Jane: This is But Why, a Podcast for Curious Kids from Vermont
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. And today, I'm somewhere very
special. I'm in southern Iceland. Now, if you don't know
Iceland, it's a big island country in the North Atlantic
Ocean, and we're on the Westman Islands, which is home to the
world's largest colony of Atlantic puffins, and many of
them are actually right behind me now. They're nesting right
now. They've burrowed into the hillside, and their eggs have
actually hatched. Puffins mate for life, and so each pair has
laid one egg earlier in the spring, and these eggs are just
hatching, or have hatched now, and the little puffin babies
called pufflings are deep in their burrows so they don't get
eaten by gulls. Later in the summer, they'll fly out, kind of
fling themselves off this cliffside and go out to sea.
Puffins spend most of the time each year out to sea, and they
only come back and get their feet on land when it's time to
nest. So these puffins are here for a couple of months, and
they're very cute, but they're also really fascinating birds.
Their beaks are so beautiful and dynamic, although not all the
time, and they have this really sort of charismatic way about
them that people love. So we're going to learn all about puffins
and answer all of your puffin questions in today's episode.
Hey, it's me back in Vermont now. We recorded that
introduction back in June when we were on one of the most
exciting field trips But Why has ever gone on: a trip to Iceland!
We decided to go to Iceland because it's a remarkable
country where we could answer a lot of questions you've sent us
over the years on a lot of different topics. Iceland is
known for having really remarkable geological features,
a landscape that is fascinating and always changing. So we have
upcoming episodes about glaciers and volcanoes that we recorded
in Iceland. We're also doing a horse episode featuring the
Icelandic horse, a breed known for its friendliness and ability
to survive in harsh conditions. And we made a lot of videos
while we were there that we've started publishing on our
YouTube channel, But Why Kids. And I hope you and your adults
can check those out. They include questions like: Why does
Iceland have so many volcanoes? What is a glacier? How does a
geyser explode? And why is Iceland green and Greenland icy?
We're also making a video all about puffins from our visit to
the world's largest colony of Atlantic puffins, and that's
what our episode is about today, these remarkable birds. But
here's the thing. We were hoping to be able to record an
interview while we were in Iceland with a researcher who
has spent his career studying puffins, but he was too busy...
with the puffins. The puffin babies had just hatched when we
arrived, and he was out looking in burrows, tagging birds and
collecting data, so we missed him by a day or two. That's
frustrating. But sometimes flexibility is the name of the
game. And we pivoted to interview a different researcher
who knows all about these fascinating creatures, and he
was much closer to where we are now.
Don Lyons: I am Don Lyons. I'm Director of Conservation Science
for the National Audubon Society's Seabird Institute.
Jane: The seabird Institute is based in Maine, the state
farthest north and east in the United States. Maine has a lot
of coastline. Here's some trivia for you. If you could drive up
the main coastline in a straight line, well, maybe not even
drive. Like, let's say you were flying like a bird from bottom
to top, keeping the line between the ocean and the land right
below you, you would travel about 228 miles. But if you were
to get in a boat and motor in and out of every cove and around
all the cliffs and peninsulas that jut out and the inlets that
stretch into the land and made a loop around every island that
counts as part of Maine, do you know how far you'd have to
travel? 3,478 miles. That's more than the coastline of
California. That also means there are a lot of places to
observe seabirds and to see how they behave, and a lot of
potential locations for seabirds to rest, nest and find food. So
it's a great place for Don Lyons to do his job.
Don Lyons: My job is super fun. I get to work with birds all
day, year round. I'm a scientist. What I... I call
myself an avian ecologist, "avian" meaning birds, and
"ecologist" meaning I'm mostly interested in how birds interact
with their environment, with other species, like the species
they eat, or the species that eat them, or other aspects,
weather, climate, other aspects of the environment that they
encounter.
Jane: But it sounds really quiet where you are right now. You're
not with the birds.
