The Calf of Man is a small island off the south-western tip of the Isle of Man, separated from the main island by the Calf Sound. It has been a bird sanctuary since 1951 and is managed by Manx National Heritage. The island has a long history of habitation and was used as a base by smugglers during the eighteenth century.

The name is Norse. Kalfr in that language means a small island lying against a larger one, and the Calf of Mull is named on the same principle. The older accounts make it the largest of the three small islands belonging to Man, about three miles in circumference, and put the channel at some two furlongs.

The puffins were what visitors wrote about. The Calf was well stored with rabbits, and the puffins bred in the coney-holes, the rabbits quitting their burrows for the season. The birds were reckoned of a very unctuous constitution and were taken in quantity, and there was a saying that if the puffin's nest were not robbed in the Calf of Man they would breed there no longer. The coulterneb puffin, or sea-parrot, frequented the island in large numbers down to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The approach to it is the worst water round the Island. The coast between Spanish Head and the Calf is the most dangerous part of the whole shore, a chain of precipices three to four hundred feet in perpendicular height running almost unbroken from Rushen Bay to the Calf, with sunken rocks besides. The Calf lights were the mark ships made for, and the ballad of one wreck has a brig raise them at five in the afternoon of 14 December and then take the Castletown pier-head light for Douglas.

Two older things belong to it. A fragment of a carved cross, with the cord ornament that borders the Manx crosses, was found at the old chapel on the Calf. And there is a tradition, made into a poem in the Manx Society's Mona Miscellany, that a little ruin on the island was once tenanted by a man who withdrew there in Queen Elizabeth's reign, imposing a solitary life on himself as penance for having killed a beautiful woman in a fit of jealousy.