80,000 pairs of Atlantic Puffins — timed with remarkable precision, the birds return to the cliffs on 14 April every year. On the Møre coast, Runde Boattrip’s Bird Island Boat Trip circles Norway’s largest seabird colony, where Puffins are the star attraction among Razorbills and Common and Black Guillemots on a cliff hosting up to 150,000 birds of some 230 recorded species. Further out in the Lofoten chain, Day @ Sea’s Røst Seabird Safari reaches an archipelago holding roughly a quarter of Norway’s entire breeding seabird population, with Puffins, Razorbills, and both guillemot species nesting alongside White-tailed Eagles patrolling the colonies.
UK and Ireland: Alcids on the Autumn Chum Slick
Unlike Norway’s colony-visit model, British and Irish pelagic trips mostly encounter auks offshore, on the same chummed trips that target shearwaters and storm-petrels. The Penzance Pelagic out of Cornwall lists a full complement of Atlantic Puffin, Guillemot, and Razorbill as an expected part of its summer trips alongside its headline shearwater and storm-petrel targets. In Scotland, Birding Ecosse’s Ullapool–Stornoway Minch crossing notes “auk flocks moving offshore” during its April and early-season sailings, when Great Northern and Red-throated Divers are still in winter plumage. Ireland’s West Cork Pelagics Baltimore Pelagic — best known for Wilson’s Storm-Petrel and four-skua trips — sails the same Celtic Sea waters where Razorbill and Common Guillemot from the region’s cliff colonies forage offshore.
The North Sea and Iberia: Wintering Alcids
Away from breeding cliffs, the North Sea and the Atlantic coast of Iberia offer a distinctly different way to see auks — as offshore winter visitors rather than colony birds. The BirdingHolland North Sea Seabird Trip, running from three Dutch ports through the September–October migration peak, lists Razorbill, Common Guillemot, and Atlantic Puffin as regulars on passages through the central and northern North Sea. Further south, SeaEO Tours’ Lisbon Atlantic Pelagic runs monthly from October through May specifically to catch the winter alcid season off Cascais, when Razorbill, Common Guillemot, and Atlantic Puffin move offshore in numbers — with Little Auk an additional possibility in some years, a genuine rarity this far south.
US Atlantic Coast: Winter Alcids at a Migration Bottleneck
Cape May, New Jersey sits at one of the Atlantic Flyway’s great bottlenecks, and its offshore waters reflect it. The Cape May Offshore Pelagic, run jointly by the Cape May Whale Watch & Research Center and the Cape May Bird Observatory, specifically targets alcids including Razorbill, Dovekie, and Atlantic Puffin during the colder months — three species that, together, cover the full size range of North Atlantic auks on a single winter trip.
Alaska and the North Pacific: The Deepest Auk Diversity
No pelagic trip on this list matches the auk diversity available on a single outing from Seward. The Alaska Seabird Charters Kenai Fjords Pelagic, captained by a Ph.D. marine biologist with three decades studying Alaskan seabirds, reaches the Chiswell Islands for a genuine cross-section of North Pacific alcids: Horned and Tufted Puffins, Thick-billed Murre, Kittlitz’s Murrelet — one of the rarest and most range-restricted murrelets in the world — Red-faced Cormorant, and both Parakeet and Least Auklets. Further south on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the Whale Centre Tofino Pelagic makes alcid diversity the core of the experience: Rhinoceros Auklets are abundant year-round, Cassin’s Auklets breed in the millions on offshore islands, Pigeon Guillemot is a summer fixture on rocky headlands, and Ancient and Marbled Murrelets join in fall migration, with Tufted and Horned Puffins turning up as the season’s biggest bonus. The Pacific Northwest’s Oregon Pelagic Tours and Westport Seabirds encounter alcids too, chiefly as a supporting cast to their headline shearwater and albatross flights over the productive Heceta Bank and Olympic Peninsula shelf.
Japan: Tufted Puffins and Rhinoceros Auklets on Hokkaido
Eastern Hokkaido offers one of the most accessible auk-colony experiences in Asia. The Ochiishi Nature Cruise, a short 2.5-hour tour from Cape Ochiishi on the Nemuro Peninsula, reaches the protected islands of Yururi and Moyururi — home to breeding Tufted Puffins, Spectacled Guillemots (a Northeast Asian specialty found nowhere in this guide’s other destinations), and Rhinoceros Auklets, with Ancient Murrelets joining the mix in summer alongside feeding Steller Sea Lions.
ID Tips for Auks at Sea
Silhouette first. Auks fly on short, whirring wings held stiffly out from the body, low over the water, in a straight line rather than the banking glide of a shearwater — often the fastest way to separate a distant auk from every other seabird family in this guide.
Bill shape and colour narrow it down fast. A stocky bird with a deep, brightly-coloured bill in summer is a puffin. A slim bird with a straight, dagger-like dark bill is a guillemot or murre. A heavier, blade-shaped bill with a fine white line is Razorbill.
Size separates the small Pacific species. Murrelets and auklets are noticeably smaller than puffins and guillemots — sparrow-to-starling-sized rather than pigeon-sized — and are best identified by structure and behaviour (diving frequency, flight height) as much as plumage at typical pelagic-trip distances.
Season changes the picture entirely. Breeding-season auks at a colony show full bill colour and ornamentation; the same species offshore in winter can look drab and superficially similar to one another, which is exactly why the Cape May and Lisbon winter trips above are valuable — they force careful comparison of birds in a plumage most birders rarely study closely.
Conservation Note: A Family Under Pressure from a Warming Arctic
Several species in this guide are sensitive indicators of change in the Northern Hemisphere’s oceans. Atlantic Puffin is IUCN-listed as Vulnerable, with major North Atlantic colonies — including sites in Norway and the UK — showing long-term declines linked to shifting prey fish distributions as sea temperatures rise. Kittlitz’s Murrelet, encountered on the Kenai Fjords pelagic above, is one of the rarest and most poorly known seabirds in North America, nesting on glacial scree and dependent on tidewater glacier habitat that is receding across its range. Little Auk and Brünnich’s Guillemot, both dependent on Arctic sea-ice-associated prey around Svalbard, are watched closely as the high Arctic warms faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Trips that log sightings through eBird’s Pelagic Protocol — several of the operators above do — feed directly into the long-term monitoring these species depend on.
Ready to see puffins and auks for yourself? Browse pelagic trips worldwide or explore by region to find a trip near your target species.