Puffin bird download#

For most, it’s the essence of a cherished cuisine.

It’s a test of skills: gauging flight paths and timing the háfur swing just right to snag a bird mid-air. The seabird harvest is a test of nerve: men dangle on ropes dozens of meters above the sea, plucking eggs from cliff-side nests. For their descendants, the tradition lives on as the heart of community identity. For the settlers, seabird hunting and egg gathering meant the difference between life and starvation. Vast colonies of kittiwakes and puffins sustained the settlements they established on the harsh seaboards of Iceland, eastern Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. Viking Age explorers followed ocean foragers such as guillemots and gannets to new shores. Photo by Carsten Egevang/ įor centuries, seabirds have been crucial to the coastal peoples of the North Atlantic. Árni Hilmarsson uses decoys to lure puffins close to waiting hunters. And the group-all members of the same Westman Islands hunting club, a hub of island social life-has a mission: to fetch birds for the puffin-hungry folks at home. His party of fathers and sons, neighbors and friends, has come to catch puffins with a triangular net, or háfur the older ones teaching the youngsters, like their elders taught them. Hilmarsson unwinds with a smoke after hours crouched on a wet, tick-loaded hillside, sweeping birds from the sky with a long-handled net. We’re sitting near the Arctic Circle signpost outside the two-story yellow house that serves as Grímsey Island’s hotel. “Since I was a little boy, I was always catching puffins,” says Hilmarsson, who’s in his 50s and grew up hunting seabirds in the Westman Islands. They’re here for the age-old Nordic tradition they call lundaveiðar : the summer puffin hunt. They’ve made two boat crossings and have driven more than 500 kilometers-a long day’s journey-in pursuit of black-and-white birds with enormous red-and-yellow-striped bills: Atlantic puffins. He and a half-dozen other men have traveled to Iceland’s far north from the Westman Island of Heimaey (population around 4,500), about 10 kilometers off Iceland’s south coast. Hilmarsson, a fisherman from the other end of the country, is on a seabird quest. It’s balmy for the Arctic on this July day, and Árni Hilmarsson relaxes outside in jeans and a wool sweater. And they cluster on the tarmac, erupting in clouds when planes ferrying day-trippers circle in. Birds nestle in sea cliffs, brood in wildflower-filled meadows, patrol rocky burrows, and raft on the cold North Atlantic waters. Thousands and thousands of kittiwakes, puffins, Arctic terns, and more transform Grímsey into a bird nursery bustling under the constant light of the midnight Sun. In the brief high North summer, the island belongs to seabirds. It’s home to some 70 residents, with one street, a tiny grocery store, a slash of airstrip roughly a third the length of the island, and a signpost pointing to the 66☃3’ N parallel, across which tourists drive golf balls into the Arctic. This eyebrow of land 40 kilometers above the mainland crosses the Arctic Circle. Article body copyĪ wheel of wings spins around Grímsey Island, Iceland’s northernmost outpost. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format.

Puffin bird download#

Stream or download audio For this article Janu| 3,700 words, about 19 minutes Share this article Photo by Carsten Egevang/ The Uncertain Future of Puffin for Dinner Hunting and eating puffins are Icelandic traditions. As his ancestors have done for generations, Icelander Árni Hilmarsson catches an Atlantic puffin in a net called a háfur.