Puffins: If You're Gonna Play God...

When you really think about it, Newfoundland, Canada's - "Great Island", one of the largest puffin colonies in the world, could have never imagined what the visitors who went up there in the summer of 1973 would bring back to Maine, United States, in soup cans, of all things. It was an idea so preposterous that it had been dismissed summarily, told it would not work, not ever - never never, and the leader of the team had been accused of 'playing God'.

But the three visitors, especially their leader, believed otherwise. Mankind had 'played Devil' long enough, for a couple of centuries at least, so why not 'play God' for a change instead?

The intrepid group, carried the special suitcases, in which were nestled the very special soup cans, on a mysterious journey - over land and water, through customs, Canada, and into the northeastern United States. The cargo was precious and every minute mattered.

They headed toward an island in the eastern part of Maine called "Easter Egg Rock" and in a man-made burrow, gently and carefully deposited the contents of one soup can. Then they repeated this maneuver hundreds of times. Every soup can was 'emptied' - so to speak - in a man-made burrow created specially for this purpose: To hold a puffling.

For each soup can contained a "puffling".

The puffin chicks had been collected by hand, by the team, after suffering (what we can only imagine) dozens of sharp, swift, severe nips from annoyed puffin parents. Puffins live in deep burrows and there is no way to collect a chick except to put one's hand in, without knowing if it is going to come upon a furry little puffling or a supremely irritated and protective parent.

Over the next couple of weeks, the team fed the puffin chicks twice daily, with a special diet of sandeels (and more) and nurtured the pufflings the way their parents would have (almost). After a few weeks, all the puffins that survived their perilous journey and rugged transplant (I am happy to say, nearly all chicks did) fledged, i.e., flew out of the burrow and went to sea.

Now the team waited.

The hard part began.

What Stephen Kress (who ultimately went on become the VP of Bird Conservation, National Audobon Society), Robert Noyce (who had co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore a few years earlier in 1968 and who gave Silicon Valley its name), and Kathleen Blanchard wanted to do was bring puffins to back Easter Egg Rock. Stephen Kress's plan was to see if 'transplanting' the chicks from Newfoundland, Great Island, to Easter Egg Rock, Maine would work.

Stephen Kress was so in love with nature that as an eighteen-year-old, he signed up to wash dishes for a National Audobon Society camp in Connecticut, one summer. Robert Noyce was just as much of an interesting character. In his junior year, Noyce got into trouble for stealing a 25-pound pig from the Grinnell mayor's farm and roasting it for a luau. The annoyed mayor wrote to his parents - “In the agricultural state of Iowa, stealing a domestic animal is a felony which carries a minimum penalty of a year in prison and a fine of one dollar...” Noyce would have been expelled, if his teachers hadn't worked out a compromise. Noyce was suspended for a semester instead, and returned to school, graduated with a B.A. in Physics and in Math, with an honor from his classmates that stated - "the senior man who earned the best grades with the least amount of work".

So, anyway... back to the puffins.

Over the years, hunting had reduced the puffin population of Maine to practically zero. In 1901, only **one** single pair of Atlantic puffins was known to nest in the United States, on an island called Matinicus Rock, about 20 miles from the Maine coast.

That was it. One pair.

Just one.

What Stephen Kress was trying to do was rectify the damage. He wanted to bring back the puffins to Maine and believed transplanting might just work, even though no one else did.

Puffins are famously social birds, who return to the island where they were hatched to breed again. They do not breed until they are 3-4 years old, so the team knew they had a long wait. They would have to wait at least 4 years or more before they could find out if what they had tried had succeeded or not. It was something no one had tried before - would transplanted puffins consider their 'new' home as their real home? Would they come back there to breed? Would Kress and his team be able to bring the puffins back to Maine in United States? If the puffins came back to Maine, to breed, they had accepted Easter Egg Rock as their 'home'.

But would they?

So, the team waited. Waited. Waited. Waited.

While they waited they continued to work in strange, if logical, ways. Kress hired a wood carver named Donald O'Brien to create puffin carvings, that is, 'decoys', which he then placed on the island to trick the puffins into thinking that the island was full of puffins.

Nine years after Stephen Kress brought back the first puffin chick, he wrote in his log book -

“After 100 years of absence and nine years of working toward this goal, puffins are again nesting at Eastern Egg Rock—a Fourth of July celebration I’ll never forget.”

And there you have it... what an amazing end to an amazing endeavor. Nesting again!

Today, seabirds conservation teams around the world use the techniques started by Stephen Kress and his team. According to Michelle Nijhuis, author of the immensely informative piece in the Smithsonian article where I first read this story...

"Bird decoys, recorded calls and in some cases, mirrors—so seabirds will see the movements of their own reflections and find the faux colonies more realistic—have been used to restore 49 seabird species in 14 countries, including extremely rare birds such as the tiny Chatham petrel in New Zealand and the Galápagos petrel on the Galápagos Islands..."

Which means that with more breeding colonies, set up the way Stephen Kress set up puffins, seabirds like the terns and petrels are more likely to live through disease outbreaks, oil spills, and climate change disasters. It is now a recognized technique to help birds colonize in new spots and transplant themselves to new areas. Seabirds don't like to move to new islands on their own. They don't dare to do so, for fear of safety, we can only presume. This method of colonizing birds, aids in their survival given the many threats the birds face these days.

That, however, isn't the end of the story.

There is more.

Nowadays, the puffins are themselves 'monitors' of what is going on in the ocean. Each of these puffins are tagged with geolocators that are very light so they do not drag the poor puffins down, that beam back information about where these puffins go.

According to Stephen Kress:

"... observing the puffins isn't just about maintaining puffin populations: it can also provide clues of what's happening in the water around them. Their ability (or inability) to find ample fish of the proper size and nutritional quality to raise young can help us understand how climate change and warming water affects other species and maybe even larger ecosystems. In the long run, this may even inform us about our success in mitigating the effects of climate change..."

So, there you have it. Puffins aren't simply cute. They are also ocean monitors, reporting back on the health of the ocean because they spend 2/3 of their lives in the ocean and visit places that we normally do not.

We take care of them and they return the favor (in a way).

I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I loved writing about it.

If you're interested in learning more about the puffins and Project Puffin, check here. You can also adopt a puffin or donate to them or become an intern to learn how to take care of them.

Read about Audobon Project Puffin - it is remarkable, really.

---

If you liked the story and would like to read more, please go to Contact page and subscribe!

We would also love to hear from you so email us at jrnsenn@gmail.com.