Don Lyons: That's right. I'm in an office today, sadly, but I
get to spend a lot of time out on islands, ocean Islands, where
the group of birds that I like to work with, seabirds,
typically nest. And they nest in colonies, in big groups all
together. They're very social. They like to nest together, and
those can be very noisy places. Birds do a lot of talking to one
another, and also smelly places. Birds, when they're all
concentrated in one place, can produce a lot of bird poop.
Jane: So you've had to get used to the smell of bird poop in
your workplace.
Don Lyons: That is right. But most of the time those islands
are, you know, out in the ocean, far from the coast, and so
there's usually a pretty good breeze, which helps carry that,
that smell away.
Jane: So the specific sea bird we want to talk with you about
today is a bird called the puffin.
Ace: Hello. My name is Ace. I am eight years old. I live in
Denver, Colorado, and my question is, what are puffins?
Jane: What are puffins?
Don Lyons: Ah, well, that's a good question. Coming from
someone in Colorado, you've probably never seen a puffin
before. So puffins, they are seabirds. So they spend most of
their time out in the sea, in the ocean. They eat fish. They
dive underwater. They can swim underwater with their wings. And
they catch small fish, maybe two or three inches long, or maybe
five centimeters long, with their bill, which is their beak.
They catch those while they're underwater, and they they can
eat them right then underwater even, or they can bring them to
the surface and swallow them there. And they only come to
land when they're going to nest. So they make nest for three
months out of the year, maybe middle of summer, and that's the
only time they ever set foot on land. The rest of the time
they're out flying around the ocean, or swimming on the
surface of the ocean or diving underwater to catch fish.
Jane: Don told us there are actually four different species
of puffins, and they all live in the northern half of the world,
the northern hemisphere. By the way, penguins, by contrast, all
live in the southern hemisphere. Three types of puffins live in
the northern Pacific Ocean: the horned puffin, the tufted
puffin, and something called the rhinoceros auklet, which I had
never heard of. That's a type of Puffin with a little horn, like
a rhinoceros's horn on the top of its beak, right where its
beak comes out of its face. But the most famous puffin is the
one that lives in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Don Lyons: The Atlantic puffin, which nests in the North
Atlantic Ocean from here in Maine in the US, all the way
across the North Atlantic in Canada and Iceland and the
United Kingdom, even into Norway. And so they're, they're
an Atlantic puffin species.
Jane: Atlantic puffins are what we are mostly going to talk
about today. These are small sea birds, a little heavier, but
about the same length as a pigeon. But puffins don't walk
like pigeons. When they're on land, they sort of stand up and
waddle, kind of similar to the way a penguin walks. They have
black backs and white fronts. The top of their heads are
black, and they have big white cheek patches. And then they
have these really bright orange feet, an orange and black
triangle over their eyes, and beautiful black orange and white
beaks. Sometimes these birds are called the parrots or the clowns
of the sea.
Hazel: My name is Hazel. I live in Gilbert, Arizona. I'm eight
years old. Why are puffins' beaks so colorful?
Don Lyons: That's great question, Hazel. So a lot of
times when animals are colorful, they're, they're trying to
convey information, or communicate information. With
puffins, that's true, and often what they're communicating is
how old they are. And whether they're old enough to nest. So
when a puffin is a chick or just fledges and takes off into the
world on its own, their bill is dark, kind of black, grayish
black, and it stays that color for a while. They often wait
until they're five or six years old before they nest, which is
pretty unusual for birds. And so they spend their second, third,
fourth, fifth year of life not nesting, but they start to look
a little more like an adult puffin each year. That bill
becomes more colorful. It becomes thicker top to bottom,
and it has ridges that kind of run vertically from top to
bottom. So that, that colorful bill that we were also impressed
with and catches our eye really well, it develops over time, and
really communicates that an individual puffin is old enough
to nest.
Jane: And when you say old enough to nest, you mean old
enough to mate and have babies.
