As soon as I’d scrambled across the rock weed to get onto Eastern Egg Rock and laid eyes on Theresa Rizza’s hat, I knew I was in trouble.
Rizza, a 28-year-old bird researcher from California and seasonal supervisor on this 7-acre island bird sanctuary off the coast of Maine, was wearing a broad-brimmed hat completely covered in bird excrement. Kat Lane, 22, a researcher from Ottawa, Ontario, was wearing a similar hat, also richly adorned with guano.
Besides the hundreds of puffins that come here to breed, this island, which sits exposed to the
Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of Muscongus Bay, is the nesting place for multiple bird species, including a couple thousand terns and hundreds of laughing gulls.
Rizza and Lane informed me that the avians didn’t take kindly to people who got too close to their unborn charges. Depositing a load of fecal matter onto interlopers’ heads was just one of their ways to express their displeasure. I was wearing a mesh baseball cap and I was about to get shat on.
Up to that point, my trip to Eastern Egg Rock had been perfectly lovely. Earlier in the day, I’d met Don Lyons, director of conservation science for the Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute, at the organization’s waterfront facility in Bremen, Maine. Besides delivering supplies to the island, Lyons was also transporting seasonal employee Ke Coco Deng and volunteer Harper Brown to their weeks-long stints on Eastern Egg Rock.
Deng, 19, grew up birdwatching on a flyway in Shenzhen, China. She recently graduated from Bard College at Simon’s Rock with a degree in environmental studies/ecology and visual studies. Deng had spent a previous summer on Stratton Island, one of the Audubon Society’s six other Maine island seabird colonies. There she had held a black guillemot chick in her hands and fallen in love with Alcids—the short-legged, short-winged, web-footed divers of the bird world, a family that also includes puffins. Deng was headed to Eastern Egg Rock for a 10-week research stint and was looking forward to getting close enough to the puffins to see “the color of their irises and to count the scales on their feet.”
Brown, 20, an animal science student at Penn State University, was volunteering as a “Project Puffin” research assistant. She’d already spent two weeks on Pond Island, another of the Society’s Maine island seabird sanctuaries, and would be spending another two weeks on what the island’s researchers simply referred to as “Egg.”
After loading Luna III, the Institute’s 23-foot Seaway, with food, personal gear and a half dozen 20-liter jerry cans of potable water, everyone donned Mustang life jackets while Lyons fired up the 115-hp Mercury outboard. Despite her advanced years, the Downeast hull looked tough enough to cross Muscongus Bay, a place that can be nasty. But not on this day.
With a gentle breeze and a following sea, we covered the 8 miles to the island in 30 minutes. Lyons had told me the supply runs had to be scheduled on good weather days, since Eastern Egg Rock doesn’t have a harbor or dock, and ocean surge can make landings difficult. Everything and everyone would be ferried onto the island with an inflatable kept on the island.
As we retrieved the mooring line, the island’s third resident, Arden Kelly, clad in a one-piece Mustang anti-exposure work suit, was already aboard the 8-foot Achilles.
Rowing a hard-bottomed inflatable on the sea can be tough work, especially when wind, waves, swell and current are at play, but Kelly, 24, was up to the task, pulling on the oars like an experienced hand. She had worked as a rafting guide in the Berkshires and told me that rowing made for a perfect break from island life. The Bostonian had discovered the Audubon Society’s Project Puffin while studying environmental sciences and wildlife biology in Montreal. In 2022, she’d served as an educational outreach assistant for the program and spent 9 days on Eastern Egg Rock. This year she’d been hired for a three-month stint on the island.
With everyone ashore, Rizza gave us instructions on how to make our way to the top of Egg without killing anything. Eastern Egg Rock is covered with bird nests, including on the foot trails, which makes it akin to walking through a minefield. If you make a mistake, you won’t die, but you could commit involuntary avicide.
Eastern Egg Rock is famous among bird experts because it’s home to the world’s first restored seabird colony. For millennia, this treeless granite ledge was a natural nesting place for puffins, terns, eiders and other birds. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, humans would make their way to the nesting islands, gather the eggs and shoot the birds for their meat and feathers, nearly eradicating them.
Then, in 1973, Dr. Steve Kress, a wildlife management expert, created Project Puffin. He reintroduced puffins to the island and pioneered new methods to get puffin and tern colonies reestablished on Eastern Egg Rock.
That first year, five puffin chicks from Newfoundland were raised on the Audubon Society’s nearby Hog Island and transferred to Eastern Egg Rock, where they spent two weeks under the watchful eyes of researchers. The idea was to imprint the island on the birds’ brains in the hope they would accept it as their natural home and return there to mate. The next year, 21 chicks were raised entirely on Eastern Egg Rock, with protection from researchers. Over the subsequent decades, nearly 1,000 young puffins were released on site. By 1981, five pairs of puffins were nesting on the island and by 2017 there were more than 172 pairs. In 1980, the terns also began nesting here—today there are about 1,000 pairs, including roseate terns, an endangered species hit hard by the early-20th-century plume industry.
The island is fringed by massive granite boulders, which provide burrow space for puffins and guillemots who hide their nests inside the crevices. The interior of the island is dominated by dense pasture grasses interspersed with raspberry and elderberry bushes and is home to ground nesters, including laughing gulls, eiders and terns.
