Amble Puffin Festival
Amble Puffin Festival
Amble Puffin Festival celebrates everything Puffin! Fun and activities in the Friendliest Port at the best time of year to see the Coquet Island puffins, as they prepare to take care of their newly hatched pufflings.
The festival will include: craft fair, guided nature walks, bird watching, local history talks, arts and crafts, watersports and live music. There will be events to interest all age groups. Events will be held in a variety of locations throughout the town.
Festival Sponsors
The Puffins of Coquet Island
The Puffin Festival has been inspired by the colony of approximately 30,000 puffins that nest on the RSPB seabird sanctuary of Coquet Island, just a mile off Amble.
- Puffins are very sociable birds that like to nest in burrows in the soft sandy soil on the island – that’s over 15,000 burrows!
- Puffins arrive on the waters around Coquet Island at the end of March and are settled on the island in plenty of time for the start of the Puffin Festival.
- Puffins like to gather in vast numbers on the top of the low cliffs around the island, to take a break from nest duty and stretch their wings!
- A baby puffin is called a puffling. Puffins and their pufflings leave Coquet Island at the end of July and spend the winter bobbing about on the sea!
- Puffins have some special neighbours on Coquet Island – eider ducks, fulmar, kittiwakes and four species of terns and lots of grey seals.
- In total over 82,000 seabirds nest on Coquet Island each year.
The Atlantic Puffin is now officially endangered, after dramatic declines in their numbers over recent years.
Puffins are now facing the same level of extinction threat as African elephants and lions. Europe is home to 80% of the world population of Atlantic puffins, but breeding failures in their strongholds of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Norway in recent years have seen numbers dramatically fall.
Puffins are highly susceptible to extreme weather and rising sea temperatures, which affects the number and availability of sand eels, their main food source.
Data from RSPB Coquet Island 2023
Get Involved
Amble Puffin Festival celebrates everything Puffin! Fun and activities in the Friendliest Port at the best time of year to see the Coquet Island puffins, as they prepare to take care of their newly hatched pufflings. In the past the festival has included: guided nature walks, bird watching, watersports, local history talks, photo exhibitions, arts and crafts, children’s activities and live music.
Growing every year, we are now planning our next annual Festival when we will be holding events to interest visitors and locals of all ages in a variety of locations in and around the town. We greatly value those who host events and this is your opportunity to be part of our Festival!
For more information contact: Julia Aston at Amble Development Trust.
Email: Julia@ambledevelopmenttrust.org.uk
Tel: 01665 712929
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AmblePuffinFestival
Twitter (X):@AmblePuffinFest
