It's Throw A Baby Puffin Off A Cliff Season In Iceland

It’s puffin-chucking time! Every August in Iceland's Westman Islands, locals rescue baby puffins by literally throwing them off cliffs, and it's actually a vital conservation effort. The islands are home to the world's largest puffin colony with about 830-thousand breeding pairs. When baby puffins, called pufflings, leave their burrows for the first time to head to the ocean, they often get confused by city lights and end up going the wrong direction inland instead of toward the sea. The baby birds are supposed to follow moonlight to find the ocean, but bright town lights confuse them.

So rescue teams and hundreds of volunteers search the towns each night during peak season, collecting up to 10 lost pufflings per person. The rescuers take the birds home overnight and then bring them to the south side of the island the next morning, where families gather to throw the pufflings high into the air above the sea cliffs. Once airborne, the babies instinctively know how to fly and head toward the ocean. Thousands of puffins are saved this way each year.