Besides humans there are no mammals on Eastern Egg Rock, and it is far enough from the mainland to prevent wingless predators from getting there. However, winged predators, like herring and black-backed gulls are a real threat. When Kress started Project Puffin, lethal force had to be used to rid the island of the gulls that had taken over. Researchers still employ non-lethal means to keep winged predators at bay. Rizza explained that nowadays hazing is used to scare the winged predators by pointing, clapping and sometimes firing fireworks toward them. She told me of a bald eagle that showed up to prey on the puffins. “We fired a screamer, and it ducked in the air,” she said. “Then we watched a hundred teeny tiny terns chasing off this big eagle. It was really impressive.”
Rizza, who has worked on other conservation projects and islands, says that seeing all the chicks hatch and fledge is one of the best parts of the job. But sometimes Mother Nature throws a curveball.
“The hardest part of the job,” she said, “occurs in bad years—when the ocean has gotten so hot it causes the fish to seek cooler water, which means the parents are not able to feed their chicks. Or when storms hit at critical points in the lives of the chicks. There isn’t really anything you can do to prevent baby birds from dying. While death is inherently a part of life and very common on a seabird colony, it is very hard in those seasons when it kills most of the chicks that hatched that summer.”
Living on an island for three months with just a few other people can be isolating, but there are visitors, and light moments. As Lane and Kelly secured the inflatable, Hardy Boat Cruises showed up for its twice-daily puffin cruise. Loaded with tourists, the boat also had an Audubon Society employee aboard to talk about the birds. Kelly, who spotted the boat first, encouraged the researchers to wave to the Hardy boat occupants, who all waved back. She then broke into YMCA dance mode and got many of the tourists to do it as well.
As we walked up to the researchers’ camp at the top of the island and approached the tern nests, the birds alighted, protesting loudly. Common terns may look like small birds, but they have a 31-inch wingspan, are extremely agile and can hover over a target like a helicopter. They can hang over a fish and dive into the water to catch it, but they’re also capable of pecking human heads. Intent on protecting their unborn children, the terns didn’t take long to use their sharp beaks to strike my balding pate through my cap.
The researchers’ camp is shockingly simple, especially when you consider that some of them live there for three straight months without getting off the island. There is no running water. Drinking water is transported from the mainland and the rare shower comes from a solar-powered bag filled with rainwater. The head is a small metal-roofed outhouse with a composting toilet. Sleeping accommodations are 8- by 8-foot platforms where the researchers pitch their tents, which are covered by tarps to protect them from UV deterioration and bird droppings. For decades, a 12- by 12-foot cabin dubbed the “Egg Rock Hilton” served as the hub of the camp, giving the residents a kitchen and a place to gather. But over the 2024 winter, two massive January storms knocked the Hilton off its perch, making it uninhabitable.
While the researchers put away their supplies and Deng and Brown got used to their new surroundings, Lyons, who studied birds all over the world and spent 20 years at Oregon State University where he still lectures, suggested that we make our way to the large blind on the eastern end of the island so I could observe the puffins.
While walking ahead of me, he showed me how waving my hand over my head would discourage tern attacks. It worked, mostly. Fortunately, the laughing gulls, although just as ticked as the terns when forced off their nests, were not nearly as aggressive.
Once inside the blind, Lyons quickly spotted a puffin that had climbed out of its burrow. I had seen puffins from afar before, but up close, I could see why their large, triangular, orange, black and yellow bills earned them the nickname sea parrots. Over the next hour, we watched more of the Alcids come out from among the granite slabs. They’d waddle up to the highest rock they could find, hesitantly flap their short wings as if they were trying to build up the courage to throw themselves off their perch, and then launch themselves. Sometimes they would abort a flight attempt, waddle back up the rock to try again, and finally get airborne. Flying back to the island, they would circle their intended landing spot and then make a landing that looked more like a navy plane slamming down on an aircraft carrier than a jetliner gliding onto a long runway. Throughout, the entertainment value was high and they lived up to their other nickname, the clown of the sea.
Lyons explained that puffins are not optimized for flight, but purpose-built for underwater hunting. Long wings will slow a bird underwater, but short ones will allow them to swim faster to catch fish. Having seen other puffins in flight and having been amazed at their speed, I asked Lyons if it was true that they could go 50 miles per hour. “More like 35,” he said, explaining that because their wings are so small they have a much higher wingbeat than a lot of other birds—as much as 400 beats per minute.
We rejoined the others for an egg count, which the researchers explained would intensify the tern attacks. Rizza offered me a leather garden glove, which I inserted underneath my cap. I also put on my Helly Hansen jacket while Lane handed me a little surveying flag, which she said would keep the terns away if I waved it over my head. Everyone wore outfits to protect themselves. Deng, for instance, wore a shortened graduation robe with the cut off pieces attached to her hat to protect her hair.
Inside a fenced-off area, the terns’ attacks were fierce. Their protests were so loud, that Lane and Kelly had to yell out the numbers. And yet they stood in the nesting area unfazed, terns circling them like bees around a hive.
As we walked to the next nesting area, a bird bomb exploded on the right sleeve of my blue Helly Hansen. I had been hit. Lane turned around and smiled. “There’s your badge of honor.”
This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue.
