Puffin all around us

The cutest bird in the north Atlantic gotta be the puffin. The puffins have such a colourful beak and they look pretty in their black and white feathers. So far we have been travelling half way around Iceland without spotting a single puffin. But today this will change we have reach the small village of Borgarfjordur – the drive to the village was very nice but there isn’t much in the village itself. So we drive from the village to the small harbor just outside the village.

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The small harbor is a small fishing harbor and there isn’t any tourist activities going on in the harbor. But there is actually quite a lot of tourist here in the harbor. We are not allowed to park in the harbor itself which is restricted to people with business at the harbor. Instead we have to park a little before the harbor and then walk down to the harbor.

Behind the harbor is a small hill and everybody go there. The hill is home to not one, not two, not ten, not a hundred but thousands of puffins who go here to dig a hole in the hill and lay their eggs. We walk up the hill along a small stair which is put in place to protect the hill and the puffin from being stepped on by the tourist coming to enjoy the small birds.

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We stay and look at the many puffins which come to the hill to lie on their eggs and relax after having caught some fish in the water below. From time to time some of the puffins take off and go down to the water below to swim around for a bit and possibly dive below the surface to catch some small fish.

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From time to time the puffins return with the beak full of fish – but there are pirates in the neighborhood which are much bigger than the puffin and want nothing better than stealing the fish from the puffins instead of catching fish themselves. So when the puffins return they quickly head towards there small burrows to deliver the fish at the right spot before some other birds steal it from the small puffin. The puffins are surprisingly fast when they return and run underground in only a few seconds.

We stay with the puffins for a while taking countless photos of the amazing birds before we walk back down the stair and back to the car. Unfortunately there are no entrepreneurs in the neighborhood setting up a small restaurant or café at the harbor to take advantage of the tourist dropping by during the puffin season so we just have to leave the puffins behind and go to a bigger town with some facilities.