 Good evening, everybody, and welcome to our second spring Audubon western main Audubon talk. I have one announcement tonight and that is that we have decided to go ahead with our warbler walk, which meets at the whistle whistle stock trail. That will be on March 8, a Saturday morning at 7am. May, May, I'm sorry. There we go. We get in the right month. The 8th of May at 7am. Kate Weatherby again will be leading it. We do request that you wear masks and we'll do social distancing. And hopefully the birds won't be put off by any of that and we'll be happy to come. So put that on your calendars. We are very fortunate. Today to have Dr. Stephen press speaking on his work with puffins. Dr. Cross has held many, many positions related to seabird conservation, education, and many other things. The seabird conservation methods he developed in Maine are now followed around the world. And the title of his book, which is project puffin, the improbable quest to bring a beloved seabird back to a rock is just wonderful. And we are now privileged to hear him speak about this quest. Dr. Cross. Thank you Nancy. It's a pleasure to have this invitation to speak to Maine Audubon and Western Maine Audubon chapter. And to share this story about seabirds, it's been my lifelong pursuit to learn how to bring seabirds back to nesting islands and so when I put this presentation together was kind of a challenge to figure out just what parts to share, but I'm going to share a little bit of all the various parts of the story. And that story started back in 1969, when I was hired as a bird life instructor at the Hog Island Audubon camp. I grew up in central Ohio, so it was a very different kind of place to be on the ocean and to be on an island was even more different. I was charged with telling people from all over the country about the history of Maine seabirds was pretty daunting, but I did my research and I learned as much as I could. And people listened as I talked about birds like little black Gellemots, and the galls and the cormorants that I saw on those coasts. So parts of this story were pretty clear and familiar. Well documented, for example, the, the plume hunting days when people shot birds all along the coastal parts of the country to decorate ladies hats. That hunting was severe in Maine, they went out to the most remote bird islands, and they killed most of the seabirds. And this woman is wearing plumes of egrets in her hair but in Maine they were shooting galls to decorate hats and puppens to almost every kind of seabird was destroyed off the nesting islands. And by 1900 there was only about one pair of puppens left on one island off the main coast. Now as a bird life instructor I knew that part of the story. And I also took students from the Audubon camp out to a little island near Hog Island. It was about an eight mile run out to to Eastern egg rock. And at that time in the late 60s, it was an important nesting spot for galls herring and great blackback calls and I thought that's sort of what the bird life was until I started reading about the history of birds in that area. And I discovered that puffins used to nest on that island. They nested under the big boulders. And they raised their little chicks in the rock crevices, until people began hunting them for food. And they took the eggs, and they took the adults, and they used the feathers, and they ate them. The seabird in this way on a small island, particularly if you're putting nets over the rocks to trap the birds when they come out in the morning was complete. And that colony was extinct by 1885. And I thought it was such a shame that they disappeared. I began to, in my mind, try to imagine wouldn't it be terrific if I could bring the puffins back to egg rock. What would it take. Well, it took years of learning about puffins, and it took years of accumulating ideas, the nucleus of a puffin plan. And that plan in short involved collecting puffin chicks in a large colony in Newfoundland, and flying them back to Maine in a small airplane. It's about 1000 miles. And I would bring those puffins to Eastern egg rock. We set up a field camp on egg rock in 1974. And I hired some college age students to join me for this project. And they had the adventure of living in this remote site in a tent camp. There's a reason there's no trees here is because it's so windy, no tree could survive in this environment. We began to wonder if people could survive here, either. But the plan was this. It was to bring the chicks to a egg rock to put them in a carrying case like this. And then to transfer them as fast as possible to artificial burrows to feed the chicks a couple of times a day a diet of frozen fish supplemented with vitamins and then let the chicks come out of the burrows at night. Band them and have them head to sea. I hope that they would remember that egg rock was home and they would return back here to nest rather than go back to Newfoundland. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the first time anybody had ever tried to restore a colony of seabirds anywhere. And so I had to kind of invent every step of the methods. And I had to convince people that it was a worthwhile thing to do. And that was not so easy because there were still millions of puffins living in the northern parts of their range. But it was at the edge of the range where they had been hunted and extirpated. There are people were telling me, why bother? Why let nature take its course? And I argued that if we could learn how to bring the puffins back, other seabirds would also benefit. And if people cause them to disappear, shouldn't people have some responsibility to bring them back? Some agreed with that idea. Some said, I don't think it's going to work. And I began to wonder too, if it was going to work, because the chicks left, but years was going by and none of