A bird’s-eye view of climate change
On a remote, craggy cliff 18 miles off the coast of Maine, a parent waits. Weepy-eyed and web-footed, the pudgy, painted puffin braces against a capricious wind — and fickle foothold.
At last count, hardscrabble Eastern Egg Rock was home to 150 breeding pairs of Atlantic puffins, each vying to incubate a one-per-season puffball in burrows carved beneath boulders. Having clawed back from the brink — in 1901, only one puffin pair remained in Maine — climate change is now poised to do its own number on these charismatic birds. As last month’s scientific audit, “The State of North America’s Birds” warns, 49% of the continent’s seabirds are caught up in the crisis.
Thursday night, Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, will speak to climate change at the Democratic National Convention. The issue has put politicians at odds, galvanized voters and saddled scientists with a burden of proof.
Birds are used to being in human’s sights. Not too long ago, our American bald eagle was in danger of vanishing in a puff. Patriotic symbolism couldn’t shield it from human activity: hunting, habitat squandering, pesticide use. It took the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to restore that bird to its perch of power.
Also in 1973, a young ornithologist — a diminutive Don Quixote named Stephen Kress — got into the recovery act.
“It was love at first sight,” Kress, 70, says of first viewing puffins as a teen near the U.S.Canadian border. He learned they once flourished in Maine, the southernmost limit of their range, but by 1885 the effects of agri-fishers raiding the henhouse, daily plucking eggs from rocky crevices and laying nets on ledges to snare meaty adults, had taken a grievous toll.
Not abiding by fate, Kress ne- gotiated with the Canadians for six puffin chicks to try re-colonizing 7-acre Eastern Egg Rock. Backed by the National Audubon Society and Barbara’s, maker of Puffins cereal, he worked through the decades-long “jigsaw puzzle” of Project Puffin. Their team hand-reared “pufflings” with vitamin-fortified fish in man-made burrows and stationed interns from May to Au- gust to keep predators, like eagles, at bay. Fledged puffins set out on two- to three-year sea cruises while scientists set up sound recordings, decoys and mirrors to lure them home. And waited. Eight years later, the first prodigal puffin pair returned to roost. Things were looking pretty peachy until waters in the Gulf of Maine began rising faster than 99% of the Earth’s oceans, Kress says, throwing delicate fish populations out of whack.
Audubon’s annual Christmas bird count reveals nearly 350 North American birds are “climate-affected,” moving farther north. “For those species that are already farther north, they’ve got nowhere to go,” Kress says. “Their fate, their future, really is in our hands.”
Last weekend, I saw it firsthand, setting foot on the puffins’ hallowed breeding grounds, a towering babble of gulls, guillemots and terns situated 17 precarious feet above sea level.
An all-female summer squad yanked us ashore. Among their duties: Daily at 0600, one climbs atop the shack, ironically dubbed “The Hilton,” for a bird census. They label active burrows, tag birds and monitor avian diets and growth. By luck, we spy an adult puffin whiz by at high speed, a bowtie of sushi dangling from its slack-jawed rainbow beak, only to disappear underground. Interns fish out the baby for inspection. Puffin chicks’ weights are steadily declining, they sadly report.
The changes for these colorful birds come in dribs and drabs.
“Ocean conservation is a hard thing for people to understand because it’s happening underwater, and you can’t see most of it,” Kress explains. “But seabirds are above ground, so we can see through their eyes.”
Dimpled, tears-of-a-clown eyes. In ill-fitting waistcoats, they wait. For a meal. A mate. Another morning.
Ever facing forward, because, to quote Emily Dickinson, “hope is the thing with feathers.”