Where To See Puffins In Wales: Best Locations And When To Visit

The first puffin you see properly, not a distant smudge on a clifftop, but a real one, close enough to count the grooves on its bill is a bird you never forget. For most people in Wales, that moment happens in Pembrokeshire.

Walk off the boat at Skomer Island on a morning in late May and you will find puffins sitting on the grass path in front of you. They don’t scatter. They tilt their heads, study you briefly with one orange-ringed eye, and go back to whatever they were doing. After years of seeing puffins only in field guides or wildlife documentaries, the reality of this small, vivid, utterly unbothered bird tends to stop you in your tracks.

Skomer Island alone supports somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 pairs in a good season. Travel north to Anglesey and you find a very different experience, smaller numbers, but a mainland headland where puffins nest on accessible cliffs and no boat is required.

This guide covers what each place is like, when to go, how to get there, and what to expect when you arrive.

Why Wales is best for for puffins?

The short answer is Skomer. The Pembrokeshire islands hold more puffins than anywhere else in England and Wales, in a landscape with wave-cut cliffs, sea campion and red campion, Atlantic horizons that would be worth visiting even without the birds. But the island also has Manx shearwaters, razorbills, guillemots, short-eared owls, grey seals, and some of the most dramatic coastal scenery in Britain.

What makes this region particularly valuable for puffin watching is the range of access options. Skomer is a day-trip by boat from Martin’s Haven, twenty minutes offshore with no specialist knowledge required to find the puffins. At the other end of the scale, South Stack on Anglesey is a mainland RSPB reserve where puffins nest on the cliff faces directly below a clifftop path, with no boat needed at all.

Together, these two locations cover a broad sweep of Wales and offer genuinely different experiences. Whether you want the full Pembrokeshire island immersion or a day walk to clifftop puffins in North Wales, there is something here that fits.

South Stack, Anglesey, North Wales

South Stack is a different kind of puffin experience from Skomer with no boat, no booking system, no island to reach. You park, walk to the clifftop, and the birds are there. For visitors in North Wales, or for anyone who wants to see puffins without the advance planning that a Pembrokeshire island trip requires, South Stack is the answer.

The RSPB reserve at South Stack sits on the north-western tip of Holy Island, which is connected by road bridge to the western edge of Anglesey. The cliffs here are ancient pre-Cambrian quartzite, streaked with pink and grey, dropping steeply into the sea below the white-painted lighthouse on the stack itself. It is a genuinely dramatic landscape, and the seabird colony that occupies the cliff ledges from spring to summer is one of the most accessible in Wales.

Puffins nest in the rock crevices and short-turfed ledges at the cliff top and upper cliff face. The colony is smaller than Skomer with typically a few dozen to a couple of hundred pairs depending on the year, but what South Stack offers that Skomer cannot is immediacy. You can drive from Holyhead town centre to the RSPB car park in fifteen minutes and be watching puffins within half an hour of arrival. The reserve has a visitor centre, Ellin’s Tower, which sits right at the clifftop and serves as both a seabird watching station and an RSPB information point. Telescopes are often set up on the platform outside, and staff or volunteers are usually on hand to point you to the best spots.

The cliff ledges below Ellin’s Tower hold large numbers of razorbills and guillemots as well as the puffins and in peak season, May and June, the noise and activity from several thousand seabirds on the cliff face below you is extraordinary. Choughs, the red-billed crow that is the symbol of Wales, breed nearby and are often seen along the cliff top. Peregrine falcons hunt over the headland. The heathland behind the cliffs is good for stonechats and wheatears in spring.

The lighthouse at the tip of the stack is accessed by a long flight of steps cut into the cliff face, over four hundred of them, and is open to visitors. Even without descending, the views from the clifftop across to the Lleyn Peninsula, Snowdonia, and on clear days to Ireland, make South Stack worth visiting in its own right.

CHECK LIGHTHOUSE OPENING HERE

The puffin season at South Stack runs from roughly late April through to the end of July. June is typically the best month for guaranteed sightings. By August, most birds have departed. The reserve is open year-round; car parking is managed by the RSPB and there is a charge in peak season.

South Stack pairs well with other North Wales wildlife. Newborough Warren on the south coast of Anglesey has red squirrels, red kites, and one of the finest beaches in Wales. The Lleyn Peninsula across the Menai Strait has its own seabird colonies and coastal walking. For anyone making a wildlife trip to North Wales or Snowdonia, adding South Stack as a half-day puffin stop requires almost no detour.

Planning your visit – one trip or two?

If you have one trip to make and puffins are the priority, go to Skomer. There is no UK puffin experience in England or Wales that matches it for sheer number of birds, quality of access, and ease of visiting.

