Puffin Season in Iceland

The puffin is the most common breeding bird in Iceland. The Icelandic Institute of Natural History puts the population at around 2 million pairs, and Fuglavernd — BirdLife's Icelandic partner — reckons that is about 40% of every Atlantic puffin alive. You will see a bigger number quoted elsewhere. We are using the one the ornithologists publish.

They are also, quietly, in trouble. The same institute listed the puffin as Critically Endangered on the Icelandic Red List in 2018, after a decline of roughly 3% a year since 1998. A bird can be everywhere and still be going. That is worth holding in your head while you stand on a clifftop watching thousands of them: this is not a permanent fixture.

The calendar, and why mid-August is the wall

Puffins keep a tight schedule. They appear at the colonies around the turn of April and May, according to Vísindavefurinn, the University of Iceland's science service; Borgarfjörður eystri, which runs the Hafnarhólmi colony, puts the national window as the beginning of April until September. Then a single egg goes into a burrow — laid late May into early June — and everything after that is arithmetic.

The egg takes about 42 days to hatch. The chick then sits underground for roughly another 40 to 45 days while both parents fly fish in to it. Add those together from a late-May laying and you land in the second half of August, which is exactly what Vísindavefurinn says: around the middle of August, the young bird leaves the nest. Once the chick goes, the adults have no reason to stay either. By September the cliffs are empty and the birds are somewhere out in the North Atlantic, not touching land again until spring.

Which makes mid-July — right now — close to the best time to be standing at a colony, and not because of anything scenic. It is because the chick is in the burrow and hungry, so the adults are commuting all day with beaks full of fish. Come in early May and the birds are there but quieter. Come in September and you have driven four hours to look at grass.

They live in the grass, not on the rock

This is the thing people get wrong before they arrive, and it matters for both your photos and your safety. Puffins do not perch on ledges like guillemots. They dig — a burrow up to half a metre into the turf, per Borgarfjörður eystri — and they dig it in the soft grassy soil along the top of the cliff. Visit Westfjords says the same of Látrabjarg: the puffins are the ones frequenting the grassy, higher part of the cliffs.

So the birds are at your feet, not below you. That is why puffin photos look so intimate compared with every other seabird, and it is also why the ground you are standing on near a colony is honeycombed with tunnels and weaker than it looks.

The puffling patrol

This is the best thing in this guide, and it happens in the last three weeks of the season. In Heimaey, young puffins leave the burrow at night and navigate to the sea. Except Heimaey is a town, and a town has lights. Some of the pufflings go the wrong way and end up flapping around a car park instead of the North Atlantic.

So the town goes and gets them. After dark, families walk the streets with torches and cardboard boxes, collecting stranded chicks, and in the morning the birds go to the Puffin Rescue Centre on the island — run by the Sea Life Trust — to be checked and released. Science News reports that the 2024 season turned up more than 4,200 pufflings — more birds rescued than the island has residents. It has been going on far longer than the catchy name has.

The window is late August into early September, when Science News says the pufflings are mature enough to go and head out over four or five weeks. If your trip lands in that window and you can get to Vestmannaeyjar, it is the one puffin experience in Iceland you cannot have anywhere else — and the one where the birds are better off for you having turned up.

Which colony should you actually go to?

Four honest answers, depending on what your trip already looks like. Compare them against the live wind readings above before you commit to a long drive.

The two that ask more of you

Grímsey holds 40,275 pairs and sits on the Arctic Circle, three hours from Dalvík on the Sæfari — the ferry the Road Administration runs — or a short flight from Akureyri. It costs you a day and gives you a latitude line as a souvenir.

Ingólfshöfði is the strangest of the six. It is a nature reserve on a headland 9 km off the Ring Road, and Iceland's nature agency is blunt about the route: it is only passable for off-road vehicles and tractors, and it asks visitors not to drive out there in their own cars. So you cross the sands in a tractor-drawn hay cart, about half an hour each way, and then a guide walks you 2–3 km around the cape. Not for a tight schedule. Excellent for everyone else.

And if you are stuck in Reykjavík with an afternoon: there are colonies on the harbour islands, Akurey among them, reached by boat. We have no published pair count for them, so we will not invent one — but they are real puffins, fifteen minutes from a coffee.

Getting to the cliffs

Puffins are the rare Icelandic attraction that does not argue for a big car. None of these colonies is on an F-road, so none of them needs a 4WD by law — see the 4WD guide for where that changes. Two of the best (Vestmannaeyjar, Grímsey) are reached by boat or plane, and one (Ingólfshöfði) actively asks you to leave the car behind. For everything else, a small 2WD does it; the Westfjords gravel to Látrabjarg is more pleasant in a crossover. Check the alerts page for weather and road status before a long drive west or east, and see summer driving in Iceland for what the roads themselves are like.