them were coming back. And it was 1977. When I began to realize if I don't see some puffins come back pretty soon, we're going to have to chalk this whole project up to a failure. And then no one would probably try anything like this again for a long time. So I began trying to think like a puffin at that point. What's missing? What could I do? And one thing I realized was missing was that young puffins spend their first couple of years at sea, maturing, and then they remember where they hatched and they come back to that hatching place. And that's what gave me the idea of putting up decoys. I put up some decoys in 1977, and almost immediately I was amazed where I put on a rock three decoys. There was a puffin standing there among them. It just like appeared. And it looked at the decoys, quizzically, picked at them, and then flew away. And I said, oh my, this is terrific. They came back, but they weren't fooled. They didn't stay. But I kept at it, tried other things. I put up a box with mirrors on it to make a more interactive kind of decoy, a reflective surface. You know, birds see their own reflections, and they often fooled to think it's another real bird. And that's in fact what puffins are doing. That's what this bird in the picture is doing. And I kept bringing more puffins from Newfoundland based on the success of these first returning birds. And they started coming back and increasing numbers, landing with the decoys. And now we're up to about 1980. Remember, I started this in 1973. Seven years into this project, I still didn't have any puffins nesting here, but they were coming back, and they were landing with the decoys. What I really needed to see was a puffin with fish in its beak. And that big day happened on the 4th of July in 1981. I was sitting out in a bird blind on the island. One of my fellow researchers started shouting. They had seen a puffin fly by with fish. And together then we saw the puffin circle the island, land on a rock, drop down under the rocks, and then come out without the fish. And that was the first time a puffin nested there in about 100 years. That meant there was a chick there. Well, that was a huge success. And that gave me reason to bring back a few more puffin chicks. And we kept bringing more puffin chicks through actually through 1981 to Eastern Egg Rock. And here's a graph that shows what's happened ever since. This is the number of nesting pairs of puffins on Eastern Egg Rock. You can see just there were like five pairs that first year and the numbers have increased steadily ever since. The excitement that bringing that colony back and starting a colony encouraged me to try to replicate the thing, the whole idea on another historic puffin site, Seal Island in Penobscot Bay. And this graph shows the number of puffin pairs and how they've been increasing. It also took eight years from the time we moved the first puffin chicks to Seal Island to the time that we had our first nesting. But the puffins there increased faster, hundreds of pairs, and now it's the largest puffin colony in Maine. So two puffin colonies we started from scratch, we restarted them after they were extinct for over 100 years. That was so exciting. This was the first time anyone had started a puffin colony. But that led to some interesting questions. For example, this question, why didn't puffins naturally return to Maine Islands once they were protected from hunting. It was illegal to hunt puffins ever since 1918 when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed. Other birds came back, but the puffins did not until we started bringing these chicks from Newfoundland. To understand that question, we have to look a little bit at the life history of puffins. This underground view taken with the Audubon puffin video cam on Seal Island shows an adult bringing fish back to its newly hatched chick. Those chicks grow up underground with the parents. The parents take care of that chick until it fledges at about six weeks. And then the chick spends its next two years at sea and eventually comes back. And it usually returns to Island where it hatched. So if a colony goes extinct, there's no birds with a living memory of nesting at that colony. And that's what happened at Egg Rock. Puffin colonies, of course, do start on their own. They haven't always depended on people to start them, but it takes a long time. These birds are very reluctant to start new colonies. And the colony has to grow pretty big before some of them overflow naturally to start new colonies. Compare that life history to that of the herringalls. Herringalls, a whole different thing. Herringall chicks grow up with the parents, but they are not faithful to the nesting site where they hatched. They'll come back and nest anywhere along the coast, anywhere where there's nearby food and other gulls. That's the good place for a herringall. They don't require rock crevices to nest in. They nest on the surface. So hundreds of main islands can be suitable for gulls. And herringalls and blackback gulls rapidly increased along the coast. And the increase in these gulls, I think, was the main reason that puffins didn't come back. This amazing photo here shows a gull snicking up and trying to grab a puffin going into its burrow. The whole underground habit of puffins living underground probably has evolved to help them avoid being eaten by gulls. And gull populations resurged. In the absence of hunting, they came back in great numbers. But it wasn't for them. It wasn't just the lack of hunting. There were basic changes in their food supplies. Herringalls are called herringalls because they eat herring. But this picture, this historic picture taken in 1900 on Matinicus Island in Maine shows the local fishermen doing their boats full of huge numbers of herring. They took lots of herring. They probably didn't take enough