Science / Medicine : Call to the Wild : Taped Bird Sounds, Wooden Decoys Used to Lure Puffins and Other Shore Fowl to Abandoned Habitats

From the blind on Maine’s Seal Island, you can see the distinctive triangular orange, yellow and blue bill, chunky body, and black and white feathers of the Atlantic puffin, perhaps the most photogenic of all sea birds. You can also hear the deep, cow-like calls from what must be a puffin colony lying just beyond the rocky cliff ahead.

After a minute of watching, though, you realize that the birds haven’t moved--they’re decoys, and the puffin sounds you’ve been hearing are actually coming from a solar-powered tape recorder hidden in the island’s scrub.

But then, you see what many might say is a miracle: Several adult puffins, their wings flapping at a furious pace of 300 to 400 beats a minute, land near the decoys. The birds eye the decoys curiously, but the live birds don’t seem put off by their wooden brethren. In fact, the fakes appear to make the real puffins seem right at home.

And that’s just the point. “Puffins are gregarious, social birds, and they’ll only nest where there are other puffins,” said Stephen W. Kress, a visiting scholar at Cornell University and director of the Puffin Project, a joint project of the National Audubon Society and the Canadian Wildlife Service aimed at reintroducing puffins to the United States. “So the only way to get puffins to come to a place where they’ve been absent for a hundred years is to fool young adult birds into thinking that there’s a colony already there. That’s what the decoys and tape-recordings are all about.’

The Puffin Project, undertaken in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is one of several attempts by biologists to reintroduce sea and shore birds into habitats they once occupied. Along the Maine coast, puffins, terns--which resemble slender gulls--and petrels--small, swallow-like birds--are the object of researchers’ attention. These efforts are serving as models for similar efforts in the Great Lakes, where the common tern is anything but, the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand and Japan. In addition, scientists are struggling to preserve the few remaining light-footed clapper rails and California least tern, both endangered shore birds.

“What we’re trying to do is give these endangered birds as many high-quality nesting sites as possible to provide a buffer against both natural and man-made disasters that can so easily devastate fragile bird populations,” said Barbara Massey, an adjunct professor at Cal State Long Beach.

For example, during the last El Nino--a cyclic disturbance of world weather patterns that may disrupt the birds’ food supply--the number of pairs of the endangered California least tern dropped from 2,000 to 600 in one year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is using decoys to attract least terns and light-footed clapper rails to secured nesting areas at Bolsa Chica, Playa del Rey and the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge.

Sea and shore birds, like countless other species, have dwindled in number because of the presence of humans. In the Galapagos Islands, for example, ships have not only brought Charles Darwin and countless tourists, but also rats, which have a hearty appetite for the eggs of dark-rumped petrels. In California, many beach-nesting clapper rails and terns have beendriven away by off-road vehicles, ocean-front houses and summer volleyball games. And in the Great Lakes, commercial shipping and other industrial activity has--in addition to polluting--disrupted the breeding behavior of terns.

Elsewhere in the United States, though, it was the puffin that suffered most drastically at the hands of humans. In the early 1800s, thousands of “sea parrots,” as sailors called these clowns of the sea, nested on the rocky islands off the Maine coast. About a foot in length, puffins belong to the auk family, which also includes penguins and the extinct great auk. Each summer, thousands of birds would come ashore to form large colonies and build their burros in the rocky crags and barren soil.

With luck, each puffin pair would rear one chick from the two eggs the female laid. Come fall, the adults and fledglings would depart for parts unknown somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. The chicks would vanish for several years, while the adults would return the following summer to the same island to breed once again, often with the same mate at the same nesting site.

By 1901, biologists recorded only one pair of puffins returning to Matinicus Rock, about 70 miles east-northeast of Portland in outer Penobscot Bay. These were the last of Maine’s puffins. The rest had been killed for the cause of fashion and food: Their beautiful feathers were sought as hat decorations, and puffin omelets were a local delicacy. Also contributing to the puffins’ demise was the spread of gulls and cormorants, aggressive species that thrive in humanity’s shadow. They scavenge food from coastal fisheries and garbage dumps and compete with the more passive puffin for breeding territory. Gulls also eat puffin eggs and chicks.

Nearly 20 years ago, the National Audubon Society and the Canadian Wildlife Service launched the Puffin Project to learn how to restore puffins to U.S. waters. The project was headed by Kress and fellow Audubon Society biologist Richard Podolsky. David N. Nettleship of the Canadian Wildlife Service was also involved in the research. For the first decade, the biologists studied the nesting and feeding habits of puffins living on Great Island, Newfoundland, where puffins had hung on and now thrive. The researchers also surveyed the Maine islands looking for suitable places to establish puffin colonies. They eventually settled on two: Eastern Egg Rock and Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge.

