Project Puffin

Puffins are very sociable birds and that is one trait that is being used to lure them back to the rocky islands around Maine. Puffins look like small penguins with highly colourful beaks, except that they can fly, unlike penguins.

They were hunted for meat and their feathers along the Maine coast till only one pair remained in 1901. Then in the early 1970s Stephen Kress, director of the National Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Programme, decided to take hand. He brought two-week-old chicks from an island off Newfoundland to Easter Egg Rock and other islands off Maine and used wooden decoys to keep them there.

He used an old hunter’s trick, something that hadn’t been done with seabirds before. Now three decades later, Easter Egg Rock hosts more than 90 nesting pairs, while four other islands together have more than 700 nesting pairs.

Apart from the puffins, Easter Egg Rock is the breeding ground for species like guillemots, gulls, eider ducks Leach’s storm petrels and terns. Biologists live on the island during the summer to protect the seabirds from other predatory birds like great black-backed gulls and herring gulls, which tend to plunder the nests and eat the chicks.

While the breeding grounds are not open to the public, there are boat trips for nature lovers. There is also a Project Puffin centre in the Rockland that shows how the puffins live.

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