IF YOU thought the least sunny New England summer in a century was tough, consider Juliet Lamb, Liz Zinsser and Yvan Satge. These interns for Audubon’s Project Puffin spent the summer on Eastern Egg Rock in Maine - barren jumbles of rock miles out into the Atlantic. They were often pinned down in tiny cabins by 26 inches of rain in June and July, about four times the normal amount.
Their purpose was to help Cornell researcher Steve Kress in his 36-year-old project of restoring puffins to Maine islands after nearly a century’s eradication by humans. But the way they relished every moment of their summer is also a beautiful example of what unplugged youth can observe. I asked them what was it about their childhoods that prepared them to appreciate summers in damp, gusty isolation.
“We didn’t watch TV,” said Lamb, a Harvard graduate now working on her masters degree at UMass Amherst.
“We didn’t have TV either,” said Satge.
“We had TV but no video games,” said Zinsser, a graduate of Hobart and William Smith.
They did not need reality television for entertainment, not when the rare calm days were quickly blown away by 45-mile-an-hour gusts. Even when stuck inside, they kept busy. “We did a lot of baking and sat around playing games and writing songs,” said Juliet Lamb, 24, the intern supervisor on Eastern Egg.
“One day we made strawberry rhubarb crumb,” she said. “We made a hot sauce from fermented pineapple rinds that one of the interns from Puerto Rico taught us to make. We were getting Creole lessons from the Haitian interns who knew every little detail about building duck boxes for the West Indian whistling duck.”
Zinsser forgot about the weather every time she found a particular tern family she was fond of. “Most terns bring to their chicks herring, hake, butterfish and stickleback,” Zinsser, 21, said. “But this one tern parent brings in really bizarre fish, like red rock eels that are twisted in knots around the parent’s beak”
Satge, 24, from France, talked of a day when he was on another island in the project, Matinicus Rock. “I was in the bird blind and I saw a low cloud, a long cloud rolling above the ocean,” he said. “The cloud rolled straight for the island. It came onto the island and the birds freaked out. Then two minutes later the sun came out in this unique light I’ve never seen before.”
Satge saw something else on Matinicus Rock no one has seen in Atlantic waters south of Canada for 126 years - a common murre egg. A murre is a more elongated black and white relative of the puffin. The egg was eventually destroyed, probably by a gull, but its existence was more proof that puffin restoration is regenerating an entire ecosystem. Researchers also saw this summer a red-billed tropicbird and a black-browed albatross. It was the first sighting in Maine of that type of albatross.
They said their ability to turn torrential rain into liquid sunshine for the soul stemmed from childhoods that once were common, but have largely disappeared in an age where households watch television 5 hours a day and spend a total of 8.5 hours a day on screens, according to Nielsen. The three of them offered their memories of creative play and exploring: hide and seek in cemeteries; playing “Little House on the Prairie’’ pretending to be orphans; feeding an orphaned baby bird with scrambled eggs; picking mushrooms with grandparents; playing in tree houses; making maps; catching lizards; and chasing birds.
“When my mother got bored of us,” Zinsser said, “she gave us a salt shaker and said if we sprinkle salt on a bird’s tail, we would catch it. They always flew away. But it made me always want to hold a bird.”
It makes you wonder how much more curiosity we could nurture if we could unplug millions of other children. “Watching wildlife is like an addiction,” Lamb said, “to see life in all that complexity. It’s free, easy to see and available to you, depending on where your imagination takes you . . . even with the weather, I’d rather be here than anywhere else.”
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 
