Puffins are a national treasure in Iceland, and the Westland Islands, located off the southern coast of Iceland, have the world’s largest puffin colony. However, in recent years, their numbers have been dwindling due to several factors, such as climate change, overfishing, pollution, and difficulty finding food.
Due to increasingly warm sea temperatures, reduced populations of sand eels, one of their primary food sources, have particularly hurt puffins, forcing them to search further for food for their chicks. This scarcity can be a puffling-killer since they feed themselves over their pufflings if puffins can’t find enough food.
Every year during the late summer, locals on a remote island off the coast of Iceland spend their evenings searching for disorientated puffin chicks — known as pufflings — and throw them off a cliff’s edge.
Light pollution can confuse the pufflings, causing them to fly inland instead of out to sea. The locals scour streets to save the pufflings, documenting them and throwing them off cliffs. Puffling tossing, as it’s known, might look crude, but it is for their good.
The pufflings use moonlight for guidance but often get disorientated by artificial lights from town and fly inland instead. Without human help, they are left to fend for themselves and cannot escape predators or find food. Tossing them off the cliff’s edge allows them to use the sea winds and distance below as a makeshift runway, and once they take flight, they can head out to sea where they belong.
The patrols are famous in Iceland. According to one 86-year-old resident named Svavar Steingrimsson, these patrols have been going on since the beginning of the 20th century when the island first got electricity.
The patrols used to be more successful, and about 25 years ago, you could save 100 pufflings every night, according to local Valur Mar Valmundsson. Now, you’re lucky to find that many over the whole season.
Locals must help the pufflings by tossing them off the edge of a cliff. People could let them fly away in their own time, but most people like to throw them off. This practice might seem odd, but it highlights how much Icelanders value their puffins.
If we don’t act fast, the puffin population may never recover. We must change our daily lives to reduce our carbon footprint and lessen our environmental impact.
We can also support organizations dedicated to protecting wildlife and their habitats. Together, we can help ensure that future generations can enjoy these beautiful birds.
This article by Nicholas Vincent was first published by OneGreenPlanet on 5 April 2023.
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