08/11/2026
In the 1970s, a biologist carved wooden puffin decoys, arranged them on a bare Maine island in clusters that looked like birds absorbed in conversation, set up mirrors to make the fake flock appear larger, and played recorded colony sounds through speakers hidden in the rocks. He was trying to convince real puffins that the island was already occupied. It took eight years. On July 4, 1981, a puffin landed on Eastern Egg Rock carrying a beakful of fish, disappeared into a crevice in the rocks, and came back out with an empty beak. It was feeding a chick. The fake colony had become a real one.
Stephen Kress was 28 years old and working as a summer instructor at the Audubon camp on Hog Island when he first visited Eastern Egg Rock in 1969. The seven-acre island sits six miles off the Maine coast in Muscongus Bay, low and treeless, ringed with granite and topped with grass. Puffins had nested there for centuries before hunters wiped them out for feathers, eggs, and meat. By 1901, a single pair remained in the entire state. When Kress walked the island, there were none. He learned that puffins had been gone from Eastern Egg Rock for roughly a hundred years.
Kress knew one thing about puffin biology that made the idea possible. Puffins imprint on the place where they hatch. A chick raised on Eastern Egg Rock would spend its first three to five years at sea and then, when it reached breeding age, return to Eastern Egg Rock to nest. If he could move chicks from a healthy colony and raise them on the island, the birds should come back as adults and start a colony of their own.
In 1973, he began transplanting 10-to-14-day-old puffin chicks from Great Island in Newfoundland's Witless Bay. He dug artificial burrows, placed the chicks inside, and hand-fed them vitamin-supplemented fish until they fledged and walked into the sea on their own. Over the next 14 summers, he and his teams transplanted 954 chicks. The work was cold, wet, and thankless. The chicks defecated on everything. Herring gulls and great black-backed gulls, which had taken over the island during the century-long puffin absence, killed chicks and smashed eggs faster than Kress could protect them. Managing the gulls became a parallel war that ran for years alongside the restoration.
The transplanted chicks fledged successfully. They went to sea. Then nothing happened. By 1977, a few puffins had been spotted in the water near the island, circling, looking, and flying away without landing. Kress realized the problem. Puffins are social nesters. They do not land on empty rock. They look for other puffins first, and if the island appears uninhabited, they keep flying until they find one that is not. Eastern Egg Rock had no puffins standing on it because no puffins would land until they saw puffins standing on it. He needed to break the loop.
He carved decoys from wood. Heavy, bowling-pin-shaped carvings mounted on dowels and painted to resemble standing puffins. He placed them in groups on the rocks, angled toward each other as if socializing. He set mirrors among the decoys to double the apparent population. He mounted speakers inside rock crevices and played recordings of puffin colony sounds, the grunting, growling chatter that a healthy colony produces around the clock during nesting season. The island now sounded, looked, and from the air felt like a colony in full operation. The only thing missing was a living bird willing to believe it.
Four years later, on Independence Day 1981, eight years after the first chick was placed in a burrow, a puffin carrying fish landed on Eastern Egg Rock and fed a chick it had hatched inside the rocks. Then another came. Then more. The colony grew. Today roughly 1,300 pairs nest across five restored Maine islands, and the social attraction technique Kress invented with wooden carvings and cassette tapes has been used at more than 500 sites worldwide to restore 138 seabird species.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: National Audubon Society / Audubon Seabird Institute / Slate / Bangor Daily News / All About Birds, Cornell / Pacific Seabird Group / The Maine Mag.
