Iceland is home to one of the world’s largest puffin colonies. Over half the world´s population of Atlantic puffin breeds are there – eight to ten million birds. That’s a lot of puffins.
Puffins can be seen all over Iceland, but the Westman Islands is home to the largest colony of them. Puffin watching is big business. People like them – they’re cute, colorful, and kind of comical, like penguins with wings.
In Iceland, they arrive in late April or May, and stick around until late August.
Puffins spend most of the year out at sea, eating fish and riding the waves. They can dive 197 ft. deep and swim 55 mph. They do it by flapping their wings up to 400 times per minute! Seriously, that’s just super cool.
Puffins are monogamous and mate for life. A couple may stay together for over 20 years. The female only lays one egg per year. She and her mate share incubating and feeding duties until the puffling is ready to fledge.
Puffins nest in clifftop colonies, burrowing down before laying their egg. They return to the same burrow every year. It takes about 45 days for the baby puffling to hatch.
To learn more about Puffins and especially where to see them, visit this excellent blog.
https://www.extremeiceland.is/en/travel-guide/puffins-in-iceland
While we were in Reykjavik, we decided to take a short excursion out of the harbor to see some Puffins. It was well worth the trip. First off, the harbor itself is a lot of fun, with little shops, restaurants, bakeries and an ice cream shop. There’s a whole lot of boat yard work going on as well. Dry-docked vessels of all sizes mix in with the buildings, docks and vessels in the water. Boats in Iceland are super interesting to me, as they’re often made for a specific purpose and designed to handle the local conditions of each place that we went.
It was not difficult to sass out a guide and boat, as there’s a little info center that helps tourists do exactly that.
Pulling out of the harbor offered an immediate ocean view of the Performing Arts Center, which seems to somehow capture the feeling of the water and the sky at the same time.
Our captain was more than happy to take our small group out on perhaps his 5000th puffin trip. Not only was he a good-natured and informative captain, but also a commercial fisherman. He said that the catching was easy, with fish in abundance, but it was tightly regulated, not a lucrative enough enterprise to survive on without whale and puffin trips.
We didn’t have to venture too far out before we started seeing little puffins at sea. It was a short tour, and our main puffin view point was a little Island where they were nesting.
They say the first guy to see a puffin on a puffin tour will be rich and famous. Actually, that’s not true, but I did find the first puffin and got to say, “There’s one.”
