Puffin tours from Reykjavik: an hour to Akurey and Lundey

The Atlantic puffin is smaller than almost everybody expects — about the size of a pigeon, twenty-five centimetres or so standing up. The famous bill is a summer thing: the orange plates are shed after the breeding season, and outside it the bird is a grey-faced creature that looks like a different species entirely.

They nest in burrows dug into the turf on top of the islands, which is why Akurey and Lundey look like green pincushions from the water. A pair raises one chick a year. Both parents fish, which is what produces the sight everybody comes for: birds coming in fast and low with a beakful of sandeels, then disappearing into a hole in the ground.

From a boat, the colony is a constant blizzard. Puffins fly badly and land worse — four hundred wingbeats a minute, and an approach that ends more or less in a controlled crash. On the water they raft in groups of hundreds. The best fifteen minutes of the trip is usually when the skipper cuts the engine and lets the boat drift.

Iceland holds a very large share of the world’s Atlantic puffins, and the birds are part of the fabric of the place: the Icelandic name is lundi, which is why one of the islands is called Lundey. Numbers have fallen in parts of the country as the sandeel has moved north, which is one reason the colonies in this bay matter.

Akurey lies about fifteen minutes west of the Old Harbour, a low flat island of basalt and turf covering a few hectares. Lundey — the name simply means Puffin Island — sits a similar distance to the north-east. Neither has a building on it, and that is the point: no rats, no cats, no foxes.

Puffins nest in burrows a metre or so deep, dug into soft turf on the tops of islands and cliffs. A ground predator turns a colony into a larder within a season, which is why the birds concentrate on islands and steep headlands and why these two flat scraps of rock hold tens of thousands of pairs while the mainland shore two kilometres away holds none.

Both islands are protected, and no operator lands passengers on either. The boats circle slowly offshore, and on a calm morning the skipper will cut the engine and drift, which is when the trip becomes properly good: rafts of birds on the water around the hull, and a constant traffic of them going in and out of the burrows above.

The other bird you will see is the eider duck, which nests here in numbers, and in summer the terns — arctic terns are aggressive, spectacular and extremely loud, and they are worth watching for their own sake.