It's 'throw a baby puffin off a cliff' season in Iceland
Young puffins have to leave their burrows alone, without the help of their parents, and find the ocean. Every year, local Icelanders set out to help.
It’s 1:15 a.m. in Vestmannaeyjabær, Iceland, and Hafdis Björk Óskarsd, a 23-year-old art student in athleisure wear and a blonde ponytail, is climbing a skinny wire tower that is at least eight times as tall as her.
At the top is a light that helps guide boats in the harbor, but Óskarsd is hoping she’ll find a bird there too—a baby puffin, to be exact, who she just saw shooting across the sky like a pinprick white comet flying from the cliffside burrow where it was recently born. She worries the baby puffin, which is dark gray with a charcoal beak and white belly, is stuck, having landed in a nook or cranny of the tower’s latticed structure.
Óskarsd climbs down empty-handed, but she is hopeful that someone else will find the bird.
“I don't ever do stuff like that on any other day,” she says. “If somebody would tell me, ‘Hey, climb up that tower,’ I'd be like, ‘No, hell no, I'm not gonna do that.’ But if I'm looking for a puffling, I am going to climb up.”
She’s not the only resident searching in the August night for baby puffins—also known as pufflings. The town of Vestmannaeyjabær in the Westman Islands happens to sit in the middle of the largest puffin colony in the world: About 1.6 million puffins share the islands with about 4,300 humans, who only inhabit one of them. And every summer, for as long as anyone can remember, hundreds of townspeople, including families with young children, search their village for wayward puffins, take them home, and in the morning throw them off a cliff. The pufflings' parents have left the islands at that point, and if a puffling goes in the wrong direction, they're unlikely to find their way back to the sea without help.
Despite their large numbers on the island, the Atlantic puffin is in danger. It’s listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, and the Iceland population, in particular, is considered critically endangered. “Iceland has lost half its population in the last 30 years, and that is a critical flag,” says Erpur Snær Hansen—a scientist and puffin expert who lives in the center of Vestmannaeyjabær and runs the South Iceland Nature Research Centre. Forty percent of the world’s Atlantic puffin population resides in Iceland, Hansen says, so when their populations decline, it’s a huge threat to the species as a whole. “If it keeps going on like this…. they're going to vanish.”
When a species is facing extinction, every little bit helps—even small, local conservation efforts. And many residents, like Óskarsd who climbed the tower, feel a responsibility to their local wildlife that makes them risk their lives. Bloodied hands, broken toes, daring feats—just about everyone in town has a story to tell about a rescue attempt.
“You get scratched up, you can get hurt. You can twist your ankle running after a puffling, there are so many risks, because you think just like, ‘Oh, you're just catching a bird.’ But it's so much more than that,” Óskarsd says. “You have to go under cargoes. You have to go under cars. You have to go up on top on roofs. Some people jump in the harbor to save them.”
The plight of the puffins
To understand why puffins are struggling, you have to understand their yearly migration pattern: In Vestmannaeyjar—which means Westman Islands in Icelandic—at the end of summer, adult puffins spend eight months at sea, going first to the Labrador Sea between Greenland and Canada, then migrating south to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a “hotspot” for seabirds to feast, Hansen says.
Out in the ocean, several factors threaten the adults’ survival. For example, a 2021 study found a 50 percent decrease in krill—a puffin favorite food—over the past 60 years in the North Atlantic due to a persistent rise in sea temperatures. When there isn’t enough food, many of them die.
For the ones who do return to breed in Vestmannaeyjar in the early spring, a few obstacles await them and their offspring.
Some of the rescuers I meet will refer to their puffling patrol activities as “puffin hunting,” a term that is ironic, since adult puffins are still locally hunted with a stick and net for food. While many residents have a purely conservational relationship with these birds, there are others who both rescue the babies and hunt or eat the adults. As with many cultures, it’s a complicated relationship, reconciling conservation and tradition. But Hansen says that he simply doesn’t think hunting in Vestmannaeyjar is sustainable, even in small numbers.
Having survived environmental change and predation, a female adult puffin will lay one egg a season in a burrow, which can be anywhere from 4 to 13 feet deep. Burrows tend to curve at the end—so no sunlight can enter. After hatching, the baby’s first six weeks of life are in total darkness. Their parents take turns feeding them fish, but then leave the islands to restart their eight-month journey at sea. The pufflings are on their own.
