At breakfast, we overheard the proprietor of our hotel tell some other guests that Puffins had been sighted at Borgarfjörður Eystri, a fjord about 80 miles to the northeast of Egilsstaðir.

In the afternoon, we decided to drive out there to see them. In order to get to Borgarfjörður Eystri, we had to drive over a pass through the Dyrfjöll Mountains. The mountain drive, by the way, is worth doing, even if you’re not interested in seeing Puffins.

Once over the mountain pass, we descended into the Njarðvik valley, then traveled east along the coast…

… to our destination, the little island of Hafnarhólmi in Borgarfjörður Eystri harbor.

Every April, thousands of Atlantic Puffins (“Lundi” in Icelandic) return to Iceland from the North Atlantic to breed.

They remain ashore for about four months, time enough for each pair’s single chick to mature, before flying back out to sea for the other eight months of the year.

Puffins are monogamous and mate for life.

There’s a staircase at Hafnarhólmi that ascends right up through the nesting area. Consequently, it’s possible to get within an arm’s length of the Puffins. The birds are protected here and are completely habituated to the presence of humans. All of these photos were taken on my iPhone13 without any zoom.

We were close enough to go eyeball-to-eyeball.

Puffins nest in the burrows they dig where the female lays her single egg. They return to the same burrow year after year.

Watching these little guys waddle around and fly about, you would never guess that they have the ability to dive 200 feet underwater or reach an airspeed of 55 mph! But jump back when they come in for a landing. They look totally out of control.

After spending about an hour huffin’ and puffin’ up and down the staircase observing our feathered friends, we drove back over the mountain pass, stopping briefly at the summit…

… for a view of the bay into which the Jökla River flows – that’s the river that formed the canyon we saw from the observation platform earlier in the day.

Tomorrow, we’ll be heading north to Mývatn, one of Iceland’s larger lakes.