Beaks in My Lens: Runde, Norway

We drove 254 miles north from Bergen to Runde specifically to look for birds. We stopped for dinner a half hour short of Runde just after 8pm and started to research which part of the island would be best for spotting puffins in the morning. That’s when we learned that the cliff where they nest is on the west side of the island which is only accessible by foot and the only time to see them on the cliff is in the evening after 7pm. Since we weren’t planning to spend the whole day in Runde tomorrow, we hurried along and drove straight to the trail head by 9:30pm. The hike was a half mile trail with approx. 980 foot elevation gain (I’ll save you the math, that’s a very steep hike). I told Avi that it’s a good thing that I am fairly lazy about researching ahead of time, because otherwise I would have said no-go to this birding spot. It ended up being VERY worth the pain when we saw THOUSANDS of Atlantic puffins flying around and roosting on the cliff face! Also, even though sunset is after 11pm, it remains light 24 hours, so we weren’t hiking in the dark.

Atlantic Puffin - same species as found on the east coast in North America.
The area where the puffins were nesting / the cliff face was roped off, but the birds seemed unaffected by their spectators and came pretty close.