Puffin island off the Pembrokeshire coast.
Puffins nest in burrows right beside Skomer’s main path, close enough that you don’t need binoculars, from around April to July; some 40,000 of them breed here. Below ground the numbers are even bigger: Skomer has the world’s largest colony of Manx shearwaters, around 350,000 pairs, which only come ashore after dark to dodge the gulls. There’s a vole here too, its own subspecies of bank vole found nowhere else, and low banks crossing the fields mark out an Iron Age or older field system, laid out by farmers who worked this ground more than two thousand years ago.
Day boats land at North Haven from Martin’s Haven on the Marloes Peninsula, running from April to September, Tuesday to Sunday; the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, which manages the island, caps numbers ashore, so book ahead. Skokholm, a smaller island to the south with its own bird observatory, comes into view on the way over.
