What Does a Puffin Taste Like?

For the past nine years, puffins have had almost complete breeding failure over the southern half of Iceland, including in the world’s largest colony, in the Westman Islands. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of failed nests each year. So it was a shock to find out that the biggest puffin debate in Iceland this summer was over whether to keep hunting them.By 2011 and 2012, breeding failures had taken such a toll that puffin hunting was banned in the Westman Islands. Some scientists recommended making the ban nationwide. But in 2013 a vocal minority grew restless and petitioned for the season to be reopened.
The hunters’ argument was crushingly straightforward:
 1. There are so few young puffins around that it will be hard to catch them.
 2. That means a hunting season will have no discernible effect on puffin numbers.
 3. Ergo, hunting should be allowed.
If that sort of logic makes a screeching sound in your head, it’s just the collision between the way things have always been and the way things are now. A symptom of the insane human ability to ignore a calamity just because it interferes with tradition.
 But killing puffins?
They’re one of the few species the non-binocular-wearing public can get excited about. Squat little guys in orange gumboots with fish crammed in their beaks. They weigh about a pound with all their feathers on. To us, eating them is grotesque. In Iceland, they’ve been a source of protein for 1,000 years.
Maybe you have to be Icelandic to get why.