to wipe out the herring population. But they took a lot and there were dozens of sardine factories all along the coast. That was the beginning of a big problem for herrings. Before people started taking so many herring, the ocean was full of fish. And the rivers that go up into the mainland were also full of fish. Herring gulls eat not just Atlantic herring in the ocean, but they eat alewives as this gull was doing. But the alewives, a river herring, have been blocked by dams. So food supply for herring gulls and puffins and all kinds of birds has had a big hit because of fisheries. Here's a map of the Penobscot River drainage. The black spots, each one of those black spots is a dam on that river. Collectively, it's like having your arteries clogged. No wonder the fish can't make it back up to breed in the lakes and ponds of Maine. Because all of these dams along the way, that's greatly affected the amount of food in the ocean. It's made the birds very hungry and that's why the gulls have moved into landfills and garbage dumps. They're opportunists, but their natural food has been greatly reduced. And then there's the commercial fisheries that are siphoning the herring out of the oceans. Herring populations are greatly declining. Much of this is caught, most of this is caught and used as lobster bait. And the lobster traps all along the coast, the preferred bait for lobstermen is herring. They have to change that herring in those traps. Several million traps are fished along this coast. And that bait is thrown in the water and that's old bait and that's what these gulls are trying to eat. So they're still eating herring, but it's degraded and it's much scarcer by the time it gets thrown overboard as used up and bait. This kind of commercial fisheries using sonar to find the schools and huge herring boats has greatly depressed the herring population. This is the herring catch along the New England coast. And you can see the numbers of landings in US and Canada are greatly declined after the peak of it in the late 60s. And the number of herring in the water has also declined. That dark orange line that bounces up and down is heading downhill almost to gone. Those are the size of herring that puffins need, but their primary fish has been overfished. Here's another question that I've come to wonder about over time. We've learned how to restore colonies, but are these restored colonies sustainable? Can we ever back away from these colonies and do something else? I think that's a really important question because it takes a lot of work, effort and sustained financial support to keep these colonies going and to keep the researchers on the islands. Well, I tried to think of a way that how this might work naturally. And one idea I had in the beginning was that turns might be the solution because these surface nesting birds, these fast-flying aggressive birds can chase away gulls. If you had enough turns, I reasoned, maybe the gulls wouldn't be able to nest. In fact, the turns can even chase away bald eagles that get near the nest. The problem is that the turns are highly migratory and so they migrate far from Maine in the winter and the gulls are more local and so are the eagles. So the eagles and the gulls get a head start. And so this idea hasn't quite worked out, but we did learn how to start turn colonies as well as puffin colonies. And here's how we do it. This decoys, as we do with the turns, as we do with the puffins, but here we play sound recordings as well. And these sound recordings are played from outdoor speakers, not just any recording. That's an alarm call. We try to avoid using alarm calls. We want to attract the turns. So instead, we play this call, which is a horseshoe call. And they discovered that if you play the courtship call and you play put out the decoys, the turns will land and offer fish to the decoys. It's amazing how that works. And they not only, you know, recognize them to try and feed them, but they'll try and chase them away. And it doesn't even have to look a lot like a real turn. We call this the blockhead turn. The blockhead also is attractive to turns. Anything that is about the right size with a general pattern will succeed in attracting turns. And if you attract them with those sounds and with those decoys, they'll lay eggs right next to the decoys on spots where they haven't bred for 50 or more years. That's the story at Egg Rock. We brought the puffins and the turns we're missing, but we first brought the puffins back, and then we brought the turns back first Arctic and common turns, and then Rosie at turns joined the colony as well. This idea in Maine has been the centerpiece for restoration of turn populations throughout the coast. Now, all these red spots are Audubon managed islands where there are summer interns living on those islands. They're living in lighthouses like Matinicus Rock, but typically they're living in a tent camps in those remote islands just as they were nearly 50 years ago when the first researchers helped me bring the puffins back to Egg Rock. Collectively, these two lines represent the growth of both turn and puffin colonies along the main coast. If you add up all the puffins and all the turns on those two islands, the blue line shows the dramatic increase in common turns, and the orange line shows the dramatic increase in puffins. These are real success stories, but how sustainable is this? If we weren't out there every year, I'm convinced that the gulls, which are resident and now the eagles and peregrine falcons as well, would end up displacing the turns and the puffins, and we'll be right back where we started some 50 years ago. The only thing keeping off the predators during the summer are the researchers that live on the islands. The turns and puffins tolerate them, but the big gulls and the eagles keep a safe distance