Puffin restoration marks 30 years Innovative means have added terns to sanctuary

loading...

It’s a perfect sunny day, 80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. A small boat full of people clad in long sleeves, knit hats and rain slickers makes its way toward Eastern Egg Rock, home to the world’s first restored Atlantic puffin colony, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this month.

The rock is just a blister on the watery horizon, eight miles off Bremen, with hundreds of birds swarming above – overlapping and interweaving their flight paths like planes at O’Hare International Airport. No trees grow in this harsh environment and no summer homes balance on the granite cliffs.

This island belongs to the birds.

Puffins buzz along the surface of the water, their stubby wings flapping in triple time to keep their fat torpedo bodies aloft. Laughing gulls swoop overhead, cackling to one another. A family of eiders paddles by with fuzzy brown ducklings in tow, unruffled by human presence.

But the terns are not pleased.

With feet and scissor-tails outstretched, a mama or papa tern screeches and dive bombs anyone or anything that approaches its helpless chick, often dropping a well-timed blob of guano onto intruders.

While the long-sleeved shirts and rain slickers help protect the visitors from bird droppings, Stephen Kress, founder of Project Puffin, hands out squares of sturdy cardboard.

“They’ll peck your head. Sometimes they draw blood,” he says, almost apologetically. “Be prepared for a lot of screaming, dirty birds.”

Project Puffin

If any human is at home on Eastern Egg Rock, it’s Kress. He’s the man who in 1969 imagined restoring Atlantic puffins to the coast of Maine.

By the 20th century, the seabird’s numbers, once abundant, had dwindled to a tiny colony on Matinicus Rock. Decades of puffin hunting and egg stealing combined with an explosion in the gull population to drive the birds out of Maine.

The state’s rocky islands were once nurseries for a half-dozen different seabirds. Now, most harbor only the herring gulls and great black-backed gulls that plague tourists at lobster pounds on the mainland.

In 1969, Kress decided to do something about it.

“We have to intervene. Otherwise, we’re just documenting the loss of life on Earth,” he said.

By 1973, Kress had obtained funding from the national Audubon Society and other sources. Over the next few years he shipped more than 900 puffin chicks to Eastern Egg Rock from Great Island, off Newfoundland. No one had ever restored seabirds to lost habitat before.

“We didn’t even know if they could make it through an airplane flight,” Kress said.

Other ornithologists hypothesized that the chicks would die, or that they would return to their birthplace as soon as they could fly.

But Kress thought, “If we took the puffins before they knew where ‘home’ was, they’d come back [to Egg Rock].”

Eight years later – success. The first native pufflings were born in 1981. Last summer, scientists counted 52 nesting pairs on Eastern Egg Rock.

On a warm, late June day, Kress told his story while perched on an overturned bucket inside a bird blind that looks out over square shaped boulders. He likened them to fallen dominoes and said the rare geological feature created perfect burrows for the puffins to raise their young.

A single puffin landed on the rocky outcropping in front of the blind. Soon another, then five, then twenty, were huddled close together. Kress said puffins are the sheep of the seabird world.

“They need lots of each other to feel safe,” Kress said.

Two puffins started rubbing their striped parrot beaks against one another, a nuzzling courtship dance that is called “billing.” These are young puffins, 4 or 5 years old, seeking a mate that they likely will keep for the rest of their lives. Puffins live 25 to 30 years.

“This is a singles club,” Kress said. “Nesting puffins are all business this time of year.”

Like many seabirds, puffins only spend a few months on land, breeding and raising a single chick. After their pufflings have fledged, they go to sea, and that’s where scientists’ knowledge ends, said Scott Hall, research coordinator for Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Program and a resident of Belfast.

“They could be anywhere in the North Atlantic – that’s a big sphere,” he said.

But every spring, the puffins return to Eastern Egg Rock, often to the same burrow, to raise chicks with the same mate year after year.

“They’re charismatic. The more you know about them, the more appealing they are,” Kress said.

