RUNDE

Runde is famous for its large number of birds. There's roughly about 500,000 to 700,000 seabirds inhabiting the island, most of them are found in the cliffs. The island has a population of about 150, and it's connected to the mainland by a bridge. The island is on the west-coast of Norway.

The main attraction on Runde is the puffin, which is the largest population of birds on the island. It wasn't shaping up to be the best day there but we were on a mission to see some puffins.

As we got closer to Runde, the cloud ceiling seemed to get lower and lower. It wasn't the best conditions for viewing bird flying in and out from the Atlantic but there was something eerily nice about the day.
We had a bit of a hike to the cliff where the puffins where hiding out.
At some parts the fog was pretty thick but the environment still had lots of beauty and things to see.
We saw a lot of these black slugs from Stockholm-to Oslo-to Runde. It is the European black slug, which can get to15cm. The black slug varies in color and can even be white. Moe taking her collection of local vegetations as usual.
Fred looks like he's in a scene from American Werewolf in London. The black slug is eating away on some fine tasty grass, but it is actually an omnivore and has no problem eating meat. It just has a problem catching meat so it sticks to carrion.
These pictures give you a good idea of how wet everything was even though it wasn't really raining and of course we didn't have anything that was waterproof.
The sheep that we don't have a good picture of to the right probably saved Fred from a severe accident ... maybe even his life. We thought the trail was behind them. The sheep wouldn't move and actually looked like they were going to attack (see Black Sheep), well the mother did. They were blocking our path, & then wouldn't let us past. Fred was going to charge at them to get them to move out of the way. Well it turned out that right behind them was at least a 200 hundred foot cliff that we couldn't see because of the fog and landscape. The mama sheep saved us from hiking right off the island!!
Safe from our near death ... well sort ... we continue our search for the cliff where the puffins were hiding out.
Below we found a cliff but as you can see there are no birds on it. It was ridiculously loud as we approached the edge, but we couldn't see a thing given the cloud.
This is when we were all shiny and new at Runde and there was hope that the clouds would part and we'd see thousands of puffins soaring in and out to sea.

There are four species of puffin. We were looking at the Atlantic puffin, definitely the cutest of all the puffins.

Puffins form long term pairing bonds and the female usually lays one egg a season. Both parents incubate and feed the chick. Puffins carry a lot of fish in there beak rather than regurgitate. This way they can take back more.

FINALLY we saw some puffins. AND this is all we saw out of the estimated 200,000 puffins on the island. We did hear the rest though and it was quite loud.
And finally we called it a day at Runde, taking the ferry back. As you can see the day never really improved but you make the most of what you got.