If you are based in or travelling through North Wales, or if you want to combine puffin watching with Snowdonia, the Lleyn Peninsula, or a broader Anglesey wildlife trip then South Stack at Holy Island is the right choice. It requires no advance booking beyond knowing when to go (May and June are the reliable months) and is accessible by car from Holyhead railway station. It is not a replacement for Skomer, but for the North Wales visitor it is genuinely excellent.

For a long weekend focused on Pembrokeshire, stay somewhere near Haverfordwest, take the Skomer day trip, and spend a second day walking the Dale Peninsula or Marloes Sands. The area around St Brides Bay has enough wildlife, coast, and landscape to occupy a week easily.

One practical note: Skomer day trips are a finite resource. The boat takes a maximum of around 250 visitors per day and the summer season runs from May to September. If you want to go in peak season, May or June, at a weekend, book as soon as the booking system opens usually in early December.

Photographing puffins in Wales

Skomer is the best location in England or Wales for puffin photography, and it is among the best in the whole of the UK. The birds’ tolerance of people, combined with the photogenic clifftop habitat with early bluebells and sea campion and red campion in flower later in the season, Atlantic light, means that almost any decent camera produces good results.

The most productive area is the Wick on the north coast, but burrows run along almost every path on the island. Early morning arrivals (the first boat lands around 10am) give you the clearest light and the busiest activity around the burrows before midday. Overcast days are often better for photography than full sun with the pale pink and orange beak colouring renders more accurately in diffuse light, and you avoid the harsh shadows that direct sun throws into the face.

For telephoto work, a 200–400mm lens gives frame-filling portraits from the path. A wider lens of 70–200mm at the shorter end captures birds in their habitat context, with wildflowers and cliffs in the frame. The birds coming in to land with sand eels in their bill are the classic image; watch the sea as well as the cliffs, because birds will sometimes circle several times before landing.

South Stack on Anglesey requires more reach with a 300–500mm lens being more useful here than at Skomer, as the birds nest on cliff ledges rather than in burrows at path level. The clifftop light at South Stack in the morning is good, and the quartzite geology makes for a more dramatic backdrop than the grassy clifftops of Pembrokeshire. The choughs are often at close range and worth including in a South Stack photography session.

Getting there and making it work

Planning around weather and tide as well as the booking system is needed to ensure you get a booking for Skomer. Here is what you need to know for each location.

Getting to Skomer

The launching point for Skomer is Martin’s Haven, a small cove at the end of the Marloes Peninsula in south-west Pembrokeshire. The nearest train station is Haverfordwest, which is on the Swansea to Milford Haven line. From Haverfordwest, it’s about eight miles to Marloes by road. There is occasional bus service (the Puffin Shuttle runs seasonally but check current timetable) but a car or taxi gives you much more flexibility, particularly if you want to catch an early boat.

At Martin’s Haven, the National Trust car park is a short walk from the slipway. The car park fills up early on popular days so arrive by 9am at the latest. The Dale Sailing company manages the Skomer day trip boats on behalf of the Wildlife Trust.

What to bring: layered clothing (the island can be cold and windy even in May), waterproofs, packed lunch and water, binoculars, camera. There is no café on Skomer. Toilets are available at the Martin’s Haven car park and on the island.

Getting to South Stack, Anglesey

Holy Island, where South Stack sits, is connected to Anglesey by foot bridge, and Anglesey itself is connected to the Welsh mainland by the Britannia and Menai bridges. Holyhead, the largest town on Anglesey is served directly by train from St Pancras in London and Birmingham. From Holyhead station, South Stack is about three miles by road; a taxi or car is needed for the final stretch as there is no regular bus service to the reserve.

By car from the rest of North Wales, South Stack is straightforward: Bangor is about 25 miles, Caernarfon about 30. The A55 North Wales Expressway runs along the north coast of Wales and crosses to Anglesey via the Britannia Bridge, making it easily reachable as a day trip from Snowdonia or the Lleyn Peninsula.

The RSPB car park at South Stack has a charge in season. On busy summer weekends it fills quickly so arriving before 9am is recommended for May and June visits.

More UK puffin colonies

Wales offers some of the finest puffin watching in England and Wales, but the UK’s colonies extend from the Isles of Scilly to Shetland. For mainland cliff colonies accessible without a boat, the RSPB reserve at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire is stunning with puffins, gannets, and kittiwakes from clifftop paths with no boat required.

For the most dramatic island experiences, the Scottish islands take things to another level. Staffa and the Treshnish Isles off Mull combine extraordinary basalt geology with large, approachable puffin colonies. Shetland’s Sumburgh Head offers a rare drive-up colony with puffins on the clifftop grass beside the lighthouse car park.

In Ireland, Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast is accessible by ferry from Ballycastle and has a purpose-built RSPB seabird viewing centre. Skellig Michael an ancient monastic island off Kerry hosts puffins in their thousands alongside one of the most remarkable historic landscapes in Europe.