It’s ‘throw a baby puffin off a cliff’ season in Iceland

“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.”   

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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.”