During their studies, Puffin Project researchers learned that at about two months after hatching, puffin chicks stumble to the rocky shore, flutter into the sky and head to sea. They vanish for two to three years, and where they go is still anyone’s guess. During this time, says Kress, chick mortality is high, ranging from 50% to 95% a year, but once a puffin reaches adulthood, mortality drops to about 5% a year.

At age 2 or 3, puffins will return to the North Atlantic coast and begin searching for a colony to join, though they do not actually breed until they are 5 years old. Usually, the young adults will visit a number of colonies before making their choice, “but once a puffin commits itself to an island,” said Kress, “it returns to that same island every summer for the rest of its life.” Puffins can live over 30 years in the wild.

The researchers also found that they could entice young puffins to at least explore sites containing decoys, so they decided to include decoys as part of any attempt to repopulate the Maine islands. For added help, Kress turned to the Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, the world’s largest collection of recorded bird calls. The staff there helped him assemble a variety of puffin noises into a tape that would serve as an auditory enticement to go along with the visual lure of the decoys.

Then, from the summer of 1984 through the summer of 1989, the Puffin Project team, which included over 100 graduate students, student interns and volunteers, transplanted more than 2,000 puffin eggs from Great Island to the two islands, which had been cleared of gulls by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The workers hand-reared the baby puffins in sod burrows, and attached yellow, coded bands to their legs before the chicks waddled off to sea.

The first few years of the project were disappointing, as only a few puffins from Eastern Egg Rock and Seal Island returned, and none nested there. The only good news was that some unbanded adult puffins not reared on the islands did nest on Eastern Egg Rock--lured, perhaps, by the decoys, calls and freedom from gulls.

But then, in 1988 and 1989, researchers spotted a number of young puffins sporting the yellow leg bands on Eastern Egg Rock. And last year, 52 Seal Island transplants returned to either their birthplace or neighboring Matinicus Rock in July and spent the summer. In addition, many unbanded birds also joined the colony.

It is still too early to tell if these colonies will be stable, but Kress is optimistic: 15 pairs of puffins nested at Eastern Egg Rock last summer, and this summer some of the Seal Island puffins will be old enough to mate. “It’s going to be an exciting summer on Seal Island,” he said. “Last summer, some of the young birds explored the rock crevices on the island, suggesting that they were already beginning to prospect for nesting burrows. We’ll just have to see what they do next.”

The birds have returned this summer and scientists are watching their activity closely.

Meanwhile, the Puffin Project has branched out, employing the same techniques of eliminating gull populations and using decoys and tapes to attract Arctic terns to the same islands that now house puffins. Arctic terns had also suffered for women’s fashions--their feathers were in even greater demand by the millinery trade--though tern populations had rebounded in the 1920s and 1930s after passage of the 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Still, Arctic tern colonies had become sufficiently small that they became easy prey for advancing populations of herring gulls and great black-backed gulls. By 1989, only eight colonies remained on Maine islands, down from 18 in 1984.

But the tide may have turned for the terns in 1989, when the 17 pairs nested on Seal Island and an Arctic tern chick hatched there--the first in 35 years. In 1990, the tern colony increased to 270 pairs. Similar increases were seen on nearby Stratton Island, where a record 217 tern pairs nested last summer, and on Eastern Egg Rock and Matinicus Rock.

This is good news for Maine’s puffins as well, for puffin chicks seem to survive better when terns nest nearby. The reason may be that terns aggressively defend their nests against attack by gulls, and adult puffins seem to be able to learn this behavior from the terns.

Nevertheless, Kress said, active management at key nesting sites is still essential for tern and puffin populations to continue growing.

“If we stopped helping these birds today, their numbers would almost certainly suffer serious declines once again,” Kress said.

Puffins at a Glance

Here is a look at the Atlantic puffin: SIZE: Usually 11.5 to 13 inches tall; stubby bird. STRIKING FEATURES: Triangular, black, bill covered with curved, brilliantly striped sheaths. Black and white bodies, similar to small penguins. RANGE: Puffin colonies are found on both sides of the North Atlantic, as well as in Greenland and in the North and Barents seas. MATING HABITS: Puffins do not breed until they are 4 to 5 years old, and they usually mate for life. Puffin mates return to the same burrow each year. When one mate dies, the other bird will find a new mate. Surviving males return to their old burrows, but surviving females find new burrows. NUMBER OF CHICKS: 1-2 per year. FEEDING HABITS: Puffins will fly up to 35 miles to hunt for food. They dive to depths of 80 feet to catch a variety of fish, including sand eels, capelin, squid and butterfish. A puffin will emerge from the water with several fish hanging neatly from a bill. MIGRATORY HABITS: Puffins leave burrows each fall for the sea. Scientists have been unable to determine where puffins go during the winter.