Late every summer, the children of Heimaey stay up past bedtime and go looking for birds. The island, the largest inhabited one in Iceland’s Westman archipelago, has about 4,400 residents and a puffin colony of more than 700,000 breeding pairs. When the chicks, called pufflings, leave their cliff burrows for the ocean, some of them get it wrong.
“Using the moonlight for guidance, they fly off and head towards the ocean,” explains the local group LUNDI, which runs what the island calls the Puffling Patrol. “Some pufflings, however, get disorientated by the lights in Vestmannaeyjar and fly towards town.”
The puffling patrol: flashlights and cardboard boxes
So residents go out at night with flashlights, checking under parked cars, and gather the grounded birds into cardboard boxes. The pufflings spend the night in the box and are brought the next day to the SEA LIFE Trust sanctuary, where they are weighed, measured and marked. Then they go to the sea cliffs, where they are released with a two-handed underarm toss or set on the rocks to launch themselves.
In the 2025 season, which ran from late July to the end of September, more than 7,000 pufflings were rescued across the island. Of those, 276 needed care at the sanctuary: some injured, some oiled or dirty, some underweight, and 134 still too downy to fly. They stayed an average of 11 days, with as many as 110 birds in the hospital at once.
“It’s quality family time,” one mother, Hildur, told CBS News during a 2018 patrol. “Sometimes there’s a little bit of sadness and some tears if we go home and we didn’t find any.”
A tradition older than anyone remembers
Nobody is certain when the patrol began, but it likely dates to the early 1900s, when electric lights first reached the island. Svavar Steingrímsson, an 86-year-old lifelong resident interviewed by Smithsonian Magazine in 2023, took part as a child.
The colony itself faces pressure. Researchers on the island have documented declines tied to warming waters, and some seasons yield far fewer chicks than others. The 2025 count was a strong one. Either way, the routine holds: the lights come on, the pufflings get confused, and the kids go out to bring them home.
Sources
- SEA LIFE Trust Beluga Whale Sanctuary, Puffling Season
- SEA LIFE Trust, Information about the Puffling Patrol by LUNDI
- Smithsonian Magazine, An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins (March 2023)
- CBS News, A children’s puffin rescue squad (April 2018)