Why pufflings get lost
By day in Vestmannaeyjabær, the cliffs are postcard-green and majestic, and the sea slams dramatically at the cliff’s edges. But when the last ferry rolls into the harbor from the mainland just before midnight, the town starts to look like a moody thriller movie set—floodlights reflect off the huge gray rock of a cliff, and a red light glows from a tower in the harbor. Above on the cliffs, you can hear the odd sheep calling out with a lonely “baa” as small fishing boats bob in the harbor.
It’s in this nighttime noir that the baby puffins, at about 6 weeks old, leave the burrows for the first time. Under the cover of darkness, they can avoid predators. But when they emerge, many get confused by the town’s infrastructure and lights. “If there would be no town here, they would probably just walk towards the shore and jump into the sea on their own,” Hansen says. Instead, they get lost.
The pufflings can fly and many shoot over the night sky, only the white of their belly visible, just to land in someone’s garden or onto a roof or, mostly, in the industrial area near the harbor. There, some scatter beneath shipping containers that offer the same dark coziness of their burrows. Others dive into stacks of tires, or hide underneath pallets or in plastic containers. Having lost their way and unable to navigate to the sea, they're stuck and will die if not rescued (they’re a favorite meal for housecats and seagulls). And that’s why the town mobilizes every year to save their lives.
Puffin patrol begins at sundown, 11 pm
I spent four nights with residents of Vestmannaeyjabær to understand what it takes to rescue these fledglings. In 2024, more than 3,000 pufflings were rescued, and the town keeps a running tally by asking everyone to report their rescues. (The “pysjur skráðar” number in the lower lefthand corner on this page is the season’s current tally.)
Each rescued puffin in the tally can represent an exhausting amount of work, and several sleepless nights. Puffin rescues aren’t easy. If you’re lucky, you might see a small white dot in the black sky, and be able to follow it to where it has fallen in town. But then, it’s a game of hide and seek in the dark through industrial nooks and crannies.
My first night of puffling patrol I set out at 11 p.m., just after dusk. That evening, cars circled the quiet harbor—slowly and methodically, with the cadence of families driving slowly to look at Christmas lights. But I realized that this was all the puffling patrol. If you pop the trunk of most of these cars, you’d find cardboard boxes either full of pufflings or prepped with grass for their rescue.
Ingvar Örn Bergsson, 36, a fishing boat captain, wears a heavy brown wool Icelandic sweater and jeans, and his strawberry-blond hair is pulled back into a long, thin braid that rests over one shoulder. “Since I was a small child, we just drove all night; sometimes I was sleeping in the car,” Bergsson says. “You do this all day, every day when it’s the season.” He’s out searching with his sailing buddies’ two kids: Eric Eduardo, 12, and Albert Clark, 10, who are already experts.
They saunter through the industrial area of the harbor, running through parking lots and jumping on top of shipping containers and climbing walls like it’s a parkour course that comes easy to them. But they find no puffins.
On the second night, I tag along with Vignir Skæringsson, who works as a senior caretaker at the Sea Life Trust, a puffin conservation center in town. When I show up at his home at 10 p.m. so that we have time to chat before joining the puffling patrol, his youngest son Georg, 5, hugs me, then gives me a temporary Lilo & Stitch tattoo before we head out to look for baby puffins. With a flashlight, he hops out of his father’s car at the harbor, along with his brother Ívar, 12, shining a light under every dark surface.
Ívar says that puffling season is even better than Christmas: “It’s so fun running at them,” he says. I point out that at Christmas you get presents you can keep, but the pufflings are released. So how could it possibly be better? He’s speechless for a moment, then says, “Happiness.”
Ívar spots a puffling that night on top of a warehouse in the harbor with a crane lit in the background against a dark sky. “There’s a puffin!” he yells and we all run toward it.
But the puffling doesn’t jump down, and there’s nothing we can do to get to him.
These are the kinds of nights that Óskarsd, who climbed the light tower, says are full of heartbreak. She’s seen baby puffins unable to be saved before, having crammed themselves into too tight of spot: “It’s the worst feeling ever,” she says. The “best feeling” in contrast is saving one. “You feel kind of this warmth…just holding them. You can feel their heartbeat, you can feel them breathe, and they squeak a little bit, but it's one trick: You put your hand over their head, and they relax…and they feel safe.”
I witness my first puffling rescue the night I go out with the town’s “puffling queens,” two sisters who’ve been captivated by pufflings since they were toddlers. Now in their 30s with kids of their own, Berglind Siguardsdóttir and Sandra Sif Siguardsdóttir are famous in the Westmans for capturing hundreds of pufflings each season.
When I meet them, they’re driving around the harbor, already having rescued a couple that night. Suddenly, their cars stop, and their children bolt out running at full speed. One had seen a puffling fall from the sky into a parking lot.
