Elliston, Newfoundland: It's Finally Time for Puffins!

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travel dates: July, 2023

Look! I put a puffin picture right at the top, so no one would have to wait for puffins for another second!

Puffins are amazing. And the little town of Elliston in Newfoundland is one of the best places in the world to see them up close. Lots and lots and lots of them.

I did some googling before writing this post to see what puffin viewing is like elsewhere in the world. Because there are, of course, other puffin hotspots. Lots of them are in Iceland, but you can also see puffins in places like Maine and Scotland. But very often seeing puffins requires a boat tour and gawking at them from the boat. And/or an expensive tour. Or a hike to a remote location.

Of course, Newfoundland itself is a pretty remote location…but if you’ve managed to get yourself to Newfoundland, getting to the puffin colony in Elliston is a relatively straightforward affair. It is a long drive to the eastern edge of the Bonavista Peninsula (it’s a little over three hours from St. John’s), but once you’re there, you can take a short, easy walk from the parking area to where the puffins hang out and spend all the time you want watching them for free (there is a donation box there, and I suggest everyone donate so the town of Elliston wants to keep letting us look at puffins for free).

I was going to just write one post about the Bonavista Peninsula, and it was going to be about other stuff besides just puffins. Then I realized I’d already written over 1000 words just about puffins and decided I needed to break this up. So let’s talk about how to see puffins on the Bonavista Peninsula! (and then later I’ll tell you about other stuff there, because, while you might think puffins are enough for one peninsula, there’s so much more!)

The Bonavista Peninsula is a sprawling place, and we ended up staying on the western side of it, so first off we had a pretty long drive to get to Elliston, and didn’t make it to the puffin viewing site until a little before noon, but this worked out fine. There is limited parking, but we were able to take a space that someone was just pulling out of. From the parking lot it’s maybe a 5 minute walk to the puffin viewing site. We got over there and were looking around, squinting at rocks in the distance and wondering if maybe that was a puffin we saw through the fog, when someone helpfully clued us in that we weren’t yet to the actual puffin site. Oh! There was a big hill in front of us that were people were making their way up, slipping on mud and wet rocks, but we noted that there was also a flat trail around the hill. Don’t be fooled by the big hill! You don’t need to climb it! There are no puffins up there! It just kind of dominates the landscape, and people see other people climbing it so that they feel irresistibly drawn to it. But the walk around the big hill is an easy one and takes you right to…puffins!

The puffins nest in Elliston from May to September, so there’s a nice long season for seeing them. The nesting site is on a small, rocky island that people can’t access (though you can see it easily across the water), but puffins are not particularly shy, so they make regular trips over to where the people are hanging out and will happily land just a few feet away from the adoring crowds. All the pictures in this post were taken with my Fujifilm mirrorless camera and a 55-200mm lens. I’ve gotten a lot of “you must have a good camera” comments (which, btw, is like telling someone who just cooked you a meal you enjoyed, “you must have a good pan”) and it is a decent amateur photographer kind of camera, but I don’t have any special equipment for wildlife photography or anything like that. I wasn’t out there with some giant lens and a tripod. My mother-in-law got pretty good pictures with her iPhone, too. The puffins are just that close and photogenic.

Other notes about puffin-viewing:

*There are very steep cliffs all around the viewing site, so definitely be cautious, particularly with young kids. That said, it’s very easy to stay away from the edges and see all the puffins you want; I’m moderately scared of heights and had no problems.

*I read a lot about the best times to see puffins before we went and didn’t detect too much of a consensus. Most people seemed to say earlier in the day was better. If nothing else, you’re likely to deal with fewer crowds that way. We went twice, and it was not overwhelmingly crowded either time, though there were always a good many people by Newfoundland standards. We went once late morning on a foggy day and once in the afternoon on a clear day, and I’d say puffin viewing was better on the foggy morning, but not by a whole lot. But! I have also read accounts of people making the trip out and having very lackluster puffin experiences. It’s hard for me to imagine, because….so many puffins! But apparently it happens that the puffins are not feeling up for coming to visit sometimes.

*You’re not supposed to bring dogs here (because puffins don’t like them near their babies. duh!) but some people did anyway. Don’t be like that. And, of course, recognize that this is the puffins’ nesting site and we want them to feel and be safe here, so don’t do anything to make the puffins sad. Aside from the occasional contraband dog, we mostly saw good behavior while we were here, so that was good.

*You can also see puffins by the lighthouse in the town of Bonavista. We did this, too, because we were going to the lighthouse, and there were indeed puffins. But not nearly as many of them as in Elliston, and the area was a lot more crowded. I think a lot of people just go there to see them and don’t bother making the trip to Elliston, which is a little more out of the way. I definitely recommend Elliston if you can get there! But the Bonavista site is more accessible (tour buses pull right up there to the lighthouse), so if you have mobility issues and can’t do the short, unpaved walk out to the site in Elliston, Bonavista is a good alternative.

*Puffins are smaller than you expect! Here are some grown-up puffins hanging out with baby seagulls for reference:

*The puffin viewing site is a good place for spotting whales, too. We saw a couple of them very close in.

*It’s very hard to stop taking pictures of puffins. Here are some more pictures of puffins.

A puffin love story in two photos:

Puffin with stuff in its mouth was my favorite puffin:

So that’s the puffins! Seeing them was a huge highlight in a summer that was pretty jam-packed with amazing stuff. Abe was so inspired, he dressed up as a puffin for Halloween last year: