Puffin
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Puffin. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a bird of the auk family. It is related to the grebe and the loon, and more closely to the murre. There are several species, varying from six and one-half to seventeen inches in length. The puffin has a huge, triangular, gorgeously colored beak that gives it a look of clownish wisdom. On land it sits up on its short tail in an awkward, solemn fashion. In water it dives with loon-like rapidity in pursuit of fish, on which it feeds. The puffin nests in deep rock crevices, or, failing these, and, in fact, usually, at the end of a burrow excavated in a sand cliff. A single white egg is placed in a rounded depression about three feet from the face of the cliff. Sentinels are placed to notify a nesting colony of the approach of danger. If an arm be thrust into a burrow to take a surprised puffin, it grasps with its bill, like a parrot, and holds on like an owl. The common puffin is found along the shores of the Atlantic from Maine and Scotland northward. The wings are weak; the tail, scanty. The side of the face, breast, and abdomen are white. The rest of the plumage is of a jet black. In size the puffin resembles a small duck. The tufted puffin is found on the Pacific coast. It has black plumage, a white eye and cheek patch, and, in the breeding season, a soft flowing tuft of yellow feathers curving backward from above each eye. The enormous bill is of a bright red and olive green. See Auk
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the Fratercula arctica, a common English sea bird, with many popular names-bottlenose, coulterneb, pope, sea-parrot, and tammy norie, with others that are only locally known. It is rather larger than a pigeon; plumage glossy black above, under surface pure white; feet orange-red; bill very deep, and flattened laterally, parti-colored red, yellow, and blue, and grooved during the breeding season. Puffins lay a single egg-white, with gray markingsin a burrow.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account calls the puffin "related to the grebe and the loon"; modern classification keeps the auks (Alcidae) in the shorebird order Charadriiformes alongside gulls and waders, while loons and grebes sit in entirely separate orders — their resemblance is convergent diving, not kinship. The bigger change is in numbers: the Atlantic puffin Aiton's found "from Maine and Scotland northward" was nearly gone from Maine by the early 1900s, and Stephen Kress's Project Puffin began transplanting chicks to Eastern Egg Rock in 1973 to rebuild the colonies, a technique since copied for seabirds worldwide. In 2015 the species was listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List after steep declines in Iceland and Norway, driven largely by shortages of sand eels and other forage fish as sea temperatures rise. One detail Collier's noticed in 1921 — that the bill is "grooved during the breeding season" — is now understood precisely: the bright outer plates are shed each autumn, leaving a smaller, duller bill.
Written for this edition, 2026.