Returning A Puffin to the Sea 

When my grandson arrived home from Iceland, he had plenty of stories to tell. There was the cloudy eclipse, tasting pungent shark meat, and the shock of discovering that a hamburger could cost $30 or more.  .    

But the most memorable experience was something he hadn't expected: holding a young Atlantic puffin in his hands and helping send it back to sea.    

My grandson, was visiting the Westman Islands when he encountered a local tradition that has become an annual community effort: rescuing young puffins that become lost on their first flight to the ocean.    

The Atlantic puffin is one of Iceland's signature birds. Iceland hosts enormous breeding colonies of these colorful seabirds, which spend most of their lives at sea and return to land in summer to nest. They dig burrows in grassy cliffs and among rocks, usually raising a single chick. Both parents feed the chick small fish, which they carry crosswise in their distinctive bills.    

The young birds are called pufflings. At about six weeks old, they leave their burrows—usually at night—and make their first journey to the open ocean. That's when things can go wrong.     

Normally, the young puffins are guided by the darkness and the natural light of the sky toward the sea. But artificial lights from towns can confuse them. Instead of flying toward the water, some follow streetlights and other illumination inland. Once on the ground, they can become stranded and are vulnerable to cars, cats and other dangers.    

In the Westman Islands, south of Iceland, this has led to a remarkable tradition known as the Puffling Patrol. Families and children go out at night carrying cardboard boxes, searching the streets for the lost birds. The rescued pufflings are kept safely overnight and released the following morning.    

That's essentially what happened to my grandson. He didn't actually catch a puffin himself. Someone else had rescued it and put it into a box. The next morning, he was given the opportunity to help release it.    

“I was kind of scared it would die,” he recalled. Another person had released a puffin just before his turn, and the bird had failed to fly, falling onto the rocks.    

He carefully held his puffin around its body, keeping its wings free. He gave it a slight forward push. Then it flew. “I felt good that it survived,” he said. “If it didn't fly, I would have felt really bad.”    

The photograph captures the moment. My grandson is holding the young bird horizontally, its wings spread wide and its webbed feet dangling beneath it. Unlike the familiar adult puffin—with its bright orange-and-red bill—the young bird has a dark, grayish face and a narrower, subdued bill. Its feathers look remarkably soft.    

“Extremely, extremely soft,” he said. “I've never felt anything like it.” The bird weighed less than a pound.    

A second photograph from his trip shows the other side of the puffin's world: adult birds perched among the dark volcanic rocks above the pounding Atlantic. Their black-and-white bodies, bright bills and orange feet stand out against the green grass and gray Icelandic sea.    

For him, the experience also offered a glimpse into the unusual life of these seabirds. Puffins commonly return to the same nesting areas and reunite with the same mate. They excavate burrows or nest in rocky crevices, sometimes several feet underground.    

And the puffling he released wasn't really a “baby” in the way we normally think of one. It was a newly independent young bird beginning a remarkable journey. After leaving land, puffins can remain at sea for two or three years before returning to their birthplace as adults to establish themselves as breeders.    

My grandson’s Iceland trip had its disappointments. The eclipse was obscured by clouds. The weather was about 11 degrees Celsius, or 52 degrees Fahrenheit. And Iceland, he concluded, was simply too expensive for a return visit.    

But he had one experience that was hard to put a price on. On a cold Icelandic morning, standing above the Atlantic, he opened his hands, gave a young puffin a little encouragement—and watched it fly toward the sea.

~ Al Zagofsky