Puffin Away
Here's a rather odd story. A project has been underway since the 1970s to bring puffins back to Maine. The birds were once hunted regularly and puffins disappeared sometime around the turn of the 20th century. But there are now colonies reestablished on several islands in northern Maine.
Puffins, which resemble half-pint 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 Kress set out three decades ago to bring them back to Maine's islands, on the southern end of their range around the North Atlantic.
In 1973, with backing from the National Audubon Society and help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, 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, Kress 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 — black backs have a 5 1/2-foot wingspan — 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, Kress said.
What does not make sense here is the claim that the human presence is vital to keeping the puffins in Maine. One presumes humans were not protecting the puffins since the dawn of time, so how exactly did they survive? Don't get me wrong here, I think its a good project and it obviously is getting real results if there are 700 nesting pairs. But it seems odd that the project is interfering in the functioning of a natural ecosystem in the way they are, doesn't it? Obviously, puffins are very cute and therefore popular. But isn't being overly puffin-centric skewing the rest of the ecosystem? Just asking.
(Side note: My wife and I have placed bluebird boxes out in our yard for years now and they usually have nesting pairs every year, so we have a history of trying to save species ourselves. But we also tend to let the bluebirds alone. They are fun and interesting to watch, but they kind of have to survive on their own, don't they?)
By Anthony (Los Angeles), Thursday, 30 August , 2007 @ 12:12 pm
I think the idea is to protect them until the breeding population reaches sustainable numbers. In other words, 700 nesting pairs are great, but it may not be enough to withstand the pressure put on them by predators. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn the Puffin Project has a target number in mind, at which point protection wouldn’t be necessary.
Of course, this is all just idle speculation on my part.
By Gaius, Thursday, 30 August , 2007 @ 12:18 pm
Actually, I could understand that, but they state in the article that the protection is open-ended and will need to be kept up indefinitely.
By old_dawg, Thursday, 30 August , 2007 @ 12:43 pm
I have found that puffins taste like a cross between bald eagle and whooping crane.
By sam, Thursday, 30 August , 2007 @ 1:45 pm
All I can think of is that old anti-smoking poster that showed a red bar over a picture of the bird with the caption “No Puffin”. So maybe they taste like smoked eagle and crane.
By Bleepless, Thursday, 30 August , 2007 @ 7:07 pm
Lundy Island, a small part of Britain, declared itself to be independent and started issuing fake postage stamps denominated in puffins. Nobody took any of it seriously and the Lundyites made a couple of quid off of numismatists.