Puffin Patrol: Throwing Puffins off a Cliff
Every fall in Iceland, local residents throw baby puffins off a cliff. It sounds cruel, but it’s actually part of a conservation strategy. These “Puffling Patrols” are actually helping to mitigate human-caused disruptions to the Atlantic Puffin’s natural migration patterns. In this episode, we talk about “humans being bros,” the Atlantic Puffin, the Icelandic practice of puffin chuckin’, and then chat with Los Angeles Comedian & Actor, Becky Braunstein!

There aren’t many places you can go to see Puffins. Some people call them the “Clown of the Sea” because of the colorful markings on their beak. They’re a black and white bird with bright orange webbed feet and beautiful colorful markings on their beak. Most of our listeners are in North America, so if you want to see them without leaving the continent, your options are basically either Nova Scotia, where they inhabit a few tiny islands near Cape Breton, Newfoundland, or a couple islands off the coast of Maine. We’re talking about the Atlantic Puffin and most of them live in the cold northern waters of Greenland, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Norway, the Faroe Islands and the largest population in Iceland. And that’s where our story centers. Because in Iceland, people are throwing young puffins off a cliff.
Occasionally humans who have encroached on an animal’s habitat will really disrupt the behavior and threaten their ability to thrive. And in some of those instances, measures have been taken to sort of reverse this damage.
For example, in Florida, North Carolina and a few other places on the American East coast, human activity – namely city lights have confused hatching sea turtles. The natural behavior of these turtle hatchlings is, once they’re born to crawl toward the moonlight bouncing off the ocean. But in human-populated areas, this can confuse the hatchlings and they can crawl the wrong way. To offset this, there are light restrictions near known hatching areas, shades that keep the light from leaking onto the beach, and human walls, where local people will line either side of the turtle’s pathway to the beach to help guide them. This has led to a huge improvement in the number of disoriented and lost turtles.
In Alaska, Caribou migration routes have been severely impacted by roads and oil pipelines. As a mitigation measure, engineers designed specifically designated Caribou corridors and crossings that allow the caribou to travel safely between feeding and calving areas. Some of these are even highway overpasses that are simply grass-covered bridges for wildlife only.
There are tons of examples of these. There’s a section of reddit called “humans being bros” that often includes stories like these. Some are indirect engineering feats like the caribou corridors in Alaska and similar corridors like the ones created for the Pronghorn of Yellowstone. It also includes things like salmon ladders to help salmon travel upstream where their migration routes have been interrupted by hydroelectric damns and road construction. But some are more like the sea turtle helpers or people who help rescue beached whales and dolphins – actual people intervening to help out our animal friends. And THAT is why people are throwing puffins off cliffs in Iceland.
Iceland has the largest population of puffins in the world. 60% of worldwide puffin breeding happens in Iceland – most of them in the Westman Islands off the Southwest coast. Somewhere between 8-10 million puffins live there. Most people will go their whole lives without seeing a puffin, but for people in Iceland, they’re common. Even so, they’re classified as a vulnerable species because climate change, and human encroachment has threatened their habitat. On top of that, overfishing has lessened their available food sources. And speaking of food sources, there are still populations in Iceland and in the Faroe Islands where it’s a cultural tradition to hunt puffins. For these people, puffins are a food source. This happens primarily in coastal communities, but in some areas puffin meat is considered a delicacy. They also used to be hunted for their feathers, but this is pretty rare in modern times.
Because of this and a slowly dwindling population, hunting bans are starting to be put into place where the puffin numbers are dropping significantly, like Iceland’s Westman Islands where they’re experiencing a 70% decline in population since the 1990s. This is a huge red flag. Puffins mate for life and only produce one egg per season, so rebuilding the population can be slow work. One of the culprits of the declining population is the city lights.
We mentioned earlier that human light pollution has disrupted the hatching behavior of sea turtles. After they’re born on shore, it’s innate for them to crawl toward the moonlight on the sea. The same is true for the Atlantic Puffin. Once a puffin hatchling – referred to as the adorable name puffling – is able to fly, they join their colony by following the moonlight, which leads them to the sea. City lights, like the lights of Vestmannaeyjaaer in the Westman Islands, have confused the pufflings and caused them to become lost from their colonies.
This is where humans have stepped in to help. In a practice that occurs between late August and the end of September, residents of the Westman Islands and a few other places in Iceland go on the hunt for baby puffins in order to help them in their journey to the sea. People will venture out in the middle of the night to find the pufflings (they can usually only be found between 9pm and 3am) and grab them, putting them in a cardboard box until the morning. The residents have been instructed to visit a website where they can enter the size and weight of the pufflings for tracking. This puffin-napping seems cruel at first, but it’s for the good of the young birds. These are pufflings that they’re finding in the city, already lost. As the city lights have confused them, people were seeing lost pufflings wander the opposite direction of their colonies because their instincts were completely hijacked. It’s important that the young birds find the water, so in the morning – these captured baby puffins are taken to the tall cliffs of the Westman Islands overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s there on the cliffs that they’re chucked out off the edge, certain to be able to see the water and fly away to meet their colonies. It’s become an honored tradition during what they call “puffling season” every year and during those two months in the fall, it’s common to see adults and children alike walking around with flashlights and cardboard boxes on this unusual, but wholesome mission. People on a “Puffling Patrol” are told to wear gloves to protect from human skin oils and to protect the humans from avian flu. They’ll put a little bit of grass in the bottom of the box to make the bird comfortable and to help keep the box and the rescuer clean from feces. Then in the morning, they’re brought to the top of the cliff and while some people just place the birds on the ground for them to take off on their own, most people enjoy throwing the birds in the air and watching them fly out over the ocean. By the time a young puffin is a puffling – we’re talking 6-8 weeks old – they can already fly and this practice of throwing them off a cliff is completely safe. In fact, it’s helping to restore the shrinking puffin population. Thanks to these dedicated locals and volunteers, hundreds of lost pufflings are safely rescued and released back to sea each year, ensuring Iceland’s beloved puffin population continues to thrive. The Internet says it’s true.
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