Seeing puffins in their natural habitat

Question

A friend has just returned from Iceland, and while they enjoyed it, they were disappointed not to see puffins as it was the wrong time of year. Where else could you see puffins in their natural habitat - ideally closer to London than Iceland is?

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Answer 1

Ah! There are loads of places around the British Isles that your friend could go to see these fabulous little birds. The Atlantic Puffin can be found in places like

• the Pembrokeshire Coast
• the Isle of May
• the Farne Islands

These folks have a nice write-up of some of these places and a few others.

And these folks in Scotland have even briefly described a couple of days' worth of itinerary for seeing the birds up there.

Note that they are not readily visible all year round. Waiting a couple more months for these locales would be best.

Answer 2

You can see Puffins in UK as well. I recommend to use data from ornithologists like BTO or RSPB.

For example, let's have a look at BirdTrack map output:

http://blx1.bto.org/birdtrack/results/index.jsp?o=BOU_ORDER&r=20

In "Animated maps" field select "Puffin", year 2011, months from Jan to Dec and the map will animate its occurence during the year :-)

Answer 3

The distribution of this bird is quite wide. Here is a link to the distribution.

In Europe with the British Islands and Iceland, there are some other spots in the north of France in the Brittany region. One big spot for birdwatcher is the Seven Islands.