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I often find ideas for books in something I’m reading or someplace I’m visiting, but every once in a while, an idea is gifted to me by a friend. That’s what happened on March 28, 2023, when I received an email from my friend, and fellow author, Caroline Hatton, with a subject line that read, “Your next PB?”  The email linked to this article:

If you click on the screenshot and read the article, you will discover (just like I did) what an amazing gift Caroline had handed me. I mean, come on, baby puffins are called PUFFLINGS?! And if they lose their way when they leave the nest, the kids of the island go out on late night rescue missions to save them?! And once the pufflings have been rescued, the kids keep them safe until morning, when they release the pufflings over the ocean from a beautiful clifftop…in ICELAND!? How perfect is that!?

But, you know, Life has a way of…Life-ing, so it wasn’t until five months later, on August 21, that I wrote to my agent and said:

I am now obsessed with puffins and have been hard at work on a picture book. I checked PW and Amazon to see if anyone has sold a book about the puffins in Iceland recently and I didn’t see anything. Is there anyplace else I should look? I also emailed the two scientists who work at the Beluga Whale Center (where the puffling rescue is headquartered) but I haven’t heard back from them yet. Here is the MOST exciting part — since this is the time of year when pufflings are leaving the nest, I’ve decided I need to go save some pufflings myself! I was kind of waiting to get my plane ticket to hear back from the scientists in case they say, “Oh Kate Messner or Melissa Stewart is also doing a book about our puffins!” because then I might have to reconsider. But, on the other hand, since nothing has been announced yet, maybe I should just go full steam ahead and get this done fast. I’m staying at Milkwood Farm (Sophie Blackall’s retreat center) from Sept. 18-23, so my plan is to go to Iceland the week before that and then finish the book while I’m at Milkwood. What do you think?

Reader, that’s exactly what I did! I had some airline credits leftover from Covid, so my husband, Warren (traveling as my photographer/videographer), and I booked ourselves a flight, and I started to make plans. I had already reached out to some scientists and to one of the people who were mentioned in the Smithsonian article, but I hadn’t heard from them yet, so I fell back on the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators to find a sure-fire Icelandic contact, and the good ol’ SCBWI came through. Author/illustrator/SCBWI member Linda Ólafsdóttir and I were represented by the same agency and she lived in Reykjavik!

Linda Ólafsdóttir (left) and Colleen Paeff

I sent Linda an email, asking if she’d be interested in meeting up, and she said yes! Here we are on September 12, 2023. The day Warren and I landed in Reykjavik.

Linda was full of knowledge about the history of Reykjavik (she had illustrated a children’s book all about the city!) and she generously took Warren and I on a tour of its historic core. It was such a treat! Eventually, we said our goodbyes and the next morning, we got into our rental car (ignoring all the documents warning us to check for high winds before opening our car door), and boarded the ferry that would take us to the Westman Islands – home to the largest Atlantic puffin colony in the world.

The first thing I did, when we got to the island, was to visit the garage behind the SeaLife Trust, which is where I found Rodrigo Catalán, the scientist I’d finally corresponded with. The garage was bustling with activity. Locals brought in boxes with pufflings (one to a box) and Rodrigo checked the birds’ health, then weighed and banded them before the recscuers took them out to release them over the water.

Luckily, while I was talking to Rodrigo, the women mentioned in the Smithsonian article (two sisters named Berglind and Sandra), showed up with a bunch of birds (and an adorable toddler!) and offered to show Warren and me where and how they release the birds. How kind, right?! It was only our first day and already we would get to save some pufflings!

Later that night we set out on our own to find some wayward pufflings, but the only luck that was on our side was the bad kind, because we didn’t find a single puffling and then, when we had parked the car near a big golf course, Warren  opened the car door and a burst of wind came along and slammed the door in the wrong direction – and broke the door hinge! After that, it was impossible to close the driver side door. We were feeling pretty bad about the damage to the car and about not finding any pufflings, so we decided to do one more loop around town (after using my scarf to tie the door shut) and then call it a night. Still, we didn’t find any pufflings until…

…we got out of the car in front of our Airbnb, and we found one sitting on the grass as if it had been waiting for us the whole time.

The next day, after releasing my little puffling over the ocean, I interviewed Sandra and Berglind and another local I’d met when I was talking to Rodrigo. (His name was Geir and I borrowed his name for the big brother in the book!) Sandra and Berglind had offered to take us out on Puffling Patrol with them later that night and while we were waiting for them to pick us up we had an unexpected surprise – the Northern Lights!

Not long after seeing the lights, we were in a minivan with Sandra and Berglind looking for pufflings. It was so much more fun with people who were pros! They’ve been rescuing pufflings for as long as they can remember (like most people on the island) and they knew where to find them. I discovered that my previous night’s puffling was an easy catch. He hadn’t tried to run away at all. (They can’t really fly away from flat ground because their wings aren’t strong enough yet. That’s why then need rescuing.) The birds on night two were not very interested in being saved and, though they couldn’t fly, they sure could run!

You can watch my not so successful rescue attempt here (it’s funnier with the sound on) and a successful one here. I can’t explain why I was moving in slow motion. But I will say that I got faster as the night went on. We ended up rescuing 9 pufflings that night, in about three and a half hours and the next day, we met up on the cliff to set them all free! (It was very windy on the clifftop, so turn your sound down if you watch the puffling release video.)

Normally, that would have been the end of the adventure. I would have gone home to my quiet office and written the book all by myself in familiar surroundings. But instead, I had the great good fortune to have won a spot in a Milkwood Farms residency for a week, so I went straight from Iceland to Milkwood, in upstate New York, where I was greeted by a double rainbow (!!) and the nicest, most accomplished group of authors and illustrators a person could ever hope to meet. That experience deserves its own post, but suffice it to say, I had an incredible, creative week and when it was over I had a first draft of Pufflings Fly Free!: A Rescue Tale from Iceland.

The manuscript would change a lot from the first draft (I’ll write another post about how and why), but the important thing to know – the thing that takes this whole story come full circle, is that when I sold the manuscript to my Great Stink and Firefly Song editor, Karen Wojtyla, she chose Linda to illustrate it! And what an incredible job Linda did with the illustrations! For a book that’s set mostly in the dark, it is so full of light. I can’t wait for you all to see it!