Don Lyons: That's right, yeah. So puffins will find a mate, and
often they mate for a long time, if not for life. The female
puffin will lay just one egg per year, but none of that starts
until they're 5, 6, 7, years old.
Jane: When they are too young to nest, do they still come onto
land for those summer months? Or are they out to sea for four or
five years?
Don Lyons: Yeah, nice follow up question. Most of the time,
these young birds are out in the ocean. They will come to
colonies sometimes late in the summer. They may just swim
around the island. They may get up and land on the island a
little bit, and they spend some of that time socializing,
getting to know other young puffins, but also studying the
colony. Was that colony a place where lots of baby puffins were
raised that year? You know, and if so, maybe that's a good place
for that puffin to think about nesting themselves when they're
old enough.
Jane: Wow, that's fascinating. Can you imagine, you know,
you're out by yourself in the ocean for 12 months, unless you
come in to say hey to everybody else who's there. And otherwise,
puffins are pretty solitary, right? They're just by
themselves, bobbing out in the ocean and catching fish.
Don Lyons: Yeah, they really don't socialize much that we
know of away from the colony. They probably see other puffins,
and they go to similar places or the same places to find food,
but we think they're mainly going there to find food, not
really to make friends or possibly find a mate. And we
know that birds that are already old enough to be nesting, the
male and female, even though they spend every, you know,
every summer together working to raise a chick, during the
winter, they split up and they they they're not anywhere
particularly close to one another during the winter.
Jane: So they're not meeting up in the middle of the winter time
to ask each other Reuben's question...
Reuben: I'm nine years old. I'm from Savannah, Georgia. Where do
birds go in a lightning storm?
Jane: They're not like, hey did you see that lightning? How did
you live through that?
Don Lyons: They don't get to consult their partners on kind
of get some advice or some thoughts or brainstorm how to
solve problems. Most of the time they do that on their own.
Jane: So how do they survive and where do they go in a lightning
storm?
Don Lyons: Puffins are lucky. They don't stick up out of the
water much, so they're not a very high target for a lightning
bolt. Oftentimes, the waves are much, are higher than a puffin
will stick out of the water. So that's one way they avoid the
risk of getting struck by lightning. They probably also
see storms coming. They're probably pretty good at
predicting the weather based on just what they see around them.
You know, not, not what's going to happen tomorrow, but you
know, when they see a dark cloud in the afternoon, they probably
can fly away from that or around it and avoid a bad storm, to
kind of reduce the chance that they get exposed to a lightning
storm.
Jane: Birds can get hit by lightning. It's not common, and
there hasn't been much research done on it. But there have been
accounts of people seeing birds get struck by lightning, and
sometimes a bird might be taking shelter in a tree that gets hit
by lightning. Unfortunately, that's usually not good for the
bird. But again, it seems to be pretty rare. Let's talk a little
bit about what puffins do when they're on land.
Ellie: Hi, my name's Ellie. I'm four years old and I live in
Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Why do puffins live underground?
Bernie: Hi, my name is Bernie. I am six years old. I live in
Woodinville, Washington. Why do puffins live in within little
holes in hills that are kind of little and that are kind of a
medium sized hole?
Don Lyons: Yeah, so great questions. You guys already know
a lot about puffins. Yeah. So puffins are kind of an unusual
bird in that they nest underground, and so they don't
spend all their lives underground, right? They're out
on the ocean for most of the year, but when they come to an
island to nest, they will look for a spot where they can either
dig a hole in dirt, which we call a burrow, or if an island
is really rocky, but has some broken up rocks, boulder-sized
rocks, maybe a meter on a side, or two or three feet on a side,
they will look for crevices in those rocks where they can kind
of drop down below the surface, and again, find a kind of safe,
little hidden burrow-like space. They really only put their nests
in these underground places because that protects the egg
and chick and the adults while they're in there from predators.
