On the morning of January 7, after a few days of moderate, mostly northerly winds, Sue Finnegan and Alex Burdo pulled into the parking lot at First Encounter Beach in Eastham to find some seabirds on the move. Watching from the car to avoid the biting cold, they soon realized that among the Razorbills and Dovekies were some pudgy, dusky-faced birds, some showing a flash of orange and yellow in their much larger bills – these were Atlantic Puffins, a prize find for seabird watchers. The occasional individual puffin passes our peninsula, mainly after a Nor’easter, and often there at First Encounter. But this was an unexpected, unexplained explosion of puffins – 61 in all, a new high count for Cape Cod.