Puffin And Puffin Until You’re Blue

With lockdown slowly relaxing, I’m able to visit the zoo again, albeit with restrictions; for instance, you need to reserve a time slot. I take one later in the day and happen to be at the sea lions just after they are being fed.

A few years ago, a blue heron — and a flock of seagulls — learned the sea lions’ teatime, as well, and as a protected species, got the occasional fish — not so the seagulls. Through the years, it took up permanent residence in the zoo — still a free bird, though — and, as such, got used to people but keeps its distance.

I am admiring it from fairly close, a one-meter-wide hedge between us, when I overhear some French-speaking visitors exclaim that it is a “perroquet de mer” or, literally, a sea parrot.

I’m telling this to a few friends a few days later.

Friend: “What? Is that even a thing?”

Out of curiosity, I do a Google search and immediately recognize the bird but cannot think of the name in Dutch, nor in English.

Me: “Well, yes, it turns out that it is a thing. It is a… a… Well, it is a penguin that isn’t a penguin.”

My friends got what I meant and had a good chuckle about it. It took another search to find that a “perroquet de mer” is a puffin which, incidentally, in Dutch, also has the word for parrot in its name.