Tern’s Turn

Once the puffins became established, Kress, now director of the Audubon Seabird Restoration Program, turned to terns, another integral part of a historic seabird nesting colony. But terns weren’t so easy to fool. The aggressive birds lay their eggs on open rocks, with no burrows to disguise their birthplace.

So Kress and his fellow scientists tested a new approach. They peppered the rocks with tern decoys and mirrors, then set out recordings of tern calls to fool birds flying over into thinking the island was full of their kind.

“It’s trial and error based on biology,” he said. “You try to think like birds, which, of course, you can’t ever really do.”

Today, Eastern Egg Rock is a rookery for more than 500 terns of three different species: the common tern, the state-threatened arctic tern and the federally endangered roseate tern. The approach is now used throughout the world, including 9 other islands off the coast of Maine, to rebuild struggling seabird populations.

Every summer, Audubon staff create a tiny community – a wooden shack surrounded by tents in the middle of Eastern Egg Rock – to research the new ecosystem. Interns and volunteers rotate shifts. Every day someone is on the roof of the shack at 6 a.m. for a headcount of any and all birds that fly overhead during the early morning.

In the afternoons, they go out on the rocks, stepping gingerly to avoid stepping on the splotchy gray and brown eggs lying in the sun. When a tentative footstep goes “crunch,” staffers’ hearts jump into their throats, though more often than not, it’s an urchin or a mussel shell underfoot, said Ellen Peterson, Egg Rock island supervisor.

For the first 15 days of their lives, the chicks live hidden in the grasses that grow between the rocks, totally dependent on their parents for food and protection. The whole colony defends the chicks from predators, be they human researchers weighing and banding the chicks or carnivorous gulls.

“Last year, there was a bald eagle miles away, and an army of 100 or so terns took off to make sure it was redirected,” Peterson said.

Individual chicks are numbered, but never named, out of superstition.

“It’s easy to become attached to particular tern families at that intimate, personal level,” Hall said.

Staffers also destroy the eggs laid by gulls to protect the puffins and terns from a recolonization. As many as 20 nests are destroyed every year. The alternative is visible just a few miles away on Western Egg Rock, an Audubon property where no restoration work has been done.

“[Large] gulls can change the balance really quickly,” Hall said.

The daily machinations of the tern families and the romancing puffins, the laughing gulls chasing lobster boats to snatch bait, and the great black-back gulls stealing an occasional egg, are endlessly entertaining for Peterson and her fellow researchers, stationed on the rock all summer long.

“There’s this crazy soap opera going on,” Peterson said.

Maine’s Backyard

A slow-moving puffin cruise rounds the island and dozens of binoculars are raised in unison, just in time to see Kress draw a flock of scolding terns as he picks his way over to a bird blind. More than 4,000 people took boat tours around Eastern Egg Rock last year and every one has a better understanding of seabirds, Kress said.

“It’s important for people who are living in Maine to know that this is part of their backyard,” he said. “If you just see [puffins] on T-shirts, how do you really know what they do, or look like?”

The puffins are ambassadors for their kind, irresistibly cute birds that capture the public’s attention. Kress wants to use that goodwill to build interest in seabird restoration and protection.

Audubon has a live bird camera on the island which is linked to a Web site where visitors can hear tern calls or see puffins billing.

Also, Kress hopes to open by next summer a Maine Seabird Center on Route 1, where tourists can learn about nesting colonies and the effort required to protect them. Perhaps a bird blind could be constructed, where projected images and recorded sound would give visitors a sense of the manic life on Eastern Egg.

“My favorite view in the world is right in the middle of all this teeming life,” Kress said. The center would be “a way to share this energy.”

Experiencing a world that wouldn’t exist if not for seabird restoration just might cut through the prevailing cynicism about the state of the natural world, he said.

“It’s not just seeing a cute little puffin, but knowing that people can make a difference,” he said. “There’s hope there.”