Decades of hard work restored Atlantic puffins and other seabirds to rocky islands in the gulf, but now puffins face threats from climate change
Island. Puffins had been gone from these islands since the late 1800s, targeted by hunters and egg collectors. The restoration effort began in the early 1970s with the transfer of a few chicks from Newfoundland to Eastern Egg Rock. Today, the seven-acre island is home to roughly 180 breeding pairs.
Butterfish pose a problem when puffin parents bring them to their chicks, Lyons explained, because they’re deep-bodied, and the chicks have a hard time swallowing them. Nesting burrows can be littered with uneaten fish and chicks can sometimes starve, even though their parents have brought them plenty to eat. Other available fish, such as rough scad, “don’t have that issue of shape,” Lyons said, “but they are not particularly nutritious—their caloric density is not very high.
In June 1977 Kress spotted an adult puffin on the island; it was one of his, identifiable by a band on its leg. But it was not until 1981, eight years after Project Puffin began, that a mature puffin with a fish in its bill disappeared into crevices in the rocks—a sure sign that the first puffin born on Eastern Egg Rock since 1885 was feeding a chick in a nesting burrow.
These human researchers work nine hours a day—or more during “peak hatch” in late June— engaged in a variety of duties, from conducting island-wide nest censuses of birds and recording the kinds of food adult puffins bring to their chicks to controlling invasive red raspberry and other vegetation that hinders nesting by terns and petrels and protecting puffins from predatory gulls. They trap and attach identification bands to the legs of adult puffins.
For the researchers, combating gulls is an unavoidable and unwelcome job. One way they do it is by oiling gull eggs, Garlick-Ott said. Oil prevents the exchange of air into and out of the egg by blocking pores in the egg’s shell, essentially asphyxiating the embryo. Sometimes, she said, they also shoot gulls.
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