Sit above the largest puffin colony on Earth

The Westman Islands are a scatter of rock off the south coast of Iceland, and Heimaey is the only one of them anybody lives on. Every spring the cliffs of the whole group fill with puffins, which come in off the open sea to nest in burrows dug into the grassy slopes and spend the summer going back and forth between the burrows and the water.

Getting there is a short ferry crossing from Landeyjahöfn on the mainland, with the islands growing out of the sea ahead of the bow. The town comes first, and then the cliff tops above it, where the ground ends in grass and the grass ends in a long drop to the waves.

There is not much to do at the top except sit down and wait, and the waiting does not last. Puffins stand about on the slope in ones and twos, drop off the edge toward the sea, and come back in again. An afternoon goes quickly up there.

The colony has been counted at about 830,000 breeding pairs, roughly a fifth of all the Atlantic puffins in the world, which is the largest anywhere. They begin arriving from late April into May, and most have gone again by the end of August.