
Common murre/guillemot (Uria aalge)
Colonies at the bottom of the cliffs in Sunburgh Head (Shetland I., 2013)
Guillemots are 38-45 cm in size. They nest in colonies on cliff edges. Their eggs are pear-shaped so they don´t roll off. The bridled form has a white ring round the eye, which looks like a pair of spectacles (you can see some of them like this if you look closely). The spectacles like form is not a distinct subspecies, but a polymorphism that becomes more common the farther north the birds breed.

The Common Murre or Common Guillemot is a large auk. It is also known as the Thin-billed Murre in North America. It has a circumpolar distribution, occurring in low-Arctic and boreal waters in the North-Atlantic and North Pacific. It spends most of its time at sea, only coming to land to breed on rocky cliff shores or islands.
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