Posted July 26, 2010 by Lauren in Client News and Reviews
A Puffin Comeback
Atlantic puffins had nearly vanished from the Maine coast until a young biologist defied conventional wisdom to lure them home
By Michelle Nijhuis, Smithsonian magazine, June 2010
"By 1901, only a single pair of Atlantic puffins was known to nest in the United States—on Matinicus Rock, a barren island 20 miles from the Maine coast. Wildlife enthusiasts paid the lighthouse keeper to protect the two birds from hunters.
Things began to change in 1918, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act banned the killing of many wild birds in the United States. Slowly, puffins returned to Matinicus Rock.
But not to the rest of Maine. Islands that puffins had once inhabited had become enemy territory, occupied by colonies of large, aggressive, predatory gulls that thrived on the debris generated by a growing human population. Though puffins endured elsewhere in their historic range—the...
