Happy “Throw A Baby Puffin Off A Cliff” Season To Those Who Celebrate

It’s that time of year again. No, we’re not talking about back-to-school – it’s throw a puffin off a cliff season, duh! In Iceland, as summer draws to a close, obliging locals give baby puffins a helping hand as they leave their burrows for the first time and attempt to find the ocean.

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It’s a long-held tradition in the Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands), where puffins nest in large numbers. The island cluster is home to the largest puffin colony in the world, with around 830,000 breeding pairs – approximately 20 percent of the global population – arriving each spring/summer to mate and lay their eggs.

As the nights start drawing in, puffin chicks – adorably known as pufflings – start to flee the nest, embarking on an often-treacherous journey to the sea. The baby birds are guided by the light of the Moon, but tend to be drawn in by the bright city lights, heading further inland instead. Their wings are too weak to take off again, so they can end up stranded on the island, where they make easy prey for local predators if not rescued.

To set them back on the right course, the people of Iceland will intervene. There are designated rescue teams and hundreds of volunteers who scour the nearby towns and villages each night, scoop up hapless pufflings, take them home, and gently throw them off a cliff the next morning. Rescuers can scoop up as many as 10 pufflings a night during the peak.

Once in the air, the babies know how to handle the rest. “Picking the pufflings up [does] not harm them and they are only kept in a box until the next day,” Kyana Sue Powers wrote for Inspired By Iceland. “The pufflings are brought to the south side of the Island. The location can be found on Google Maps as ‘Beautiful Puffin and Shore View.’ The cliffs and air are dotted with hundreds of adult puffins and families can be found releasing their puffins one by one into the wild.”

“Children of all ages and adults, hold firm to the pufflings as they throw them high into the air above the sea cliffs. Once the pufflings hit the air their wings flap rapidly and they take off towards the ocean. Occasionally a lazy puffling will flop to the group and hobble off the cliff but they instinctively begin to soar as they fall through the air.”

Thousands of puffins have been saved this way in the Vestmannaeyjar islands. It’s a much-needed act of conservation for the species – the Atlantic puffin is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, with populations rapidly declining worldwide – though it isn't easy work. 

“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,” rescuer Hafdis Björk Óskarsd told National Geographic. “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.” 

But, according to Óskarsd, it’s well worth it. “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.”  Saving one, she tells National Geographic, is the “best feeling”.