Like here in North America, bald eagles, really big predatory
birds that are certainly capable of eating the eggs or eating
young chick, or some of those birds, like the eagles, are
capable of eating adult puffins too.
Jane: Some gulls also like to eat puffin babies and puffin
eggs.
Don Lyons: That's right, puffins are generally safe from these
species, these predators, if they, if they find a good burrow
and a pretty deep burrow. Some birds, ravens are an example,
will try and dig out birds from earthen burrows. But if the
puffin has dug a burrow really deep, then the raven will
probably give up before it gets there.
Jane: Our team was really lucky. In June, we got to go to Iceland
and do some reporting in Iceland. And one of the places
that we went to was the world's largest colony of Atlantic
puffins. And it was amazing to see all of these burrows, which
are pretty well hidden. It just sort of looks like a grassy
hillside. And the day that we were there, the pufflings, the
baby puffins, had just recently hatched, so the adults were
outside of the burrows, but we couldn't see the pufflings, but
most of the adults were sort of outside keeping guard. They
seemed to be on alert, and there were a lot of gulls and other
bigger birds flying around in great big circles, I guess maybe
just hoping that they could catch sight of a really tasty
little puffin baby, maybe?
Don Lyons: Yeah, it sounds like you had a cool trip to see a
really cool puffin colony. So gulls can have a couple other
sneaky impacts on puffins. When puffins have chicks, once that
egg hatches into a chick, puffins feed the chicks fish and
they carry fish back to the burrow. Kind of cross ways in
their bill, in their beak. And so those fish are out there for
anybody to see. We scientists, we take pictures of them, and we
identify the fish that puffins are eating that way. So it's
really neat for a research study question we can understand what
puffin diet is like, what fish are important to puffins, but it
also means that gulls and other species can see those fish, and
a certain number of gulls figure out, hey, I could maybe steal
some of those fish if I caught an adult puffin kind of not
really paying attention, I could swoop in there and maybe bump
the adult puffin around, get it to drop those fish, or maybe
scare the adult puffin into dropping those fish. And so a
lot of the interactions you see there are gulls trying to steal
fish, not actually expecting to get a look at a chick or a
chance at a chick. The chicks are, they're pretty smart, even
though they're very young, and they very rarely come out of the
burrow. So and when they do, it's often at night when the
gulls are sleeping, not very active. So they generally stay
safe in their little burrow until they're ready to fledge,
or leave the island and kind of become independent and kind of
go out in the world on their own.
Jane: Well, that brings us to Sawyer's good question about how
baby puffins learn to fly.
Sawyer: My name is Sawyer, and I am 10 years old. I'm from
Marietta, Georgia. Why do puffins live on such high
cliffs? Why don't the adult puffins carry the baby puffins
instead of letting them jump off the cliffs themselves?
Jane: To get to your question, Sawyer, we first have to
understand a little bit about the body structure of a puffin.
Since puffins spend almost all of their lives in the water
diving for fish, they need really strong wings for
swimming. Don says most seabirds that spend a lot of time
swimming have short wings. Penguins are kind of the extreme
example of this. Their wings have become so specialized for
swimming that they can't even fly at all anymore. Puffins are
actually really fast flyers, but they do have relatively short
wings that help propel them underwater, so they can't soar
around like the gulls we saw patrolling the skies near the
puffin burrows when we visited Iceland.
Don Lyons: Like those gulls, that's exactly right. Or if
people know albatross or vultures or eagles, a lot of
really big birds have really long wings and can soar or glide
through the air. Puffins can't do that. They have to beat their
wings really fast. I've heard, people have tried to measure how
fast they beat their wings. It might be 400 times a minute.
Jane: Wow.
