By Liz Cunningham
Photo Banner Credit: Walker Golder
Project Puffin’s pioneering methods inspire seabird colony restoration projects around the world.
Liz Cunningham’s Ocean Hope Chronicles are dedicated to inspiring individuals who are making a difference to protect the life of the seas
“Initially it was all about hands-off. Now it is all about hands-on.” Project Puffin’s founder, Steve Kress is talking about the shift in seabird conservation methods. When Kress and his colleagues undertook the challenge to restore a puffin colony on a windswept island off the coast of Maine, it was a bold, unprecedented venture. At the time the attitude toward areas where a species had been wiped out was hands-off. “Let nature run its course” was the approach. Kress’s inspiration to restore a seabird colony—to be an active steward—was a big step into uncharted territory. Now, forty years later, such hands-on stewardship has become instrumental to seabird conservation.
In 1970, as a graduate student and instructor at the Audubon Hog Island Camp in Muscongus Bay, Kress learned that puffins had flourished on a nearby island, Eastern Egg Rock, until the 1880s. Hunted for food and decorative feathers, the puffin colony had been extinguished. In his book, Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock, which he co-authored with Derrick Jackson, Kress recalls his sadness when discovering that Eastern Egg Rock once flourished with puffins, but was bereft of them. Amidst that sadness, another emotion surfaced: intense curiosity. Kress asked himself, “What if there was a way to bring the puffins back?”
That was the beginning of Project Puffin which re-introduced puffins to Eastern Egg Rock and developed techniques which have inspired and informed seabird colony restorations around the world. On Eastern Egg Rock the puffin population has grown to over 150 pairs of puffins that return every year to nest. At a sister restoration project on the Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge which was started later, there are over 500 pairs of puffins.
One of the pioneering techniques is what is now known as a social attraction. Kress had the idea to attract puffins back to the island using decoys, which were long used by hunters. The decoys lured puffins to the remote island and once the puffins arrived, they rediscovered it as a habitat. Tern decoys were later used to re-establish a tern colony, as puffins often nested under the protective umbrella of terns, who are notorious for ferociously protecting their kin from eagles and gulls and other predators. In the process, terns protect the nests of other bird species.
Project Puffin developed other social attraction techniques, such as the use of mirrors and audio playback of bird calls to attract birds. But the first puffins on Egg Rock Island arrived by the method called chick translocation, the transfer of chicks from one colony to a restoration colony with the hope that they would return to that new colony. The chicks came from a colony in Newfoundland (Kress smiles when he recounts that puffins routinely fly back and forth over the border between Canada and Maine, but the chicks required thirteen separate transit permits). The staff crafted burrows in which the chicks, only days old, were hand-fed vitamin-fortified fish. Just before they were ready to fledge—to leave their nest—small bands were placed on the chick’s legs, so they could be recognized if they returned. The chicks stepped out of their nests and flew off into the sea.
Metamorphoses take time and come in stages. After several years some of those banded chicks began to return to the island. Then researchers thought they might have seen courtship behavior. A puffin was spotted with some blades of grass in its bill. Were they building a nest? One day, Evie Weinstein, a research assistant, was collecting seawater to wash dishes when a puffin flew by her, its beak bulging with fish. It had returned from foraging in the open ocean with food for its chick. Eight years after the first chicks arrived, puffins had begun to nest again on Eastern Egg Rock.
That question “What can one person or one group of people do?” is now more daunting than ever. Project Puffin’s work is a reminder that individual successes can have vast impacts through their ripple effects, the replication of their methods. Kress would never have imagined the influence that Project Puffin has had. A 2021 study lists projects for more than 130 seabird species (40% of all seabird species) in more than 800 projects in 40 countries which use Project Puffin’s techniques.
Project Puffin has also had an influence through the interns and researchers who have come every summer for decades. Kress explained that for many interns being on Eastern Egg Rock is a chance to witness that positive change with their own eyes. “They see that if people hadn’t believed in the possibility, the puffins wouldn’t even be there,” Kress told me. “They wouldn’t have had a chance.”
Many of the interns and visiting researchers have started their own restoration projects. Lu Yiwei and Fan Zhongyong from the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History in China used social attraction to create a safe nesting colony on a protected Chinese island for the critically-endangered Chinese Crested Tern. María Félix Lizarraga with Conservación de Islas based in México, along with sixteen other researchers created a seabird sanctuary system modeled after Project Puffin’s colonies. After more than a decade of using social attraction methods, there are fourteen restored Mexican islands that include forty-six colonies that are home to eighteen seabird species. In a similar way, María José Vilches Villa of Island Conservation in Peru is using social attraction to restore the Peruvian Diving Petrels to Chañaral Island where about 100,000 once thrived before introduced mammals eliminated this colony.
This past summer over 20,000 people came out on boats to see the puffins and learn more about them from the education staff. In learning about puffins, they also learn about the threats to our oceans. The life cycle of a puffin is a window into what is happening to our seas. Global seabird populations are down 70% since 1950—for every ten seabirds you might have seen in 1950, now you would only see only three. The litany of threats that seabirds experience—climate change, fisheries declines, entanglement in fishing gear, habitat disruption, introduced predators, plastic ingestion, pollution—are a measure of the extreme damage being done to the ocean. In especially warm years, for instance, warming seas wreak havoc with puffins’ ability to feed their chicks, because the small fish necessary for feeding chicks move to cooler waters, too far away from the puffin colonies or so deep that the puffins can’t reach them on foraging dives.
“Getting people connected to seabirds is so important because it connects them to the oceans,” Kress explained to me. “Seabirds are visible to people. If we can connect people to birds and help them realize that they are sentinels of ocean change, that’s key.”
Don Lyons, Project Puffin’s Director of Conservation Science, listened intently while Kress spoke and then chimed in. “I’ll add that they have amazing intrinsic value. To lose them would be a huge loss to us all.”
“We should not lose any of them,” Kress added. “We should be stewards of every species and pass them on to the next generation. Because the next generation may not have the chance to do that.”
Lyons used the term intrinsic value. It’s a dry term, but rich with meaning: life matters. Our lives matter, the lives of all the creatures we share this earth with the matter. Love of a specific creature awakens us to their value and inspires us to be good stewards of their lives and the world they need to survive.
It was eight years before the first puffin chick returned to Eastern Egg Rock to nest. Until that moment all the painstaking work had not yet added up, but during that time the biologists continued their work, despite the uncertainty. “I choose hope over despair because that’s a path forward,” Lyons told me when I asked him what kept him resilient. “Despairing about the fate of seabirds and the natural world broadly won’t save it. I think part of being present is deciding to make a difference and buoying your spirits as needed to do that.”
About Liz Cunningham
Liz Cunningham is the author of the award-winning Ocean Country: One Woman’s Voyage from Peril to Hope in Her Quest to Save the Seas, with a foreword by Carl Safina. Her mission is to be a voice for the life of the seas and the people who are working to save it, to inspire and empower others to join these efforts and forge a sustainable future. She writes about ocean conservation and the traits we need to be effective stewards of our seas and our planet, among them courage, the power of the passion for rescue, and our capacity to work together to implement solutions. Learn more about her work at LizCunningham.net
This piece was prepared online by Panuruji Kenta, Publisher, SEVENSEAS Media