Sea
Puffins and Guillemots: 3 Live Cameras — Seal Island, Maine
Three cameras on Seal Island, 21 miles off the coast of Maine: inside a puffin burrow, the loafing ledge, and a black guillemot's burrow.
What you can see
Three cameras on Seal Island, 21 miles off the Maine coast, each on a different part of the same island.
The puffin burrow looks inside a breeding burrow. Tides, glare off the sea and heavy fog can interrupt the picture, but it usually comes straight back.
The puffin loafing ledge looks down on the rock shelf the birds gather on. It is a favourite because an escape route runs in every direction when a hawk or a gull comes in.
The black guillemot is a cousin of the puffin. Like it, it spends most of its life at sea and comes ashore once a year to raise young in a rock crevice or a shallow burrow. This camera is inside the burrow, so a single pair fishing and feeding a chick is right in front of you.
Two of the three are inside burrows, so opening the ledge alongside one of them joins up the moment a bird comes back from the sea and goes in.
Cameras you can watch now: 3
All 3 are live video. Tap one to open it in the camera list.
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Live video
Puffin burrow on Seal Island
Maine, Seal Island · Wildlife · Sea
Seal Island lies twenty-one miles off the coast of Maine. This camera looks inside a burrow where puffins nest and breed through spring and summer. The stream is sometimes affected by the tide, glare off the sea surface, or heavy fog, but it usually comes back quickly.
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Live video
Puffin loafing ledge on Seal Island
Maine, Seal Island · Wildlife · Sea
Overlooking the loafing ledge on Seal Island, twenty-one miles off the Maine coast. It is a prime spot for puffins to gather, chosen because there are exit routes in every direction if a hawk or a gull attacks.
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Live video
Black guillemots on Seal Island
Maine, Seal Island · Wildlife · Sea
A camera inside a black guillemot burrow on Seal Island, Maine. Like their puffin cousins they spend most of their lives at sea and come ashore once a year to nest in rock crevices and shallow burrows. This pair can be watched close up as they fish and raise their chicks.
When to watch
The provider says the puffins nest and breed from spring into summer. No dates are given, so none are set here either.
Maine is 13 hours behind Japan in summer time. Local 05:00 is 18:00 in Japan, local noon is 01:00 the next day and local 20:00 is 09:00. So the Japanese evening through the following morning is their daylight. In winter time the gap is 14 hours and everything runs an hour later.
Maine summer days are long; light lasts until around 20:00 local. The breeding season and the hours that suit a viewer in Japan overlap well.
This is a foggy stretch of sea. The burrow cameras do not care about the weather, but the ledge goes white on some days.
If it isn't showing
All three also appear on the United States page. Sea cameras are gathered under Sea and animal cameras under Wildlife.
Elsewhere in the United States there are Brooks Falls Bears and Salmon and Anan Creek Black Bears. For seabird rock in Japan, The Izu Islands is the closest.
How to pick the hour is set out in Which cameras are in daylight now.
Where to find Puffins and Guillemots
Agencies publishing the cameras on this page
- explore.org (Deep links and embeds OK, no image reuse) — Official site
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.