After 40 years, many of Maine’s puffins still must nest among live explosives left over from a time when the Navy used the same area as a practice bombing range. A cleanup is long overdue.

The December-January issue of Working Waterfront, in a rundown on the situation on Seal Island 22 miles off the coast in Penobscot Bay, recalls that a brush fire once touched off a series of explosions, supposedly from the Navy ordnance. Fishermen and sailors are warned about live bombs lying around on the rocky 65-acre island and in nearby waters. Visitors from the Audubon Society, state wildlife researchers and the Army Corps of Engineers must step carefully to avoid touching off a blast or disturbing the puffins in their underground burrows.

The Audubon people have set television cameras to provide live, long-distance, online viewing by computer (now closed for the winter). The researchers conduct bird censuses and counted 230 nesting pairs this year. And parties from the corps of engineers, hampered by shortage of funds, keep planning how to remove the live bombs and, so far, fending off requests that they clean up the surrounding nearby ocean bottom as well. (The Navy, which transferred the island to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1972, may still have some liability for cleanup costs, since it put the explosives there from the 1940s to the 1960s.)

Maine’s puffins’ colorful beaks and odd habits draw much human attention. They dive from the surface or the air, flutter their wings to swim underwater, and either swallow small fishes and shellfish or carry huge mouthfuls in their serrated beaks back to feed their chicks.

But they have had their ups and downs. Long ago, visiting fishermen used their nets to harvest the birds and are said to have wiped out the colony by 1887. Gulls had long since taken over, but federal specialists used decoys and noisy tape recordings to drive them away and then helped terns return to the island. The National Audubon Society brought 950 puffin chicks from Newfoundland to Seal Island in the 1980s, and they began breeding there.

Another breeding spot with a similar name, Machias Seal Island, near the Canadian border in the Gulf of Maine, had at least 3,500 pairs of Atlantic puffins in 2004. Bad weather, gull attacks and a lack of herring to feed the chicks combined to prevent nesting in 2007. With careful management, the birds should return next spring.

The project manager for the Seal Island in Penobscot Bay, Iver McLeod of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, keeps track of the situation and hopes for a report by 2009 from a corps contractor who has been studying how to remove the ordnance and how much it will cost. He says the project is low on the corps’ priority list.

The whole thing moves slowly, but, with luck, the public can resume its TV viewing of the puffins next summer.