Each autumn on the island of Heimaey in Iceland’s Westman Islands, children head out after dark carrying small boxes and flashlights.

They are not looking for candy or treasure.

They are looking for lost puffins.

A young Atlantic Puffin chick, called a puffling, spends its first weeks hidden safely inside a burrow on a coastal cliff. When it is finally ready to leave the nest, it emerges at night and heads toward the ocean for the first time.

For centuries this worked perfectly. The open sea reflects natural light from the sky, while the land behind is darker. The puffling simply moves toward the brighter horizon and reaches the water.

Modern towns changed that.

Streetlights and buildings can shine brighter than the ocean at night. Some pufflings head the wrong direction and end up fluttering into town instead of toward the sea.

That is when the rescue begins.

Each fall, local children and volunteers roam the streets of Heimaey searching for stranded chicks. When they find one, they gently place it in a cardboard box and bring it home for the night.

The next morning the rescuers walk to the shoreline.

One by one, the pufflings are lifted toward the wind and released. Most pause for a moment, then spread their small wings and glide out over the North Atlantic.

Thousands of pufflings are helped this way each year.

For the people of Heimaey, it has become a beloved autumn ritual. For the pufflings, it is a small course correction at the very beginning of a long life at sea.