Make way for puffins, terns, and laughing gulls
EASTERN EGG ROCK, Maine
A BLACK tern fluttered in circles just above the gray boulders. Its darkness and rapid wing beat evoked a bat, weaving desperately through white and slate squadrons of common and Arctic terns. Audubon Society researcher Steve Kress and interns Juliet Lamb, Merra Howe, and Lauren Scopel were transfixed by the flight. Then they led me to a tiny clump of grass between some rocks.
There lay a black tern egg. It is not supposed to be here. Eastern Egg Rock is a tiny, treeless, boulder-strewn island in the salty Atlantic, 6 miles out from Pemaquid Point. The black tern is a freshwater bird. It is endangered in Maine and declining in its main habitat as humans drain Midwestern wetlands and Canadian prairies.
This was a new turning point for the island better known for the restoration of puffins. "Who knows how it got here?" said Kress, director of Project Puffin. "After 35 years, you still never know what you're seeing. Who knows what that one egg means? Maybe it's a pair of pioneering terns. They might have decided that it was such a rich environment with all the other terns that it was a safe place to try."
Yesterday, two weeks after this visit, Kress called to say that the project set a record with 100 pairs of puffins.
The seabird restoration also extends to 6,500 pairs of terns and laughing gulls. Of particular note are the 129 pairs of roseate terns, a federally endangered bird. Eastern Egg has over half of the pairs in Maine. This does not count the guillemots and razorbacks flying about, eiders cruising offshore - and, on this day, a northern gannet, a member of the booby family, resting on rocks.
Scopel, 22, a graduate of Michigan State University, Lamb, 23, a graduate of Harvard who is starting her master's degree studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Howe, 20, a Vassar junior from Newton, asked their 62-year-old mentor whether he envisioned this diversity when he began transplanting puffin chicks here from Newfoundland in 1973. He waited eight years for the first pairs to return to breed. People killed off puffins here by 1885. Before the project started, workers poisoned the ruling herring gulls and great black-backed gulls that would have sunk the project with their voracious eating of seabird chicks and eggs.
"No," Kress answered. "When we first started, it was just about puffins. But in those eight years of waiting for puffins, we had a lot of time to think about things." One of them is that terns act as a protective cover for puffins from herring gulls and great black-backed gulls with their dive-bombing, so Kress and his team attracted them to the island with decoys and tape recordings of a tern colony.
"We didn't have a clue that we would attract roseate terns," he said. "They just came in with the other ones. It wasn't intentional, but now we have all the species back that were here before. If I had started out trying to do that, people would have thought it was wacky."
The new record of 100 pairs of puffins came with even more good news. The two oldest puffins, banded Y54 and Y33, both 31 years old, are back, challenging the puffin longevity record of 36 years.
On this day, Lamb, Howe, and Scopel scooped Y54's 26th chick out of its burrow to band it. Afterward, they speculated on how Y54 survived three decades of brutal winters on the open ocean, then locates Eastern Egg without fail.
"I can't even imagine being a puffin bobbing on 100-foot waves and getting rained on constantly," Lamb said. "It's got to be the perfect storm 24/7 for these guys."
Kress, who has now spent half his life nurturing the puffin, said the open ocean is probably the perfect place for it since it has a 95 percent survival rate from one year to the next. "They're so vulnerable up here on land," Kress said. "If they could lay an egg at sea, they probably would."
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
