There is no historical record of puffins ever having bred on that island. The presence of puffins on Petit Manan was a happy accident. What became known as Project Puffin was the world’s first restoration of a seabird to an island where humans had killed it off.Ī common tern brings a large juvenile herring to its chick. They began breeding in 1981 and today there are more than 1,300 pairs of puffins across several islands, mostly across Eastern Egg Rock, Seal Island and Matinicus Rock. Kress gambled that when the chicks became adults, they would pick Eastern Egg Rock over Newfoundland as home. Puffins stay out to sea for two or three years until breeding instincts kick in. They hand raised them on Eastern Egg Rock until they fledged out to sea. Beginning in 1973, he and colleagues began bringing down hundreds of 10-day-old puffin chicks from Newfoundland. Starting with Eastern Egg Rock, a small, seven-acre island six and a half miles off Pemaquid Point, Kress worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to control voracious gull populations that would have made restoration impossible. In the early 1970s, Steve Kress, a young bird instructor at National Audubon’s Hog Island summer camp, ran across a 1949 book that said puffins bred in “considerable numbers” off multiple Maine islands in the 19 th century. By 1902, only a single pair of puffins clung to existence on Matinicus Rock, an island 25 miles out to sea from Rockland, the nearest major town on the mainland. The bird was slaughtered for its meat and eggs by coastal communities in Maine in the late 19 th century. Petit Manan is important because it represents a unique and encouraging lesson in puffin restoration. But there are puffins on so few islands, every island we can attract them to feels important.”Ī puffin brings its chicks fish on Maine's Petit Manan Island. Puffins want to be here, but the habitat is not great. “Initially, I had a philosophical debate about whether to build burrows and intervene on the puffins’ behalf. Welch opened a couple and both times pulled out plump chicks that were about ready to fledge. They had removable covers for researchers to inspect the health of puffin chicks. It was one of four puffin “condos,” rows of compartments on top of the soil with burrow openings lined were corrugated pipe dug underneath. Among the most impressive was the most obvious. Today, a third of burrows on Petit Manan are artificial. As we continue to tweak our designs, we get to a more natural experience for the birds.” “Initially, they thought I was a weirdo, but it’s a small Home Depot so the people got to know me and say, ‘She’s OK, she’s just designing tern traps.’ I keep believing in the idea of ‘if we build it, they will come.’ You try to be creative and keep improving the burrows, such as digging deeper in the soil to keep the birds cooler. “I go to Home Depot with my calipers and sit on the floor and measure materials to design puffin burrows and tern traps,” Welch said. Anticipating rising seas and longer reaches of reaches of tides and waves driven by storms, she has been moving artificial burrows higher up the island, so high that some puffins are nesting amid the twisted ruins of dwellings for lightkeepers.

She covers them up with rocks and soil to make them look as natural as possible. She has tried burying culvert pipe and plastic tote buckets and tunneling pathways through sod for the birds to get up and into her contraptions.

She has tried flowerpots and corrugated pipe for septic systems. She and her colleagues have tried bricks and chimney liners. Given the fragility of puffin burrows and nature’s increasing fury, Welch 55, and a 25-year veteran of the the Maine Coastal Islands refuge, has long schemed of ways to build artificial burrows with every material possible to give puffins an inviting place to nest.

Biologist Linda Welch places a puffin back inside one of the “condos” she built to promote successful breeding.

Puffin stuff