Who is it?
It is a seabird, a cousin of the guillemot and the razorbill.
It stands about thirty centimetres tall, with a stocky silhouette and a very fast, whirring flight.
During the breeding season its beak turns orange, yellow and blue, which earned it the nickname sea parrot.
A bird we hardly know at all.
Why did I choose it?
The puffin's survival hangs by a thread.
Today the collapse of fish stocks has taken almost every chick, and warming waters are pushing the shoals out of reach of the colonies.
One single egg per pair, per year.
I chose it precisely because nobody really looks at it. It is on every postcard, but that decorative omnipresence hides a simple fact: the species is retreating, and is on the brink of disappearing from France.
We instinctively protect what impresses us, and let a bird that digs its burrows on islands nobody visits die out in silence.
Year after year, it finds the same partner again on the rocky islands of the North Atlantic.
