EASTERN EGG ROCK, Maine (AP) — It doesn’t seem to matter to one puffin waddling over to join another of the birds that his chosen companion is a one-legged, wooden decoy. Puffins love company.
The deception is one of the techniques that Stephen Kress has used to lure the colorful birds back to this rocky island.
“I used an old hunter’s trick, something that hadn’t been done with seabirds before,” Mr. Kress, director of the National Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Program, whispers as he watches from about 20 yards away.
Puffins, which resemble small penguins except that they can fly, were heavily hunted along the Maine coast for their meat and feathers, and by 1901 only one pair remained, researchers said.
They remained plentiful elsewhere, however, and Mr. Kress set out three decades ago to bring them back to Maine’s islands.
In 1973, with backing from the National Audubon Society and help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, Mr. Kress began transplanting 2-week-old puffin chicks from Great Island off Newfoundland, 1,000 miles to the northeast.
These days there are 90 nesting pairs on Eastern Egg, among more than 700 nesting pairs on four Maine islands, he said.
Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless, seven-acre island, is a breeding ground for 6,000 surface-nesting birds: puffins, guillemots, laughing gulls, eider ducks, Leach’s storm petrels and three species of terns.
Each summer, biologists move onto the island to oversee the project and to protect the seabirds. Two supervisors spend the whole summer on the rocky outpost, joined by rotating shifts of interns and volunteers.
A human presence is necessary to scare away predators such as great black-backed gulls and herring gulls. The large gulls rob nests and eat chicks. Earlier this summer, when five days of fog kept the volunteers away from Seal Island, another puffin nesting spot, the gulls destroyed eggs laid by 2,000 pairs of terns, Mr. Kress said.
The biologists are repaid for their protection by regular bird assaults. Dive-bombing terns swoop down to peck at their guardians’ heads.
Even worse are laughing gulls that take to the air by the hundreds. “Our hats, backpacks, shoes, shirts are pretty well covered in poop,” said Jeff Kimmons, a co-supervisor.
The breeding grounds are off-limits to the public, but several boat tours take nature lovers on cruises that circle the islands.
Last year, Audubon opened a Project Puffin visitor center in Rockland, drawing about 10,000 people. Besides boat tours, Project Puffin operates Internet cameras (www.projectpuffin.org) that show the birds inside and out of their burrows.
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