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Eastern Egg Rock is for
the Birds
"We call that the Eastern Egg Rock Hilton," he says, describing the shack where researchers come each summer to take their turn as stewards of a seven-acre colony of terns and petrels and guillemots. And of course, the star attraction: puffins. Kress, who has been called the Puffin Man has brought this bird back to Maine. By now the upright black-and-white birds, blessed with a shape that defies aeronautic rules and an orange parrot-like beak, have become aviary mascots, the panda bears of the bird world. This afternoon the short, bearded ornithologist in trademark tam-o'-shanter cap warns the fans on our boat that real puffins are smaller than the ones on the T-shirts that dot the Maine coast. "Puffins are not big lumbering penguin-like birds. They're only 10 inches high." On cue, the puffins begin to appear in the water, some with three or four small fish in their beaks. They pose for our pleasure as if they were employees of Project Puffin, the Audubon Society's program that he directs. Back in 1969, when Kress arrived at the local Audubon camp as a 24-year-old idealist, there wasn't a single puffin left below the Canadian border. The skies and nesting grounds had been dominated for a century by that resourceful co-habitant of people and debris: the gulls. He thought restoring the puffins to Eastern Egg Rock would be "a neat summer project." But 30 years later, he's still at it with the sort of persistence and ingenuity that turn out to be absolute requirements for any environmentalist. Kress began by bringing six puffins down from Nova Scotia, placing them in burrows and hand-feeding them until they took off. Puffins return to the place they were born after three or four years at sea, but these colonial birds won't nest unless they see others around. So the ornithologist came up with the idea of "social attraction," placing wooden puffin decoys around the island. It's a strategy that worked so well, it has been used in restoring birds all over the world. This summer, exactly 20 years after the first chick was born here, a record- breaking 37 pairs have raised their young in the crevices of the granite, while another hundred pairs now inhabit a second Maine site. "Every pair," says this low-key scientist, "is proof that we don't just have to witness destruction. We can reverse those trends if we're willing to be there for the long run." It turns out that protecting the more fragile seabird species includes some anti-Darwinian action. On Eastern Egg Rock, every year they have to destroy the nests of "the fittest," the herring gulls and blackback gulls. "Someone always asks us," says Kress, "if we are playing God. But if we don't play God, the gulls will play God." The same binoculars that bring the puffins into focus also offer a close-up of our own role in the nature of nature. Across the continent, in a place as untouched as Maine was 300 years ago, we are debating whether to protect the last true Alaskan wilderness. Wilderness or oil? It's our choice. Here, a relative handful of people are working to restore what an earlier generation didn't protect. It is a project far more complex and uncertain. The "Hilton" that Kress pointed out is closed for this season. Only the Webcam stands watch on www.projectpuffin.org. Within a few days, on some mysterious signal, the puffins will take off on a flight to an unknown life at sea. "I think of Egg Rock as an ark, a vessel to carry sea birds to the next century," Kress says, "but we have to stay at the wheel." Nature is always in flux. But people have altered the environment so
greatly that we have become, like it or not, the Earth's decision-makers
and caretakers. Diversity is now a matter of the decisions we make, not
just for a "summer project" or even for 30 years but for the
truly long run: forever. |