PUFFINSTUFF Biologists endure isolation, noise and dive-bombing by the locals to preserve a population of curious little seabirds on Eastern Egg Rock

A puffin hops up onto a rock, notices another puffin standing on one leg nearby, and waddles over to join him. The fact that the one-legged bird is a wooden decoy doesn’t seem to matter. Puffins love company.

Stephen Kress smiles as he watches from a blind about 20 yards away. The deception is one of the techniques he used to lure the colorful seabirds back to this rocky island.

“I used an old hunter’s trick, something that hadn’t been done with seabirds before,” whispers Kress, director of the National Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Program.

Puffins, seabirds that resemble half-pint penguins except that they can fly, were decimated in the late 1880s by hunters for their meat and feathers in Maine. By 1901, Maine had just one pair of puffins, on Matinicus Rock, researchers said.

Though plentiful elsewhere, Kress three decades ago set about bringing them back to Maine’s islands on the southern end of their range.

In 1973, with backing from the National Audubon Society and help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, Kress began transplanting 2-week-old puffin chicks from Great Island off Newfoundland, 1,000 miles to the northeast, to Eastern Egg Rock. The first returning bird came in 1977. Four years later, the first breeding pair was spied on the island.

These days there are 90 nesting pairs on Eastern Egg. All told, there are more than 700 nesting pairs on four Maine islands, Kress said.

With seemingly daily stories of global warming and vanishing species, the restoration of puffins in the Gulf of Maine represents an environmental success story.

Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless, 7-acre island, now serves as a breeding ground for 6,000 surface-nesting birds. Along with puffins, there are three species of terns, along with guillemots, laughing gulls, eider ducks and Leach’s storm-petrels.

Each summer, about five biologists move onto the island to oversee the project and to protect the seabirds. Two supervisors spend the whole summer on this rocky outpost. They are joined by rotating shifts of interns and volunteers.

It’s necessary to have a human presence on these islands to scare away the large great black-backed and herring gulls.

The large gulls – black backs have a 51/2-foot wingspan – rob nests and devour chicks. Earlier this summer, heavy fog kept the volunteers from Seal Island, another island where puffins raise their young. Over a five-day period, the sea gulls managed to destroy eggs laid from 2,000 pairs of terns, Kress said.

Even though they’re here to protect vulnerable seabirds, the biologists are regularly assaulted by the birds.

Dive-bombing adult terns, screaming “kik-kik-kik” as they swoop down, peck at the biologists’ and volunteers’ heads. Even worse are the laughing gulls” that take to the air by the hundreds. “The laughing gulls will defecate on you,” said Jeff Kimmons, a co-supervisor. “Our hats, backpacks, shoes, shirts are pretty well covered in poop.”

The noisy birds also create a relentless cacophony of screeches and flapping wings that continues 24 hours a day, making it hard for newcomers to the island to sleep.

After emerging from tents underneath poop-stained tarps each morning, the bleary-eyed biologists and volunteers grab a meal in a 12-by-12 cabin dubbed the Egg Rock Hilton and then begin the daily task of recording data on the seabirds.

Each pair raises one chick in burrows under big boulders like the ones on Egg Rock. The parents take turns feeding the chick hake or butterfish, small, silvery fish.

Puffins are often confused with penguins, with whom they share several look-alike similarities. They have similar colors, and both swim under water using their wings as paddles. But they are not related and live at opposite polar ends of the world.

The islands where the puffins raise their chicks are off-limits to the public, but several boat tours take nature lovers on cruises that circle puffin islands. Audubon supplies narrators for many of the cruises.

Kress’ hope these days is to build a caring human population.

Last year Audubon opened a Project Puffin visitor center in Rockland, drawing 10,000 people. In addition to boat tours, Project Puffin operates Internet cameras that show puffins inside burrows – and above ground – until the chicks leave by Labor Day.

“Tax dollars did not bring the birds back. These birds are here basically by the grace of caring people,” he said.

The project is open-ended.

Even though it has been a success, the puffins, including one that has been coming back to Eastern Egg Rock for 30 years, cannot survive on their own. If the volunteers left, the puffins would be wiped out once again.

“Sometimes people say, ‘How long are you going to have to do this?”‘ Kress said. “In this project we don’t see an end.”

A common tern protests as Charlie Governali prepares to band a chick on Eastern Egg Rock. Governali, a Project Puffin volunteer from Cape Elizabeth, stuffs cardboard under his cap for protection from dive-bombing terns.