Berglind’s son Jón, 12, runs to check a tiny alleyway crowded with weeds, then bends to pick something up.
He walks back toward me, carrying a bird. The puffling looks nothing like their cartoonish adult counterparts. The baby’s beak is more slender and charcoal gray, devoid of their trademark colors; their faces, too, have grayish feathers instead of being a stark white. Jón gently pets the puffling on the back of the neck to calm him.
Less than five minutes later, the kids see another white dot shoot across the sky like an avian comet. They sprint past shipping containers; I cannot keep up. But within minutes, they’ve calmly circled back to me with another rescued puffling.
“It feels like a stuffed animal with a heartbeat, and I can feel it breathing, the lungs expanding,” Berglind’s son Anton, 14, says. “It’s an amazing feeling. I’m very careful with it, make sure I don’t drop it. … I’m like a parent right now. I’m calming it down and saving it from danger.”
After catching a puffling, have a puffin sleepover
Once you catch a puffling, you have the proud distinction of being a puffling mom or dad for a night. You take them home, keep them in a cardboard box, and leave them alone—no food or drink, either.
The next day, the puffin patrol registers their rescues online. Some in-the-know residents, like the puffling queens and their kids, also take the pufflings to researchers like Hansen and his team to be ringed with a steel band that help track the baby birds into adulthood. Year after year, recording the whereabouts of tagged birds helps scientists better understand where they migrate, and how they are coping with environmental change.
In the morning, the puffling queens and their kids arrive at Hansen’s home, marching up the hallway stairs carrying large cardboard boxes full of puffins as if they were gifts. Dozens of teeny steel bands—small enough to be placed around a puffin’s leg—lie on a large dining room table, covered in a flowered tablecloth. Puffin art adorns his home: they’re on pillows, in painted and mosaic art, in a glass suncatcher through which you can see a green cliff in the background.
Millian Cavalier, a puffin scientist who works with Hansen, rings the birds by placing a band around one foot and gently tightening it with pliers, and the group works together to weigh them in plastic containers that you dangle from one hand. Hansen says that 300 grams is a good weight goal, but if they weigh less than 240 grams, they have five times less probability of surviving the year.
All of the birds are healthy enough, so we head to the cliffs, where they’re about to be thrown.
To say goodbye, throw the puffling off a cliff
A few minutes’ drive from the center of town, grass-topped cliffs sit above the North Atlantic Ocean. Waves bang against the crags and wind whips our hair. This is where we say goodbye to the pufflings. “They’re basically like human teenagers,” Hansen says of the birds’ first three years of life after being tossed to sea. “They're just going around the area irresponsibly and traveling the world. … They're basically checking out their future breeding place.”
But why are they thrown from the cliffs and not at sea level? There’s no strict scientific reason why, I’m told, though the wind does help them with flight—particularly if they’re flying against it, Hansen says. Some families also release them on a small nearby beach—safer for the tiniest children—and that works too. The town harbor is an absolute no, as several years ago an oil spill coated many lost birds. Most drowned, unable to fly. Though the harbor is now cleaner, it’s still difficult for pufflings to navigate to the sea and food there is scarce.
The cliffs are also more fun, especially for the children.
Frosti Victorsson, age 3, is one of those kids. His parents have just moved here from the mainland to work at the local hospital, and this is one of Frosti’s first attempts at throwing with his mom. Adorably, he stumbles a bit trying to let go of the bird and falls down. (Don’t worry, he’s fine.)
Then the puffling queens’ children throw four birds at once.
Immediately, they notice that one of the pufflings has circled back to land instead of going to sea, so they run to find her.
Ten minutes later, they return with the puffling. Sandra Sif realizes that the puffling noticed a predator—a seagull flying overhead—which likely caused the retreat. They don’t want to release the baby while the seagull’s there. The puffling rests on her knee as she crouches by the cliff. “They trust us more than they trust themselves,” she says. “They know that [the seagulls] are waiting.”
Sandra Sif eventually places the scared puffling on her daughter Íris’ shoulder, and the bird nestles into her. Íris, 11, waits for her to fidget, to signal that she’s ready to leave. But the bird remains still. Sandra decides to take the scared puffling home. She’ll get capelin—a small, silvery fish that looks like a sardine and that the pufflings eat whole—and give the puffling vitamin B in a tablet five times a day until she can be released.
I ask Íris if she’ll be a puffling queen like her mom when she grows up. “Maybe,” she says with a grin. But I can’t help but think it’s already in the cards.
