Great news!  Eastern Egg Rock, in Maine’s Muscongus Bay, is once again home to nesting puffins.  The funny-looking, penguin-like birds who once lived there in large numbers, had been all but wiped out by the early 1900s.  Prized for their meat, eggs, and feathers, they had been hunted so extensively that they disappeared from the eastern United States.

     Enter Steve Kress, an Audubon scientist.  In 1973 he launched Project Puffin, the world’s first seabird colony restoration project.  For 13 years, Kress and his team transplanted almost 1,000 young puffins from Newfoundland’s abundant population to Eastern Egg Rock, in hopes that the birds would thrive and establish a colony there, where their ancestors had once lived.

     Kress and his crew helped the puffin chicks survive by digging burrows for them on the island and by bringing them fish to eat.  Once the first group of chicks matured and left the island, Kress waited excitedly.  Knowing that puffins typically return to nest where they spent their ‘childhood,’ he hoped that these resettled chicks would come back to Eastern Egg Rock when it was time for them to nest.  And they did!

     Slowly, the colony took hold, and today, according to the National Audubon Society, is growing rapidly.  Last summer there was a record 101 pairs of nesting puffins on Eastern Egg Rock!  It looks like there will be more next year!–April Moore

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under Good news for Mother Earth!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.