The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.1981, Qupperneq 41

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
39
approximately the same height as its width.
Its height is lower at the south end, and this
may be due to erosion; in all likelihood,
according to older persons, the variation in
its height was somewhat less in recent
times. The stone has sunk but little into the
ground. The eastern side of it is more or less
level. Otherwise it has not been greatly
altered by the elements. Little is known
about the stone except via oral tradition. It is
most unlikely that Audur is buried under-
neath it, as the saga states that she was
buried on the seacoast at the high water
mark, but, as stated previously, the high
water mark is now more than 300 yards from
the stone. It is self-evident that the high
water mark has been receding outward
throughout the centuries due to the silt that
the river has been depositing, forming new
and new sandbanks, which in the course of
time became covered with vegetation. Thus
the land moves outward, and the sea can in
no way have a damaging effect on it.
Source:
Arbok bins Islenzka Fornleifafelags, 1893.
(The year book of the Icelandic
Archaeological Society, 1893)
THOSE PERKY PUFFINS OF PEORIA
by Bill Connors
Ask anyone in Peoria, Ill., if they know
anyone from Iceland, and they’ll point you
in the direction of the Glen Oak Zoo.
That’s where 17 of Peoria’s best-loved,
most colorful residents now live. They’re all
about nine inches tall, weigh slightly more
than a pound, won’t celebrate their first
birthday until July, and do the strangest
things. Such as hurtle themselves over
backwards suddenly in their private, tem-
perature-controlled year-round swimming
pool.
They’re the prized possessions of zoo
director Chuck Wikenhauser: a colony of
Icelandic Puffins, those cute and cuddly
little seabirds that visitors to Iceland can see
swarming by the thousands on grassy cliffs
along the North Atlantic or floating serenely
on fjords and inlets.
To Icelanders the puffin is hardly an
oddity. Its eggs are a delicacy and its meat at
one time was a particularly sought after
treat. But to North Americans and many
visiting continental Europeans this comical
little bird with the brightly colored broad
beak, soulful eyes, and body that looks like
a painted on tuxedo is a delight. And the
only place they can presently be seen in the
United States is at beautiful Glen Oak Zoo.
Thanks for that go to enterprising and
energetic zoo chief Wikenhauser.
In July 1980, Wikenhauser travelled to
the Westman Islands, off the southern coast
of mainland Iceland, on a very special ex-
pedition. He was seeking puffin chicks only
recently bom, anywhere from three days old
to two weeks of age. For it was “pufflings’ ’
that Wikenhauser’s painstaking research in-
dicated could best withstand the trauma of
being uprooted from their Westman bur-
rows, jetted to makeshift accommodations
in Reykjavik, and then transported all the
way to, first, Chicago, and then on to Peoria
by car.
Wikenhauser, accompanied by two
Westman Islanders familiar with the nesting
burrows of the puffin colony, clambered
down the steep, grassy slopes of a bluff on
the eastern end of Heimaey, the only popu-
lated island in the Westman chain. Not far
away was the still-steaming Helgafell Vol-
cano, which erupted in 1973 and engulfed