Don Lyons: Which is amazing. It's, it's a little like
hummingbirds, even, how, how hard they have to beat their
wings, just to say airborne. So they nest on high cliffs or kind
of hills on islands, so that they have a lot of space between
them and the water. So when they take off from their nesting
spot, just outside their burrow, they have a lot of time to get
up speed, to flap their wings really hard, and get up speed so
that they are flying, so that they don't just drop and land in
the ocean. The chicks start out... So one reason they, the
adults can't carry them, the chicks when they fledge, they're
almost as big as adults, so it'd be kind of like one of our
parents carrying us around when we finished high school, it
would just be really difficult for the parent to help in that
process. And so those young puffins, the first time they
leave the borough and leave the island, they have not flown
before. They don't have a lot of muscles built up to fly well, so
they often are jumping off cliffs and ending up in the
water. Which is okay. They're good swimmers. They can kind of
paddle away from the island and get their start in life and
start looking for fish to eat right off the bat. But it does
mean that almost all puffins like to take off when they start
flying from a high spot.
Jane: Imagine being that baby puffin, a puffling, and the
first time you have to try flying, it's in the middle of
the night, and you're not just expected to flap your wings a
few times and see how it goes. You're going to have to jump off
a high cliff, and hope you figure it out before you hit the
water. Don says it's not always graceful, but the pufflings
figure it out pretty quickly. In the place that we visited, in
Iceland, the Westman Islands, there are a lot of baby puffins
every year. After all, it's the biggest colony of Atlantic
puffins in the world. And sometimes these pufflings get a
little disoriented and turned around when they first try to
fly, so they wind up back on land. People who live on the
main island often scoop up those little babies and take them back
to the cliffs at night and kind of throw them or toss them off
the cliff. It sounds a little alarming, but it's actually
helpful. That's how the babies get off to sea. I wish we had
been there to see that part of the tradition. Coming up, what
are puffins doing right now in the middle of August? And we'll
learn a little bit about puffin conservation in Maine. About 50
years ago, there were almost no puffins there at all, because
they'd been hunted so much and even used in feathered hats. Now
there's a thriving population, the one that Don has been
studying. So stay with us to learn more.
This is But Why, a Podcast for Curious Kids. I'm Jane Lindholm.
And today, we're learning all about puffins. These cute little
seabirds are sometimes called the parrots of the sea. But it
turns out, they're more than just silly looking. They're
fascinating. We're learning about them from Don Lyons, the
Director of Conservation Science for an Audubon Society program
called the Seabird Institute in Maine. Don has been answering
all of your questions about puffins. We interviewed him on
August 14th, right around the time when all those pufflings
were making their way out to sea.
Don Lyons: Puffins are amazing in that those pufflings, those
fledglings, when they leave the island, they don't get any more
help from their parents the rest of their lives. They're on
their own, which is incredible. They somehow know, they figure
out how to find fish and catch fish without, without the parent
ever showing them how that's done.
Jane: And they'll figure out how to make it back to their nesting
grounds when they are mature and it's time to start having
babies. Puffins don't just hang around near the island where
they were born their whole lives. You know, they often go
really far away.
Don Lyons: They go where the food is, and that can be
relatively close by, or it can be quite a ways away. The
puffins here in Maine, they often, kind of late summer, they
go north up into the ocean off of Canada, because the food's
really good up there. And so they'll they'll find herring and
sand lance and other forage fish, we call them. And then as
the fall gets colder and we get closer to winter, they start
moving south again. And they may be just a few hundred miles, or
maybe 500 kilometers from the colony where they, where they
were raised during the winter here. A few puffins go further
south, but it's just a few birds that go that far. But other
puffins, other Atlantic puffins from elsewhere, and other of the
Pacific puffins, the puffins that nest out in the Pacific
Ocean, they may go hundreds or thousands of kilometers or miles
southward, usuallym during the winter. So it really all depends
on where they're going to find food. They're really just out
there chasing food.
Jane: And then, when they're adults and it's time to find a
mate and a nesting ground, they can find their way back. Year
after year, they go to the same colony, they find the same mate
and sometimes even the same burrow. That's pretty
impressive, considering they might head out to sea, 500 or a
thousand miles away for most of the year, and then they can find
their way back to the same tiny island.
