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There are only about 4,500 people living on the tiny island of Heimaey, and each summer they have the rather unique distinction of being outnumbered by puffins, nearly a thousand to one.

The people know Heimaey as the home of Iceland’s most important harbor. They also know it to be the largest island in a volcanic archipelago called Vestmannaeyjær that lies about six miles off the mainland’s southwest coast, where Heimaey lies north of the smaller islands of Alfsey, Brandur, Suðurey, Surstsey. Puffins, who tend to be deaf to concerns of commerce and unintimidated by pronunciation, care only that Heimaey is an excellent spot to lay eggs. People have lived in the village on Heimaey for well over a thousand years, and puffins have almost certainly been coming here for longer than that.

Puffins live at sea for most of the year and return annually to their burrows onshore for the warmer months. For whatever reason, the cliffs of Heimaey have long been prime real estate in the puffin world. The birds return to Vestmannaeyjær in enormous masses late each spring, whereupon they immediately set to the tasks of courting, mating, and tending to the resulting eggs. In mid-summer the eggs hatch, and the rest of the adult puffins’ season is spent attending to the shrill demands of the infant chicks—known, rather adorably, as pufflings.

It should perhaps be pointed out that pufflings may in fact be the cutest living things in the world. They’re downy, wide-eyed, and almost perfectly round, and even when they’re finally large enough to toddle out into the world on their own, they are still only about the size of very young kittens. Their voices have not yet hardened into the groaning yawp of a full-grown puffin, and their audible communication consists almost entirely of a light, agreeable peeping.

They mature quickly though, and during the last weeks of summer, the chirping balls of waddling fluff wander out of their burrows and amble clumsily off of the island’s cliffs to leave Heimaey in their first flight. It takes them straight into the ocean, where they’ll stay at sea for a year or two. They learn quickly to fish and to fend for themselves, and within two months of their freefall from the Heimaey cliffs, many will have flown over a thousand miles to the waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Some years later, they’ll return to Vestmannaeyjær, and will again and again after that: puffins mate annually, and tend to continue the practice throughout their thirty-year lifespan. This naturally results in a stupefying output of pufflings for one island. But that first step, getting off of Heimaey on one’s first try, is harder than it seems.

When the pufflings emerge from the burrows, their parents have often left already, leaving their offspring’s fate to the centuries of preprogramming that ought to be guiding the baby birds instinctively into the ocean. They leave at night, and appear to use the moonlight’s reflection on the water to set their course. This, alas, does not always work out. Pufflings are sometimes not as savvy as Nature might have ideally had them, and each night, hundreds of the young birds become confused, disoriented by the lights of the village. They crash-land into the human settlement on Heimaey, whose innumerable dangers range from cars and trucks to predators and starvation. Furthermore, the pufflings are trapped and helpless on flat ground, unable to fly at their young age without the benefit of a cliffside drop to start from.

And so, during the weeks in late summer when the pufflings are making their migration, the children of Heimaey come out every night in droves to rescue the wayward ones, the birds that spiral into town by the dozen every hour. They sweep the street corners with flashlights and load whatever befuddled pufflings they can find into cardboard boxes, in which they transport them home for a night of recuperation. The next morning, the rescued puffins are brought to the seashore, pointed vaguely westward, and thrown wildly, wings flapping, into the sheltering sea. This is by now a longstanding tradition on Heimaey, recently formalized and endowed with the endearingly clunky label “Psyjueftirlitið með Brúsi Bjargfasta.” This translates literally as “Puffling Patrol with Milk Jug the Rescuer,” but in fact refers to the author Bruce McMillan, to whose name the closest phonetic equivalent in the Icelandic vocabulary appears to have been “Brúsi” (“milk jug”).

In 1995 McMillan published a photo essay for children called “Nights of the Pufflings,” which brought international attention to the young puffin rescuers on Heimaey.  In addition, the Psyjueftirlitið is partially intended as a way to gather information about the birds so that they might be better served in years to come. Rescuers are asked to register and weigh each bird they find, to note the animal’s condition and the date, time, and location of its discovery.

The last photos in McMillan’s book are of some small, cherubic Icelandic children releasing pufflings into the ocean. In the first, one of the birds is cradled in a girl’s arms and looking around contentedly. In the second, a young boy on a beach is crouched like the center on a football team, holding between his legs not a ball but a confused and yet strikingly unperturbed puffling.