Islands key to seabird restoration

OK, raise your hands if you’ve seen an eider duck… a black guillemot… a murre… an Arctic tern… a razorbill… an Atlantic puffin… a Leach’s storm petrel.

Chances are the number of hands still raised is a small one (particularly since there are only 27 of you out there reading this).

Since I paddle a bit on the coast, I’ve had the opportunity to see thousands of eiders, the most at one time being flocks and flocks around the Sorrento area. But there’s not a place I’ve paddled on our coast I haven’t seen at least a few.

And terns seem to be a plentiful commodity, although I’m not real good at telling the differences. I think, by looking at the Audubon Field Guide, I’ve seen common terns, and I may have seen an Arctic tern, but they’re similar in appearance to a roseate tern, at least in the book. I need a real birder to show me.

Black guillemots and even those in their fall/winter plumage seem to be plentiful. As for puffins, I’ve seen three on a puffin cruise. Razorbills (a relative of the extinct great auk), storm petrels, murres? Never seen ’em ‘cept in pictures. But the pictures were taken recently, so I’m pretty sure they exist.

The one thing in common among these birds, save for the fact that they are all seabirds, is that we likely would not have the chance to see them today if it were not for the dedicated efforts of conservationists to keep them alive.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a symposium entitled “Seabird Conservation, Restoration Successes and Challenges” at the Samoset Inn in Rockport with paddling friends Deb and Dave Morrill of Orrington. The daylong event gave me all sorts of insight into the plight of our seabirds. It was co-sponsored by Friends of Maine Seabird Islands, Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge Complex, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust.

The biggest revelation for me was learning that many of these birds would not survive or be here today if not for ongoing conservation and restoration efforts.

At the forefront of that effort is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which in Maine manages the Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge Complex. I’d always thought it was simply Petit Manan Point and Petit Manan Island. Wrong, birdbrain. The complex involves 38 offshore islands and three coastal parcels totaling nearly 7,000 acres spanning more than 200 miles of Maine coastline including five national wildlife refuges – Petit Manan, Cross Island, Franklin Island, Seal Island, and Pond Island. These islands range from Upper Flag Island in Casco Bay to Machias Seal Island way Down East.

The offshore islands provide nesting habitat for the common tern, the Arctic and endangered roseate tern, Atlantic puffin, razorbill, black guillemot, Leach’s storm petrel, laughing gull, and eider. The birds historically favor the offshore islands because predators, such as great horned owls, foxes, coyotes, and raccoons, are less prevalent than on mainland. Ocean waters around these islands provide an abundance of food for the seabirds.

Historically, the islands provided camping places for Native Americans who fished the deep waters and harvested, on a sustainable basis, seabird eggs. In more recent history, Europeans began settling our islands in the 1600s and began farming and raising livestock on the islands, disrupting nesting sites. Seabirds were hunted for their feathers and their nests raided for eggs. This wreaked havoc on bird populations to the point that in the late 1800s “most seabirds in the Gulf of Maine were on the brink of extinction,” a USF&W brochure says.

In 1918 the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was approved. It protected the birds, their nests and their eggs. Around this time the automobile and train replaced boats as the preferred method of transportation, families who fished were starting to get motorized boats and no longer needed to live on islands near fishing grounds and hence moved to the mainland. Seabird habitat got a reprieve.

Common and Arctic tern populations rebounded until 1940 when there were 16,000 pairs on our coast. Dumps turned out to be the next threat to terns, because they helped increase the population of herring and black-backed gulls that thrived on disposed fishery waste among other foodstuffs. Gulls nest earlier than terns in the spring and claim prime nesting sites. They also tend to prey on terns. This was all bad news for the tern population that dropped to 5,000 pairs by 1977.

Enter the USF&W Service. Between 1972 and 1980, Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge Complex was established, and it began focusing on restoring terns. Their brochure points out that the federally endangered roseate terns “prefer large colonies of common or Arctic terns in which to nest. Therefore, saving this species requires assisting the other two.” That meant making the nesting islands compatible for terns, and in turn meant getting rid of the gulls by egg and nest destruction, loud noises, shooting or use of poisons such as DRC 1339 which shuts down a bird’s kidneys. To illustrate the effects of predation, Linda Welch, a wildlife biologist with USF&W, said it took only 10 years for 1,500 pairs of terns on Petit Manan Island to be wiped out.

After threatening species have been taken out of the picture, USF&W then goes about attracting the desired birds to nest by use of decoys and sound systems playing bird sounds. Welch showed Power Point pictures of decoys with their intended bird species cuddling up to them.

The tern population on Petit Manan Island, by the way, is back to 1,700 nesting pairs, and there are 20 pairs of puffins out there as well, Welch said.

On most islands where restoration or conservation efforts have been undertaken, the numbers show success. The anomaly is Ship and Trumpet islands in Blue Hill Bay, Welch said. The historic population was 800 pairs of terns. There were none in the 1930s thanks to gull predation. The number increased after restoration efforts began in 1992 to almost 600 nesting pairs in 1999, Welch said. But in 2000 there were none. Then almost 300 pairs were counted in 2001 and this year the number went back to almost zero, the victims of predation, Welch said.

Seal Island, 21 miles southeast of Rockland, had no puffins for 150 years. In the early 1980s, the National Audubon Society began working with USF&W to reintroduce Atlantic puffins to the island by transporting chicks from Newfoundland to the island. In addition to a viable puffin population of 2,500 pairs, Seal now supports 2,000 pairs of terns, Welch said.

On Machias Seal Island, there are 3,500 pairs of terns, 2,800 pairs of puffins, and 543 pairs of razorbills, Welch said. Restoration efforts since 1987 have increased the roseate tern population 276 percent, the common tern population by 204 percent, and the Arctic tern population by 61 percent.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that less than 10 percent of tern colonies are self-sustaining, according to Welch. And 94 percent of “our” Arctic terns nest on only four islands in the Petit Manan Island reserve. For roseate terns, she said, 95 percent nest on only two islands. And for the puffins, the numbers show 98 percent nest on four of the islands. That makes these few islands critical in conservation efforts, and is part of the reason USF&W has a goal of increasing the number of islands it owns in the next 15 years and trying to establish more nesting and breeding islands. Public meetings will be announced in the near future on the service’s plans.

Jeff Strout can be reached at 990-8202 or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordailynews.net.