away, and in the process, the puffins and the turns are thriving. Well, that's all fine, but is there anything else those researchers can do while they're out there except chasing off birds? Of course. A whole new future has opened up here. Things that we didn't even think about when Project Puppin started are happening, and we happen to be in place to gather data and to help the birds to tell us their story and tell us not just about themselves, but about their ocean habitat. And that's where this next chapter of Project Puppin comes in about climate change, fisheries, and life at sea for seabirds. Let's talk about that piece, life at sea. What does that mean? That means we knew nothing about where these puffins and turns were going when they left the island. They spent most of the year at sea, and we had to find out where they were in order going in order to protect that part of their world as well as the nesting islands. It was, we've been hearing about climate change along the coast, but it wasn't a headline story until about 2012 when climate change really cranked up and what is now known as a heat wave swept through the Gulf of Maine. The water warmed up, warmer than anyone had ever recorded it before. And this really hit the seabirds hard. If you graph what we know about seabird populations along this coast, you can see that the pink line shows, or the blue line shows that water temperatures are on a slow increase worldwide. But that increase in the Gulf of Maine is much more dramatic. On the global map above, you can see the spots of the oceans that are heating up faster than spots that are not. Those are shown in blue. Wide spread areas are turning red, but one of the warmest, fastest growing areas in heat is the Gulf of Maine. And that's because of the currents. The currents are changing. The Gulf Stream is shifting further north. And the Labrador current, which drains the Arctic brings the cold water down, is becoming less weak. The cold water from the north used to push the Gulf Stream far from the coast of Maine. It's not so strong now in most years. And that warm water is leaking into the Gulf of Maine. These two graphs sort of show that the slope water, you can see in the, in the graphs here, the slope water is increasingly warm along the coast and the warm water that comes in from the Gulf Stream is increasing, but the cold water from the Labrador current is decreasing. And this is affecting fish. Fish are very sensitive to water temperature. And they're very mobile, unlike seabirds that are locked on to a nesting island and they can't move because they go home to the same island year after year, regardless of the ocean. The fish can move with it, water. And they're moving further north as the upper graph shows, and they're moving deeper into cooler water. White hake is one of the most important fish for seabirds along the main coast, and this graph shows how they are decreasing to the southern part of their range, and they're moving further north, north above the, the islands off the main coast. Well, we're seeing all this, the fine view by sitting in bird blinds in the middle of our restored colony on egg rock. We're seeing how the superfood of all Atlantic herring has been overfished, and the water is warming up, and the puffins have a hard time bringing back this important food for raising chicks. And if they don't bring back enough of it, their chicks either can't fledged at all, they die in the burrow, or they fledged underweight. Because they're out there on their own without the parents to help them, that's their natural way. They have a low chance of surviving. The other superfood is white hake. It takes a lot of white hake for a puffin to feed its chicks. Here's a puffin with 20-some little hake in his beak. And they catch these, by the way, by holding the fish, the first fish they catch with their tongue against the roof of the mouth, or they lower the mandible, their lower mandible down, grab up another one, and they use their tongue to hold each one. They can hold 20, 30 little hake at a time. We're also seeing that when the water warms up, southern fish show up in Maine that are not so good for the seabirds. The hake and the herring are moving out of range or too deep, but the butterfish show up. These I call the junk foods. Butterfish, the sprickly back, sticklebacks, the puffins can't swallow these fish. And there's not much nutrition to them. So that's not good news. That's a climate change effect. But there's some good news, too. The haddock is on the increase. And the haddock is coming back strong these days because haddock stocks have been well managed. They've stopped taking as much haddock as they used to. And the puffins are finding this. So we're discovering that puffins are actually pretty adaptable. They don't always have to eat herring and hake. They can switch foods and haddock is now on the menu. Here's a close up view of what happens when a heat wave comes through one of these week long periods of warm water. The blue line show the number of feedings to a puffin check. And you can see that per day, they were feeding pretty good early in the series here in June. But as the summer went on, they declined, the number of feedings declined when the heat wave measured in temperature of the orange appeared. So as a water warm, there was the birds couldn't find enough food. And the chick suffered. When the heat wave was there, it became scrawny and lightweight. But then the parents stayed longer, longer than usual. They delayed their migration to see if the water would cool and it did. And here's what that same chick looked like by the end of August after the heat wave when the water cooled down just enough for the parents that catch food again. So puffins are adaptable to some degree on what they eat and their behavior about taking care of