The Wildlife of the Faroe Islands: A Kingdom of Seabirds

Scattered in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway, the eighteen islands of the Faroes are treeless, wind-scoured, and largely empty of native land mammals. What the archipelago lacks on land, it makes up for spectacularly on its sea cliffs, which rank among the most important seabird habitats in the North Atlantic. Roughly 50 species breed here regularly, out of more than 300 that have been recorded in total across the year.

The undisputed star is the Atlantic puffin. Nicknamed the “parrot of the sea” for its striped orange bill, the puffin does not nest on bare rock but digs burrows into grassy clifftop slopes, arriving each spring around April and departing by September. The island of Mykines, the westernmost point in the Faroes, holds one of the largest puffin colonies in Europe, with population estimates running into six figures. Puffins have traditionally been hunted for food, and restrictions have been introduced in recent years as numbers have come under pressure.

Guillemots — also called murres — pack themselves shoulder to shoulder along narrow cliff ledges, often sharing space with razorbills, black-legged kittiwakes, and northern fulmars. The Vestmanna bird cliffs, some rising hundreds of metres straight from the sea, are the best-known place to see this crowded cliff-city, usually viewed by boat weaving between sea stacks and caves. Common guillemot numbers fell sharply in the mid-20th century, and egg-collecting is now tightly regulated by the Faroese authorities.

Northern gannets, with their cream-white plumage and dramatic plunge-dives for fish, breed in the Faroes only around Mykines and its offshore islets, in a colony of a few thousand pairs. Elsewhere they are frequently seen fishing offshore, folding their wings back and dropping like arrows into the water.

Beyond these headline species, the islands host large numbers of European storm petrels — tiny, nocturnal seabirds that return to their burrows only after dark, with one of the world’s largest colonies found on the island of Nólsoy — along with great skuas, oystercatchers (the Faroese national bird), and Manx shearwaters. Together they turn the Faroese cliffs into one of the North Atlantic’s great wildlife spectacles, best experienced between late spring and late summer, when the colonies are at their busiest and loudest.