This is Bird Note. Birds feed their families in a variety of ways. Baby chickens and ducklings

are left to peck and forge on their own from the time they hatch. Osprey's fly in with

fish in their talons. Albatrosses regurgitate a rich, fishy liquid, and then there are puffins.

Puffins fly underwater into schools of small, slender fish, snatching them in their large beaks.

A puffin catches one fish, then another, and another. The fish hang crosswise in the beak,

sometimes dozens of them. Finally, the adult flies back to its nest, often miles away,

to feed its payload to a single chick. But how do all those fish stay in the beak as the puffin

goes on catching more? Credit goes to what's called the gap. It's a piece of stretchy skin

where the beak hinges. Fish can be wedged in the gap, but it's so flexible that the

village is still lined up neatly. Even as the puffin opens its beak to catch more, the dangling

fish won't slide out because both the strong tongue and the roof of the mouth are heavily lined

with backward angled spines. It's an image no nature photographer can resist, a puffin holding

its fresh catch of silvery fish in that huge colorful beak. But there's a lot going on behind

the scenes to make that possible. For bird note, I'm Mary McCann.