their single chick. And what about that mystery about where the puffins go? Well, I've got some great news to share with you. We've learned where main puffins go. Most of the most of this long project, we didn't know, but we lost this in the last few years by putting special little tags on their legs. We've been able to learn where the puffins go. These are not satellite tags. We have to recapture the bird to get this information. But this map shows the movement of one puffin, banded in Maine. And this red line you're seeing there shows that it shot up from Maine to Labrador, went into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And then it went off shore through those yellow areas. I'll talk about those yellow spots in a moment along the continental shelf. And then it went back to the nesting island. That's where it went in his first year as bird migrations grow. This was a relatively short migration. But in the second year, this is interesting because the bird took off again now shown by the blue line. Look, it went back to the same spot. It flew all the way up there to Labrador. This time it flew off shore, but it decided to go back to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some of the same areas. And then south again, repeating its migration through the yellow spot. And eventually it ended up back where it started. This pattern was never known before. What it tells us that there are certain spots in the ocean that are very important. Among those, that yellow spot here shown as a blue triangle was one of the spots that the puffins, not just this one bird, but a lot of them went to. And that area is now a national monument. That whole area is a no fishing zone now, in part because of this discovery that we made with the puffins. Protecting the birds at sea, knowing where they go as well as protecting them on the nesting islands is the solution for helping them into the future. More and more we're realizing it's not about protecting just the nesting islands. It's about protecting the birds whole winter range. And there's no bird that shows that better than the Arctic turn. This world map shows the migration of five different Arctic turns, banded on Eastern agron each color shows the movements of an individual bird. And you can see here how I'll just show you with this little arrow, the yellow bird, for example, left Eastern agron it flew to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it crossed the equator. It went to South America, off the coast of Argentina, it went to Antarctica, and then it flew back north, right through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Back to Eastern agron where it laid its egg on the same rock that it laid it the year before we know that because we were able to trap that bird after it made that long migration. Each of those lines represents an amazing story. There's another global map that's, I think, very important and it's also has to do with project puffin. The red spots on this map are other restoration projects with other rare and endangered seabirds. So far, methods that we've developed at in Maine to bring back puffins and turns have been picked up by researchers elsewhere. There are over 600 such conservation efforts for seabirds in at least 25 countries, and we've documented at least 94 seabird species that have benefited from these methods. In Maine, we make the decoys out of recycled polyethylene and we ship them all over the world. This is a Maine made product, very unique, but it's helping seabirds worldwide. And those mirrors that we developed at Agroc long ago come up with a new type of a mirror design as well. They're just as attractive as ever. And you can see some puffins here at Agroc gathering around, having a good social gathering, looking at their reflections in mirrors. I want to share just a few examples of these restoration projects with you because each one is exciting. It's an exciting story, for sure. One of the first examples of using decoys to help bring seabirds back to a nesting island was a little project on Devil's Slide Rock off the coast of California. This is what Devil's Slide Rock looks like from a MERS eye view. This area, however, was the subject of a big oil spill in about 1980 that spilled crude oil along the coast, and this black line shows where that oil drifted. And this sad looking mur was one of the casualties. Some 7,000 birds died. Here's what Devil's Slide Rock looked like before the oil spill. And here's what it looked like after the oil spill. All the birds were gone. For about 10 years, no MERS nested on this historic nesting island. Why was asked if our decoy work could help bring them back? But it was not going to be an easy project because look how the white water that crashed on that rock. We found researchers, however, that were willing to try and risk their lives to get those decoys up the rock. They had the skills of being brave boaters and mountain climbers, and they climbed up the rock. So you can see them here in this composite photo of bringing decoys up on top of the rock and securing those decoys. Hundreds of them were put up on top of the rock along with mirror boxes and sound recordings. Everything was hauled up there. And although the MERS had not been there for 10 years, as soon as they saw the decoys, some of them came back. They were probably survivors from the oil spill. They laid their big beautiful blue eggs and hatched their fuzzy little chicks at this historic site. Again, before the spill, and now here's what it looks like after. You can't even tell the difference. They don't put up the decoys and sound recordings anymore. This colony seems to be so far self-sustaining itself after we went and had a successful restoration. Here's another project. This project in the Columbia River that helped to bring the birds back following a project