Why the Puffins Came Back to Egg Rock

By Jack Myers • Senior Science Editor

	Puffins had not lived on the island of Egg Rock for more than one hundred years. People trapped them and took their eggs until the birds were gone. A group of scientists and students brought puffin chicks to the island to start a new colony.

After a hundred-year absence, puffins are nesting again on Egg Rock.

The people who brought them back were led by Dr. Stephen Kress. He is an ornithologist, a scientist who studies birds. Twenty-five years ago he came to the Audubon camp on the Maine seacoast. In studying past records, he found that several kinds of seabirds had once nested on islands off the coast but were no longer there.

There had been a big colony of puffins nesting on a little island called Egg Rock. About a hundred years ago people came to the island to take puffin eggs and trap the birds for their meat and feathers. Finally, the colony was destroyed, and the puffins never came back.

Kress studied up and learned a lot about puffins. They spend most of their lives at sea but do their nesting on islands scattered around the northern oceans. They need islands where they can find covered places for nests and where there are no rats or other predators. They are very social birds and like to live together in colonies. And they almost always return to nest on the same island on which they grew up.

	They built nests for the birds, fed them, and cared for them. The birds grew and flew off to spend their first few years at sea.

Egg Rock looked like a great place for puffins. But how do you get a colony started if the birds always want to go back to the place where they grew up? Kress worked out a plan. It would take a lot of time and work.

First he got help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, who agreed to collect just-hatched puffin chicks from one of their big colonies.

The project started in the early 1970s, when six chicks were taken from a Canadian island to Egg Rock. Students served as assistants on the project and as parents for the chicks. They built nests out of blocks of sod, and they hand-fed small fish to the chicks three times a day.

After learning how to be puffin parents, the students began bringing up puffin chicks in greater numbers. Over the next seven years, a total of 774 chicks were brought to Egg Rock. The bringing-up part was successful. Most of the chicks grew up and were able to fly away when they were about seven weeks old. They had colored plastic leg bands to tell who they were.

	The scientists and students knew puffins like to live in groups. To get the birds to come back to Egg Rock, they set up wooden decoys. In this picture, only the bird with the colored band on its leg is real.

Puffins spend their first two or three years at sea, often resting on the water like ducks. So the first of them were due back at Egg Rock in 1977. Would they come? And if they came, would they stay? Puffins have a strong need for togetherness. They don’t like to be loners. So there was a big worry whether they would stay. Kress and his helpers had decoys carved, hand painted, and set out on rock ledges. The decoys would make returning birds think they were joining a whole colony.

The first returning puffin was seen in June 1977, and was identified by its colored leg band. Others followed. But there was still one more worry. Even after returning, puffins cruise around and check out other islands for several summers. They do not mate and breed until they are about five years old. Would some of them nest on Egg Rock?

The next big event came in 1981, when one of the assistants spotted a puffin with some fish in its beak flying to Egg Rock. It scrambled across the rocks and delivered the fish to its nest.

	Now puffins are again nesting on Egg Rock and catching small fish to feed their chicks.

That meant success. After almost a hundred years, puffins were breeding again at Egg Rock. Five pairs nested there in 1981. In 1994 fifteen nesting pairs made a stable, year-after-year colony.

Just to make sure it could be done again, Kress repeated the same process for a larger island, Seal Island. Over a six-year period, 950 puffin chicks were transplanted there. Now 152 of them have lived through their time at sea and have been sighted in the neighborhood. In 1994 nineteen breeding pairs were nesting on Seal Island.

Now that there are more colonies on different islands, it is less likely that puffins of the Maine seacoast can be wiped out by a disaster such as an oil spill. Stephen Kress and the 150 students who worked with him have made the Maine islands a safer place for puffins.