Don Lyons: Yeah, it is amazing. It's not something we understand
that well. That part of this process is a bit of a mystery.
Jane: Don says they probably have a lot of complex ways of
knowing how to do that, including an internal sense of
direction that's kind of like a compass, an ability to recognize
their island by sight and familiar landmarks, and possibly
a sense of smell that helps them sniff out their colony from any
others. But there are still a lot of unknowns about how
puffins actually do it. It's hard for us humans to understand
it when we can't even tell one puffin from another.
Hi, my name is Michaela. I'm from Barrie, Ontario. I am eight
years old, and my question is, how do you tell them apart from
male and female?
Don Lyons: All puffins look alike. It's kind of amazing. I
can have a puffin in my hand. I can have two puffins in my hand,
one in each hand, and I cannot tell them apart.
Jane: Even you!
Don Lyons: I cannot tell if one's a male or one's a female.
You know, I can measure them, and I can say, well, this one's
a little bigger than that one, but that's all I got. That's all
I know. The way we do eventually figure that out is we take a
blood sample or pluck a few feathers that have blood in
them, and we take that blood to a laboratory, extract the genes
out of the blood, the DNA out of the blood, and with that DNA, we
can tell whether it's a male or female. So it's amazing that
they can sort that out. But they do, and I'm sure some of that is
how that bill looks. That bill is pretty unique from one bird
to the next, and they can make vocalizations or calls. They can
do a little talking to identify themselves. And I'm sure the
puffins themselves know other traits to tell each other apart.
Jane: All right, I have a couple of rapid fire questions for you.
Sam: My name is Sam. I'm five year old, and I'm from New York.
How long can puffins hold their breaths and do they eat fish?
Jane: Sam Is wondering, how long can puffins hold their breath
and do they eat fish? We know they eat fish. How long can they
hold their breath?
Don Lyons: Puffins, they dive underwater, swim underwater that
can last even two or three minutes. And I bet somebody's
curious about how deep they can dive. Most of their dives are
just in the top 50 feet or 15 meters of water, but there are
puffins that we've documented diving as much as 50 meters or
200 feet, which is amazing for a bird that weigh about as much as
a full can of soda.
Juliet: Hello. My name is Juliet. I am four year old, and
I live in Denver, Colorado. How do birds have red feet?
Jane: How do birds, like puffins, have red feet, wonders
Juliet.
Don Lyons: That foot color is probably there because it's
another way to signal that a bird is an adult. Puffin chicks
don't have red feet. They're just kind of dark and black or
gray. Most of that foot color is just pigments that the puffins
produce. Much like our skin color varies a lot, or we
produce pigments for our skin. It's not always the same color
in all of us, but that same process produces pigment in the
skin of their legs. But the purpose of that is probably
primarily to let other puffins know that, hey, I'm an adult, I
could be a potential mate.
Jane: Michaela, who asked a question earlier about how we
tell female and male puffins apart, has another question.
Michaela: Why do puffins have that little triangle around
their eye?
Jane: Don says it's similar to both the colorful feet and the
colorful beak, or bill. It signifies that the puffin is an
adult and old enough to mate or have babies, and he says that
triangle also helps identify a puffin as a puffin, because it's
unique to their species. We got another Puffin question from
Logan.
Logan: I'm 11 years old. I live in Mount Martha on the
Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. Do puffins
have any blubber? And if so, how much of it do they have?
Jane: Blubber is a specialized type of body fat that many
marine animals like whales and seals have. It not only helps
keep their bodies warm in cold water, but it also helps with
buoyancy, keeping them afloat. While it's usually associated
with marine mammals, penguins have blubber and they are, of
course, birds. Puffins also have a layer of fat that helps
insulate them from the cold sea and cold winds, but it's not
called blubber. I asked Don if there was anything else we
should know about puffins.