where they were eating too many salmon, so helping to solve conflicts and relocating the birds to an area where they would be eating less salmon. That's another application for this method that we call social attraction. In the Galapagos Islands, the Galapagos Petrol was making its last stand on top of Mirador volcano on Santa Cruz Island. And here these big fuzzy petrels were nesting underground, but there were introduced rats on the island that were killing them. Not just rats, but cats and dogs and wild pigs were coming up from nearby farms. And this petrol had no other place. It's an endemic species. This is the biggest problem for seabirds worldwide. Introduced mammals onto these historic nesting islands, islands where a species was always limited, particularly these endemic seabirds. They were never widespread, but if they're only nesting in one spot and rats get on that island, it's the end. So we put up sound playing equipment and we monitored the activity by putting little toothpicks in the entranceways. If the petrol went in, we'd know there was activity there and demonstrated that, yes, we could in fact attract petrels to safer nesting places like this. The idea eventually is to put a fence around some of these new islands and have an island in an island, an island of predator safe habitat. All this takes a lot of work. And here's Dr. Jerry Skinner with two researchers that are helping him with this project in Ecuador. They were the first of many researchers that came to Maine. This world map shows all the countries that have come to Maine to learn about seabird restoration on our seven islands off the coast of Maine. Restoration has also been happening in the Atlantic Ocean and other islands. Just another case example. This is the Bermuda Petrol, like the Galapagos Petrol. It's only found in Bermuda, but most of Bermuda has been transformed into an urban area or golf courses. And there's all kinds of predators all over this formerly important seabird nesting island. The petrels used to nest throughout Bermuda, but the only nest now on just a few little isolated rocks. And the new problem for Bermuda is increasing numbers of hurricanes. You've all heard about the hurricanes. Well, the hurricane season starts earlier, it lasts longer, and the hurricanes are bigger fiercer than ever before. And meanwhile, the little petrels are nesting on these tiny little rocks that get washed over. Well, there's a new project in Bermuda to try to move the petrels, the last of them, off of these crumbling windy-roated rocks to a higher ground. Here's David Wingate holding one of these birds. And Jerry Maderas holding another. The bird has become so famous that they are now the national bird of Bermuda. And they have started new colonies using our chick restoration method developed for puffins. Hand-rearing them, they're going off, and now they're coming back to higher ground. New colonies are started. To support all of this, we have the thanks of Jim Henry at Mad River Decoy, who donated his whole company to Project Puffin, so that we can continue building and sending out decoys around the world. Mad River Canoe morphed into Mad River Decoy, and now it's Project Puffin's work. Here's one more project I want to show you in China, just to show the reach of these methods. These are Chinese crested turns, likely the rarest seabird in the world. So rare, it was thought to be extinct for about 70 years, until a few were found nesting among great crested turns. That's a Chinese crested turn in the middle with the orange bill and the little chick reaching out from under its wing, surrounded by the more common great crested turns. The reason they were so rare was that in China, the people were taking their eggs out of the colonies and selling them in markets. Plastics are a problem everywhere, including China, and this turn has got plastic on its beak. Giant snakes were swimming out and taking eggs. So a couple of Chinese researchers came to Maine, they learned about social attraction or decoy and sound attraction methods, and they started their own project for Chinese crested turns. In this picture, you can see the decoys sitting on top of cement blocks here, and they have attracted great crested turns. Let's show the decoys. And here's another picture up close. Watch carefully. We'll see the Chinese crested turn mounting a decoy. Oh my God, I love that decoy. It seems to be so a cracker decoy that barely notices a female Chinese crested turn coming in. Eventually, they keep finding each other. This story has a happy ending, and they raise the chick. The Chinese are very successful with this program, and now almost all the Chinese crested turns, it's up to almost 100 pairs of them now, are nesting in several protected islands. So where does all this go, and what we learned about this social attraction technique? Well, here's something I've wondered about is how do young birds decide where to nest, any kind of bird. As I learned about birds in college, the general idea was that if you do habitat management, the birds will come to that improved habitat. And that may apply to some land birds, but sea birds, it doesn't seem to apply to. It seems that most sea birds, particularly birds like puffins that have high faithfulness to where they hatched, need to follow the leader. So that whole model of creating habitat, and that's enough, may not apply to sea birds. In fact, it may not always apply to land birds either. I want to just show you a couple of interesting things that are happening now. This idea of social attraction, also called conspecific attraction, is now being applied to land birds, increasing numbers of places. These are purple martens. Well, they're almost all purple martens. Can you find two that are not purple martens? There they are. Those are decoys. Decoys are also attractive for