Hundreds of sea birds have had to be shot after landing in oil which leaked from Godafoss, the Eimskip container ship, off Norway last week. Read the full story

If the patterns of recent years continue, Iceland’s Westman Islands could lose their famous puffin colony altogether. The reason is a collapse in the sand eel population. Read the full story

Iceland’s harbinger of summer is the golden plover whose arrival to the country every year is welcomed as a sure sign of winter’s passing – whatever the weather is doing. Read the full story

There has been another significant decrease in the numbers some species of cliff birds around Iceland. The situation of some populations, such as puffins and Brunnich’s guillemots, is much worse along the south coast than in the north. Read the full story

“You could barely hear anything except Arctic terns before, but now you barely hear them at all,” says Magnus Jonsson, a farmer on Flatey Island off northwest Iceland about the local tern population in crisis. Read the full story

The stock of common cliff-nesting seabirds in Iceland has dropped by 20 to 40 percent in the last two decades. The five most numerous species (except the puffin) were counted on bird cliffs in 2005-2008. The census was a rerun of a similar count in 1983-86.

When the results were correlated and compared, it became obvious that numbers had dropped – some seriously, mbl.is reports. Read the full story

A particularly determined woodpecker on the island of Oland has gone on a pecking frenzy, creating dozens of fist-sized holes in several houses in the town of Tornbotten. The problem has become so bad that residents of this quiet island off south eastern Sweden have asked local authorities for permission to shoot the bird dead.

Speaking to the newspaper Expressen, Leif Johansson explained that his house has been repeatedly targeted by the woodpecker, and his frustration is boiling over. “There are fist-sized holes in the houses…it costs money to replace those boards. If it makes a hole in my house I need to tear down a whole wall. This woodpecker is totally out of its mind.”

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Frettabladid reports that two young residents of Iceland’s Westman Islands, Sunna Georgsdottir and Anna Mary Gudmundsdottir found four pufflings Sunday evening and took them for weighing at the Westman Islands Museum of Natural History.

Everyone who finds pufflings wandering the islands should take them for weighing as part of the Puffling Survey – scientists’ way Read the full story