n NO bird is more popular than the puffin for people to dress up as and to read about in the paper. The public is always on the puffin's side. Marketing puffins is an enormous industry: mugs, mobiles, and masks, T-shirts, books, and book-ends, jewellery and cuddly toys - and tunes too, no doubt, if it were not for the fact that the only noise a puffin makes is a resigned snoring groan. We don't have penguins here but we do have puffins, and they make us happy.

The array of endearing diminutives which the puffin has been called suggest this affection is already old. They look like Johnny Morris in evening dress even without that beautiful red, blue, and yellow conk. I was introduced to them as tammienorries. Coulterneb and cockandy, Bass Cock and Ailsa Parrot are other Scots names. In Latin it is Fratercula Arctica - little brother of the arctic - which is maybe the best of all.

There are half a million puffins on the grassy islands and cliffs from Craigleith round to the Mull of Galloway. But counting them is hard, for they dig long burrows in the rich clifftop turf and there is always a merry-go-round of non-breeding birds spinning in the wind off the edge of the crags. Knowing this enabled the St Kildans to harvest the birds without reducing the next year's numbers.

On Mykines in the Faroes you can still see the fleyging nets arc up from the catching posts to pluck puffins off this roundabout and the catchers stagger home with a sackful at the end of the day. You can fry or boil them; when they are ready their beaks pop up from the water and open to tell you.

The puffins' biographer, Mike Harris, considered in 1984 that ``the general state of Puffindom'' was good; now he writes that ``it is difficult to know what is happening.'' The only hints are that the rise in adult mortality on the Isle of May has coincided with the systematic exploitation of sandeels on the ``wee bankie''. That is enough to justify the Greenpeace flags fluttering in the easterlies from the mastheads of the fishing boats in Dunbar harbour.

Maybe we are lucky that puffins follow the sandeels and publicity follows the puffin. I've done my bit for the puffin readership; now I'm off to put on the gear.

HUGH OUSTON