Little Auk - Habitat and Range

Habitat and Range

Their breeding habitat is coastal mountainsides, where they have large colonies. They nest in crevices or beneath large rocks, usually laying just one egg. They move south in winter into northern areas of the north Atlantic. Late autumn storms may carry them south of their normal wintering areas, or into the North Sea. The species is also commonly found in the Norwegian Sea.

In the book, The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder writes of her father finding a small bird that looked just like a Great Auk hidden in a haystack after an early October blizzard when the family lived near De Smet, South Dakota around 1880. The family never did find out what it was, but it appears to have been a Little Auk, blown south by the autumn blizzard.

The Little Auk's prey are chiefly crustacean. The Glaucous Gull and the Arctic Fox are the main predators on Little Auks, and, in some cases, the Polar Bear has also been reported to feed on their eggs.