How Newfoundland puffins helped save Maine’s bird population

The Atlantic puffin population in Maine is fairly stable today. But as late as the 1970s, hunting had made the seabird almost non-existent in the state.

At the time, only 70 pairs lived on Matinicus Rock, about 25 miles off the coast of Maine.

“They used to breed on at least five other islands in Maine, but they hadn’t recolonized any of those islands alone in about 100 years,” said Steve Kress, former executive director of the Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute.

Kress, who first encountered the seabirds on Machias Seal Island in New Brunswick, teamed up with the nonprofit National Audubon Society to launch Project Puffin on July 4, 1973 — just over 50 years ago.

Over the next decade and a half, they transported nearly 2,000 puffin chicks from Newfoundland to two historic Maine breeding grounds: Eastern Egg Rock Island and Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge.

“The idea was to hope that young puffins could be moved when they were just a few days old and transferred from a large colony to a historic site,” Kress said. The current guest host Robyn Bresnahan.

WATCH: Atlantic puffins lounging in Maine

50 years later, on the anniversary of the project, their efforts are paying off. Maine’s puffin population has increased tenfold since 1973 — and they’re even colonizing new parts of the state, according to Don Lyons, director of conservation science at Audubon’s Seabird Institute.

“They’re well on their way through the breeding season,” he told Bresnahan. “They hatched eggs and many hatched those eggs into the young chicks.”

Act on a hunch

When Kress started the project, he said there were “significant gaps” in the scientific knowledge of puffins, such as the age at which they breed.

What was known was that puffins could remember their nesting site – and often returned there when they were old enough to breed.

That got Kress thinking: If puffin chicks were transported from Newfoundland to Maine, would they remember the places in Maine where they were deposited as their new breeding grounds?

“That was just a hunch…but I thought it was worth a try,” he said.

Kress was impressed when he first saw the puffin population in Canada.

“For someone who was just amazed to see even a single puffin, to go to Newfoundland where there were hundreds of thousands of puffins in colonies was just amazing,” he said.

But the transportation involved a lot of trial and error.

“We had to figure out every step because no one had started a puffin colony before — or any sort of seabird colony,” he said.

Kress said they were initially shipped in hollow juice cans in wooden boxes, with burlap doors to give them as much ventilation as possible. Each round, up to 200 chicks were flown to Maine by private jet.

The next step was to build burrows for the puffins to breed. It took several trials, but by the third year of the project, “we came up with an excellent burrow — built of sod, L-shaped like a natural burrow,” he said.

Once that was done, the waiting began. Within four years, the first puffin returned to the relocation area. The first bird that carried fish was spotted in 1981, “which meant we had a chick,” Kress said.

Social attraction

At one point, Kress became concerned about the lack of puffins returning to the relocation area. So to counter this, Kress pioneered a new protection strategy using social attraction – based on the idea that puffins prefer to nest in groups.

“Maybe these puffins were just nervous about coming ashore,” he said. “Maybe they were flying nearby but didn’t see any other puffins, [so] they would just venture into other colonies of puffins.”

To encourage puffin migration to the Maine release sites, Kress and his crew set up two types of decoys designed to look like puffins.

The idea was that if a passing puffin ready to nest saw the decoys, they would nest more comfortably at the release sites.

Kress’s hunch was correct, and within a few years there were signs that birds were nesting in the new colony of puffins.

Heroes of conservation

Biologist Ian Jones says seabirds are among the world’s most endangered species, so conservation efforts like Project Puffin are “fabulously important” to their survival and to general scientific knowledge.

“If there was a Nobel Prize in bird conservation or even conservation, Steve would be a candidate I would nominate,” the Memorial University of Newfoundland professor told Bresnahan.

Despite their growth, Jones said rising temperatures in the eastern Atlantic, “ie around the British Isles, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland,” could threaten puffin populations within 50 years.

“There are definitely some very disturbing signs that the water is just getting too hot to support puffin prey and puffin populations,” he said.

Still, he said Atlantic puffins are doing relatively well compared to other seabird species, “so that’s cause for hope.”

Meanwhile, Audubon continues to monitor Maine’s puffin population, using several publicly broadcast cameras to study and learn from their habits.

The decoys are also still used on the islands today, and Lyons said the social attraction conservation technique has been adapted by other seabird conservation efforts around the world.

“A team of us, Steve and I with a bunch of collaborators, recently gathered all the projects we can learn from around the world,” he said.

“It’s more than 800 efforts that have now used these techniques of translocation and social attraction, and they’ve benefited about a third of the world’s seabird species.”