How researchers restored a thriving habitat for Atlantic puffins in Maine

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Now a look at a five-decade-long project to protect puffins. Atlantic puffins still face a precarious foothold. That's due in part to a loss of habitat and to troubles tied to warming ocean waters and climate change.

  But one longstanding effort off the coast of Maine continues to provide a crucial nesting habitat for these seabirds and a place for them to thrive.

  Science correspondent Miles O'Brien traveled to the only colony of Atlantic puffins in the U.S., part of our Tipping Point series on climate change.

• Miles O’Brien:

  It was billed as a three-hour tour, really.

  OK, so Gilligan, Skipper, Professor? No, you're professor, Professor.

  (Laughter)

• Miles O’Brien:

  That's Don Lyons, head of the Audubon Seabird Institute. Fortunately, on this day, the weather didn't start getting rough. The tiny ship wasn't tossed.

• Steve Kress, Audubon Seabird Institute:

  It isn't always like this.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Yes, I imagine. I think we lucked out, right?

  (Crosstalk)

• Miles O’Brien:

  We were joined by Steve Kress, a living legend in the world of seabirds. His claim to fame? The destination off our bow, Eastern Egg Rock, six miles southeast of New Harbor, Maine. It's the summer nesting perch for a thriving, curated colony of Atlantic puffins in all their colorful, charismatic, quirky glory.

  It's a barren speck of good news for some bird species that are struggling to survive in a fast, warming ocean. Getting to this place is a lot easier for the birds than for us.

  OK, so what's the strategy?

• Don Lyons, Audubon Seabird Institute:

  OK, so you will sit on the tube.

• Miles O’Brien:

  The fact that all of us were here is thanks to then-23-year-old Steve Kress' vision back in the 1970s. He had read that puffins thrived here, but then vanished in the late 19th century, unmercifully hunted to extirpation, locally extinct.

• Steve Kress:

  People caused them to leave. Maybe people can help bring them back. That was the notion. I had no idea that that notion was going to be my life's work.

• Miles O’Brien:

  It had never been done before, and the experts ranged from skeptical to hostile. Unburdened by conventional wisdom, he and his young idealistic team wrote their puffin playbook on the fly.

  In 1973, they began transferring chicks from Newfoundland's abundant colonies into these sod burrows, cozy homes for the month it took them to fledge.

• Steve Kress:

  And during that month our hope was that they were learning that Egg Rock was their home, and they would come back here someday rather than going back to Newfoundland, where they were collected.

• Miles O’Brien:

  To further entice them, they deployed decoys, mirrors, and amplified recordings of puffins. It still took four years for the first adult puffin to return and another four years before nesting pairs began breeding here.

  Fifty years later, hundreds of puffins take a summer break from life at sea to mate and rear their chicks on Eastern Egg. No longer any need for Canadian imports. I sat in a blind with Steve and Don, a front-row seat to a spectacular performance as puffin parents arrived with beaks full of fish for their hungry chicks.

  But each delivery came with risk. With every landing, they had to dodge their nemeses, the ever watchful laughing gulls, eager to snatch their catch before it reached the nest.

• Steve Kress:

  It just passed that rock with all the puffins on it.

• Don Lyons:

  Very likely has a chicken and burrow right here in front of us somewhere.

• Miles O’Brien:

  It seemed like a picture-perfect moment. But Don and Steve said it was actually epic.

• Don Lyons:

  This is unbelievable.

• Miles O’Brien:

  I did not expect this. I didn't expect it.

• Steve Kress:

  This is really an unusual day. Look at them all. I have never seen so many puffins on this island.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Wow.

  Better to be lucky than good, but diligence is the mother of good luck. And the birds most assuredly would not be here without the annual arrival of the puffin police headquartered at the Egg Rock Hilton, zero stars on Tripadvisor.

  Each year, young aspiring ornithologists and ecologists come here loaded for gull, hoping to ensure the puffins get the last laugh. This year, they were led by Alison Ballard.

• Alison Ballard, Audubon Seabird Institute:

  The initial idea was that one day, puffins would be able to live on this island without the need of human interaction. However, over time, that has been shown to not necessarily be the case.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Common terns offer another layer of defense. Uncommonly aggressive to any intruder, including us, they are the bodyguards of the puffin colony.

• Steve Kress:

  I was hoping that the terns alone would be enough to protect the puffins. Now we know that the terns alone aren't enough to protect the puffins. The terns and the puffins need our help.

  Take away the people, and we lose these species. We are the cause of the problem. We need to be the cause of the solution.

• Miles O’Brien:

  The solutions Kress and the Audubon team have pioneered have drawn international attention.

• Steve Kress:

  Somehow, this idea left Maine and it has been used around the world now. It has legs of its own, because it's a good idea.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Demand for the tools of the trade has prompted them to build a robust decoy production facility. They export 48 different painted plastic species worldwide and have inspired 800 seabird restoration projects globally.

• Susan Schubel, Audubon Seabird Institute:

  So this is a northern gannet. Last winter, we made 420 of these to send to Canada.

• Miles O’Brien:

  It's run by Susan Schubel, the outreach educator, although she prefers seabird celebrant.

• Susan Schubel:

  We're providing a way to help communicate where are the good places. Where have we done the work to reduce the predators? We can't necessarily control where the fish are in the ocean, but we will do our best to keep the oceans clean and healthy.

• Miles O’Brien:

  But that, of course, is a hope against hope. Humans are relentlessly ruining the oceans, and seabird populations are heading off a cliff.

• Don Lyons:

  The estimates are maybe a 70 percent decline over the last 50, 60, 70 years.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Seventy percent?

• Don Lyons:

  Seventy percent, 7-0. That decline is really telling us the ocean is changing in ways that seabirds can't adapt to, at least not very quickly.

• Miles O’Brien:

  Warming ocean waters fueled by the climate crisis mean fish are on the move, migrating to their temperature sweet spot.

  Gemma Clucas of Cornell University is trying to understand how this is changing the diet of seabirds by analyzing their poop.

  Gemma Clucas, Cornell Lab of Ornithology: We can go out and collect poops relatively quickly from a colony of nesting seabirds, bring them back to the lab, and then what I do is I sequence the DNA in those fecal samples in order to see which fish or invertebrates the birds have been feeding on. Working

• Miles O’Brien:

  with the Shoals Marine Lab and the University of New Hampshire, she visit's a common tern colony near Portsmouth wearing a plastic-coated wide brim hat. The aggressive birds eagerly pelt her with specimens, taking a turn as research assistants.

  In the lab, she is seeing genetic evidence of fewer cold water species, like Atlantic herring, and more butterfish, who like it warmer, but are not easy for puffin and tern chicks to swallow. It means parents must fly longer and farther to feed their young.

• Gemma Clucas:

  We are seeing an impact of these changes on the breeding success of the birds.

• Miles O’Brien:

  So we always talk about the canary and the coal mine. Is it more the puffin on the rock?

  (Laughter)

• Gemma Clucas:

  Yes, I think that's a good analogy.

• Miles O’Brien:

  The menu for a seabird chick is more than a meal. It's a diagnostic test for the ocean's health. And right now the prognosis is grim. But here in the Gulf of Maine, conservationists are listening to the warning signs and pushing back against the downward trend. Puffins still have a foothold here, not by chance, but by design.

  For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Miles O'Brien on Eastern Egg Rock, Maine.