A Crazy Idea to Bring Back Atlantic Puffins Is a Success
Ornithologist Steve Kress’s once-controversial methods are the gold standard for saving seabirds around the world.
BY BRUCE BARCOTT
Published: September-October 2013
Every visit to Eastern Egg Rock Island, six miles off the coast of Maine, is like coming home for Steve Kress, a soft-spoken man of 67. Forty years ago, as a young Audubon bird life instructor, he hatched the idea of reviving the Atlantic puffin colonies that flourished on this seven-acre island before hunters wiped them out in the 1880s. Years of trial and error ultimately led to the reestablishment of puffins—now 2,000 strong on three protected islands, including Egg Rock—and to the creation of Project Puffin, an Audubon program that today manages North Atlantic breeding colonies of American oystercatchers, Arctic terns, and 14 other seabird species, on seven Maine islands.
Maine gave birth to Kress’s ideas, but during the past 30 years the discoveries and techniques pioneered by Project Puffin have driven a new science of seabird restoration and conservation. In that time nearly 60 projects worldwide have used Kress’s “social attraction” techniques to move dozens of seabird populations to safer nesting grounds (see "The Power of Attraction," below). Decoys simulating specific species and amplified birdcalls signal that the new location is desirable and secure. Moving very young chicks from an old colony to a new one can help the birds imprint, encouraging their return to the safer island when it’s time to come in from sea and establish their own broods. . . .
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