Right now, groups of Icelanders are taking to the streets late at night, armed with cardboard boxes and torches, in search of the telltale white bellies of baby Atlantic puffins. Once caught, these birds will spend the next few hours with their captors, before being tossed off clifftops after sunrise. And this annual tradition has become one of the most fascinating wildlife rescue missions on the planet.
Each year, from late August and early September, the Puffling Patrol takes over the streets of Vestmannaeyjabær, a town of around 4,600 inhabitants on the island of Heimaey, off southern Iceland. The island is known for its dramatic volcanic structures and cliffs rising out of the sea – and the thousands of Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) pairs that breed there.
However, since the town's development, human impact on the puffin colony – the largest in the world – has been profound. According to the South Iceland Nature Research Centre on the island, Iceland has lost half its puffin population in the last 30 years and the population is now listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. Puffins, which mate for life, will only incubate one egg a season, and won't breed every year, which makes them extremely vulnerable to disturbances. And where the baby puffins – pufflings – would have once emerged after around six weeks from their deep, pitch-black burrows to be guided out to sea by moonlight, thousands now get disorientated by the town's lights and launch themselves the wrong way off the cliffs, ending up stranded on the docks, in parking lots and on roofs.
And because of their stubby wings and general morphology adapted for underwater diving, both puffins and pufflings have poor take-off ability in flight, leaving them vulnerable to predation on the ground from cats and other predators. Now, added stressors are changing that too. A 2021 study found that krill in the North Atlantic had declined by 50% in just 60 years, and overfishing has caused large scale "stock collapse" of other food sources like herring. Emerging science has detailed that this has seen a reduction in the size of offspring.
“Atlantic puffins, like all birds in the auk family, have a very energetically costly flight, which makes them sensitive to changes in their feeding distance, but also makes them an excellent gauge of change in their food supply," said Dr Erpur S. Hansen, an Icelandic researcher who collaborated on a 2021 study from the University of Oxford. "High chick mortality by starvation is driven by puffins having to fly further to find food. This has been happening in both the very large puffin colonies in Lofoten (Norway) and Westmans (Iceland) for the last decades.”
Last year alone, the Puffling Patrol rescued some 3,000 stranded birds, which were then carefully tagged and recorded, before being transported to the island’s western cliffs for release. Any injured birds are then taken to the Puffin Rescue for rehabilitation. At the release site, some birds need a helping hand to be launched into the air, and then it's up to the novice flyer to figure it out and avoid being blown back into the rocky cliffside.
In a 2024 study, researchers for the first time demonstrated the role that artificial light plays in guiding puffins – which spend most of their lives out at sea. So far, attempts to help the pufflings redirect away from the town haven't been successful, so the Puffling Patrol looks likely to continue each year, as it has done for generations.
Sources: Puffling Patrol, Communications Biology, Smithsonian Magazine, Journal of Coastal Research
