Iceland_Spinski_17-2
Locals residents and their families and friends have a long tradition of setting up a makeshift village of white tents to act as social hubs for eating, drinking and singing folk songs, as seen here during the first night of Þjóhátíð (Thjodhatid) in Vestmannaeyjar (the Westman Islands), Iceland — a small, volcanic archipelago off the southern coast of Iceland. The island is host to the annual Þjóhátíð (Thjodhatid), a four-day, outdoor concert and cultural festival which has been celebrated since 1874 and has become one of Iceland's largest and most popular festivals. The summer festival attracts thousands of people to the tiny island known for its fishing industry and its puffin population, which has become a cultural emblem to the town's 4,000 residents. Some 830,000 nesting pairs of puffins come to the Westman Islands each year to breed on the steep, grassy cliffs. But those numbers are down from over a million, as the Westman Islands are on their 11th consecutive year of complete reproductive failure and biologists are currently investigating whether warming ocean surface temperatures are driving the puffins' food supply to colder waters in the north and rendering the seabirds unable to breed in their historic nesting grounds. This population collapse has led to a number of behavior adjustments, including the reduction of consuming smoked puffin, a traditional Icelandic dish, and abbreviating the puffin hunting season to only three days this year.