Don Lyons: Well, fun fact, puffins carry fish back to their
chicks in their bill, crossways in the bill, they can catch
multiple fish and hold them, and catch another fish and hold
that. And so they're often delivering five to ten fish to
their chicks at a time. But kind of the record that we've heard
about, or that I've heard about, of how many fish can a puffin
and carry is 62.
Jane: No way!
Don Lyons: That's what I'm told! I have not seen the photograph,
but you know, that bill is really designed well to hold
lots of fish. Inside their mouths, they have some ridges
and kind of barbed surfaces that help hold fish. And so they,
they really are designed, you could say, to hold fish, to
carry fish.
Jane: I can barely carry one fish in my mouth, let alone 62,
although I'm tempted to try it tonight. Before we let don go
back to his puffin research, I wanted to know just a little bit
about the work he and his colleagues have been doing in
Maine. Because, you see, puffins were pretty much gone there for
a long time.
Don Lyons: We didn't lose all the puffins, but we were down to
just a handful of puffins on just one island. It may have
been as few as two puffins, we don't know, but really, really
low number, and that happened mostly because people hunted
them for their eggs, for their meat, or their feathers. At one
time, it was high fashion for women to wear feathers on their
hats, or even whole birds on their hats, dead birds.
Jane: About 125 years ago, puffins were nearly gone from
the coast of Maine. But in 1973, just over 50 years ago,
researchers decided they were going to see if they could bring
them back. So they went to puffin colonies along the
Canadian coastline in Newfoundland, and took some
puffin babies from nests there.
Don Lyons: And they took chicks that were about 10 days old.
They stuffed them into a suitcase and put them on a
plane, flew them to Maine, got them on a boat. The boat took
them out to one of these islands, where puffins had
nested 100 years earlier, and people had built burrows, had
dug burrows out of sod, and the pufflings were put in those
burrows and that all happened really fast, like within 24
hours, within a day, all of that was all coordinated ahead of
time, so that when a puffling was grabbed, it got to a new
burrow in Maine in 24 hours or so. Kind of an amazing bit of
travel logistics.
Jane: Personally, I can't help but think about what a confusing
process that might have been for both the pufflings and the adult
parents. But anyway.
Don Lyons: Pufflings were brought down for over five years
to that island, and in some years that was around 200
pufflings a year. They were hand fed, so there wasn't adult
puffins to feed them. So people got the small fish and gave
those, dropped those fish into the burrows, and the pufflings
would pick them up and eat them. And then the pufflings fledged
from the island. They left the island. They don't normally get
help from their parents after they leave the island so this
strategy could work, and they swam away.
Jane: Remember that puffins don't mature for several years.
So it was unclear if this plan to recolonize Eastern Egg Rock
in Maine was going to work. The scientists decided to put out
decoys, fake puffins, to make it looked like the island was a
good place to mate and raise chicks, and they even played the
sounds of seabirds. So any puffins who were scoping the
island out would think it was a rocking place to be. And you
know what? It worked!
Don Lyons: Within a couple days of those decoys, those first
decoys going out, real puffins landed on the island and started
checking them out. It still took two, three more years before
they started nesting. But that did happen. It actually happened
on the, those first fish being carried into a burrow were seen
on July 4th, 1981.
Jane: And today, Don says there are about 3000 puffins nesting
on two restored island colonies.
Don Lyons: But just as importantly, kind of the
techniques, the use of moving the pufflings, the chicks, which
we call translocation, that movement of birds and the use of
decoys have now been used for around a third of all the
seabird species in the world, including some species that that
were critically endangered. So I... kind of puffins have been a
situation where, you know, some really good conservation work
for puffins has happened, but also work that has benefited
many more species of seabirds around the world.
Jane: What a great place to end, on a conservation success story.
Thanks to Don Lyons, Director of Conservation Science for the
National Audubon Society's Seabird Institute. And thanks to
all of you for sending us your puffin questions. You can always
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