Decoys, Mirrors, Birdsong, and Pairs of Puffins: Bringing the Puffin Home to Maine

A Unique Idea that Worked to Bring Them Home

Almost extinct by the 1970s, Maine’s puffin population on several coastal islands made a dramatic turnaround due to the biologist, Dr. Stephen Kress, who thought: Why not recreate the puffins’ habitat as nature had created it to bring them home to Maine?  Dr. Kress's first attempt to bring puffins home to Maine began on Eastern Egg Rock, a small island of about 7 acres off the coast from Boothbay Harbor.  Before the late 1900s, offshore islands were home to hundreds of puffin pairs, but human actions on the islands had destroyed the birds’ habitat.  Dr. Kress’s idea was straightforward, though maybe not ‘scientific’ enough for some biologists.  To Dr. Kress, the idea was logical: Recreate the destroyed habitat where the puffins had once lived and thrived before, surmising that puffins would want to return to a place where their natural habitat had been readied for them. Some scientists called his methods ‘impossible', but what Dr. Kress’s method did to bring the puffins home worked, and it worked naturally.    
Influenced by Nature at an early age.