starting purple marten colonies, along with the playbacks of calls. Surprisingly, playbacks of land bird calls are also attractive. The first project with this was the black cap virio. Just playing the sounds of black cap virios along the color, the Rio Grande River was enough to start colonies of black cap virios. It doesn't always work, as was demonstrated by a similar project with yellow-headed blackbirds. But projects with decoys and playback recordings have started colonies of boblinks. They've helped to boost numbers of northern bobwhites. There's projects with American redstarts now, where the playbacks resulted in higher density. If you play recordings in an existing redstart forest, you'll get even more redstarts. And black-throated blues have been attracted to habitat that isn't even black-throated blue habitat by just playing recordings. It's not just birds either. There's research now that shows that frogs also will start breeding in places if you first go there and play the recordings. Yes, it's followed the leader. Play some great tree frog calls in a pond without great tree frogs, and you'll find the real thing there. Likewise, wood frogs. Good chance. Well, I want to leave you with a few things next step. So hopefully I've got you excited about sea birds if you weren't already. And they want to go out and see some this summer. The simplest way to do this is to go on a puffin watching trip. And there are Audubon operated trips out of Booth Bay and out of New Harbor. And those go out almost daily throughout the summer, starting in mid-June. If you don't get on a boat, you can still see the puffins by watching the puffin cams on explore.org. Above ground and underground. Of course, the best way to see puffins is the way I did when I first came to Maine to go to Hog Island Audubon camp and live on this island for a week. And there's several programs this summer. It was closed last year, but it's back open this year. And I hope you'll come to Maine and be part of that program. We have created this program called Puffin Islands online. If you like online learning and you're comfortable with this, you could take part in this program. These are presentations recorded on Hog Island. Dynamic puffin experts from around the world tell you about puffins and other sea birds and how they're adapted. As was mentioned in the introduction, I have a book called Project Puffin, The Improbable Quest. For adult readers and just out the puffin plan, which is a book for 12 plus year old kids about Project Puffin. This presentation has photographs in it from many photographers. And so I thank them and the recordings are from two noted audio recordists. So this is our story. I hope you've enjoyed it. I appreciate the opportunity of sharing it with you. So I'm going to stop at this point. And I think that there, if there's been any questions all the way, I hope you've put them in the chat. If not, put your questions in the chat. I'm going to turn off the presentation here. And so that we can, we can just continue the conversation now. So thank you very much. You're welcome. Folks, I'm not sure if it was stated at the top, but if you have questions now is the time please put them in the Q&A box down below or in the chat. I think I could handle it as it as it comes in so fire away whenever you're ready. And hopefully we can get the naps to turn their cameras back on to see if they have any questions as well. I think we need to have you allow us to turn our camera on. I see asked to start video. Sorry about that. Dr. Chris, what other types of seabirds are you seeing on the rise in the Gulf, but I have been told anecdotally that laughing goals, our numbers are rising is, or have you seen that over the years. The left and go population has certainly been on the increase. At Eastern egg rock in some years we've had as many as 1200 pairs. That's in there is by far the largest colony. We also breed on Matinicus rock, and a few other spots. Notably on the increase to has been razor bills, razor bills are rapidly increasing at Matinicus rock, and at seal island. They seem to thrive among the puffins, and we're seeing them regularly visit Eastern egg rock. They have been for quite a few years now, I'm predicting someday, not in the far future they'll start nesting at egg rock. And just a few years ago, we were, we were thrilled when we had the first breeding common mirrors on on Matinicus rock so these increases in acids are fascinating aren't they because we, we hear so much about birds, extend their range further north. And it's the waters are warming and they are warming. And yet, these, these birds are moving south so I think that the probably the reason for that is that it's our ongoing management, we've relieved these populations from the pressures of predators. But to these are diving birds, particularly the razor bill and the mirrors, they're deep divers they can dive to a couple 100 feet. So, even though the fish are moving deeper as the surface waters are warm, these, these razor bills and mirrors are pre adapted for for diving so they're actually still able to find food the pump and not always it's not as deep a diver in the turns are not divers at all so they suffer more with the warming. Are razor bills and mirrors are they similarly populations that you think are being restored, or are they moving in newly so the razor bills have been breeding in Maine for about 50 years now. They were extirpated but they came back on their own, first to Matinicus rock, and then to a few other islands. They were actively restored by trans locating chicks, but the restoration projects that have favored puffins have favored razor bills and mirrors because we keep the galls and the eagles off of these nesting islands. And so, excellent nesting habitat there, which is big boulder piles is what all three