By no means my least favorite auklet on St. Paul, is the least auklet. In fact they might be my favorite. No bigger than a song sparrow, they are the smallest species in the family Alcidae (puffins, auklets, guillemots, murres, murrelets, etc.). With breeding colonies as far north as the Bering Strait, these small seabirds range throughout the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, with a population somewhere around 20 million. They remain close to their respective breeding islands year-round, moving south in the winter only in extreme northern latitudes to escape advancing sea ice. Unlike murres and other wing-propelled pursuit divers, which can reach depths of over 100 meters, the small size and high buoyancy of least auklets restrict their dives to within 25 meters of the surface. Thus, they almost exclusively forage on slow moving swarms of copepods along tidal rips and thermal fronts.
Canon EOS 60D, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM + 1.4x, ISO-200 f/6.3 @ 1/800 sec.
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