species need. So they're all benefiting, I think, in part because of our management started with puffins but yeah they're benefiting as well. So we got a couple questions here first from Mary Jane she asks, could you explain again or more about how the puffins were tracked when they went out to see. So we we used a little device called a geolocator. And this is a little tag that's only a couple of grams, which means it weighs less than it than a dime. And it's attached to the leg band, and it measures the length of the day and the time of year, and it comes up with a rough estimate of latitude and longitude, based on those two variables. That's only good to within about 100 miles. So it's not a super accurate kind of thing but for getting the big picture of where the birds go. It's pretty good. And it was the only tool is still available because a puffin because they dive so deep underwater, they can't carry a tag for satellite. So this little this little tag with the with the fiberglass on it to protect it from water leaking and it's about all the weight that you could put on the burden. And they like it better when you put it on we are then been attaching to their feathers we are experimenting now with GPS tags. They're just now approaching to be small enough that we can use those as well. Well, and that's telling us about where the puffins go during the nesting season to find food. Look, we're looking for defining important feeding areas for the puffins and trying to figure out how far they go from the nesting islands. Excellent, which is amazing too because they can fly like 20 miles to see to get one big load of fish. So they're flying like 40 miles round trip for that one big load of fish. Very impressive. Another question here from James who asks, who asks, what is being done for bald eagle and paragon Falcon control, preying on some of these seabirds. Yeah, I mean this has been a surprise I mean the beginning of the project bald eagles were gone completely from coastal Maine. They did they rarely visited they never did nest in the area, but it's of course one of the great conservation success stories the return of the bald eagle but now there are so many eagles that they are a problem for birds. Now eagles prefer fish. And so there, there are problem for birds, because we have mismanaged the fishery to the point where fish are relatively scarce. So it's fine and it'll eat the birds. In fact, it's the biggest issue now for herring gulls and blackback gulls, their populations are on the decline because the eagle population is increasing the ducks, and even little ducklings eider ducks as well. Yes, I think you're losing you a little bit your break as long as we have our seasonal. Okay. Okay, as long as we have our seasonal control a seasonal resident interns on the islands that deters gulls and eagles from landing in the nesting colonies. And that's, that seems like a short term solution. But people are part of the problem. So we have to be part of the solution. Okay. And that actually bleeds into your next question we have a few minutes left here and I see two more questions so we'll, we'll, we'll think end with those. Jane asks, how is your volunteer island researcher program faring now and asked about costs associated with it. Well last summer, we were not able to put out as many people on the islands as we typically do because of coven restrictions. We didn't gather all the data we typically gather. But, but yes this program is funded annually by donations to project puff and we are part of national auto bond society science department charge with raising the full budget so people make donations, it helps keep it going. So people buy those books from project puff and store online, it all, it all helps both tours, it all helps so we're doing okay, because there's a loyal following that likes what we do and sees the value in it. Excellent. Yeah, and I did want to shout out quickly Sue Schuble who had some photos in that presentation. Obviously seabird Sue and I was also the president of the mid coast main Audubon chapter sister chapter to Western mate. It's great to see her in there right. So I'll go with the final question and I'll turn it back over to Nancy to wrap things up. Camilla asks, if the eggs hatch in Labrador wouldn't the birds go back there. Good question. Camilla. When would project started we didn't know. But yes the eggs hatch in in Newfoundland that's where we collect them. And we moved the chicks at about two weeks are gambling. As we did that somehow they the learning of where home was what happened after two weeks. We really didn't want to move chicks or eggs. It's been much more difficult and incubating them and booting the chicks so we, we, we, we began the project at the life cycle where the chicks were already able to maintain their body temperatures, and all we had to do is provide food. It was a gamble. It was a gamble that we had to play over the long haul of the program. Remember eight years before the first breeding visit turned out. And that is apparently happens sometime after two weeks probably inside the borough as the chick matures, and then heads off to see. So, we learned that by trial and air, and it was a lucky gamble that paid off and that's why the puffins are back. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your work Dr crests. And I'm going to turn it back over to Nancy now. Thanks Nick. That was a wonderful presentation and I love the fact it's upbeat and shows the successes that are happening all around the country for sure and elsewhere. I imagine. So thank you very much Dr crests for giving us your time. Really appreciate it. Thanks all for attending. Remember the warbler walk on May 8 that 7am at the whistle stop trail. Thank you in a month to discuss peregrine Falcons. And we'll sign off. Thanks Nick. Yeah, bye everyone.