For the tweeters that attended the Maine ABA conference this year and others interested in a successful program, here's an article worth reading.

Valerie Elliott
Olympia, WA

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/science/29bird.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=science&pagewanted=print
The New York Times
August 29, 2006
Trying to Export the Success of a Maine Seabird Program
By MURRAY CARPENTER

EASTERN EGG ROCK, Me. - On a summer day, this treeless seven-acre island at the seaward edge of Muscongus Bay attracts visitors from around the world. The arctic terns screeching overhead wintered in Antarctica, the puffins flying in out of the fog with herring stacked crosswise in their colorful bills came here to nest from waters well offshore, and the seabird biologist Lei Cao traveled more than 6,000 miles from China to work and learn here.

In the last few years, biologists from developing countries have joined the seabirds that summer on Maine's islands to learn the techniques that Project Puffin of the National Audubon Society has used to bring seabirds back to Maine. In addition to Dr. Cao, Marlenne Rodr?guez of Ensenada, Mexico, and Carlos Zavalaga and Gina Mori, both of Lima, Peru, are spending the summer on islands managed by the project.

Sitting on a driftwood bench near the guano-spattered tents that are the biologists' summer homes and with downy tern chicks waddling by her feet, Dr. Cao said she had spent the past three years studying red-footed boobies on tropical Dong Island in the Xisha Archipelago of the South China Sea.

The colony that is the focus of her research here has an estimated 35,500 breeding pairs of these tree-nesting, diving seabirds. In 2005, Dr. Cao also helped organize a survey of water birds along the lower Yangtze River floodplain, from Three Gorges Dam to Shanghai, important wintering grounds for more than a half-million swans, ducks and geese.

Although she has been rotating through each of the project's six staffed islands this summer, Dr. Cao said she was particularly excited to be on Eastern Egg Rock, where Project Puffin began 33 years ago.

In 1973, this island was dominated by black-backed and herring gulls. Terns had not nested on the island for decades, and puffins were last seen nesting here in 1885.

Stephen W. Kress began an experiment that has brought back puffins and terns to this and other Maine islands.

He said his work was based on restoring the nesting habitat and controlling predators, especially the large gulls that had taken over since other seabirds were hunted out 100 years earlier. His team relocated puffin chicks from thriving colonies in Newfoundland to specially constructed burrows here and fed them by hand. They used decoys and recorded calls to lure puffins and terns to the nesting grounds. And they staffed the island each breeding season to ensure that the large gulls, which do not like to nest around people, would not return.

Eastern Egg Rock now has 70 pairs of breeding puffins. There are also good numbers of Leach's storm-petrels, black guillemots and laughing gulls, as well as healthy colonies of common and arctic terns and the largest roseate tern colony in the Gulf of Maine.

Project Puffin has grown to include 7 year-round employees and, in the summer field season, 20 interns and supervisors living on six islands. The project works in partnership with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, which owns this island, and the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

The foreign biologists are trained in seabird restoration and also become infused with the spirit of the project.

"When you are in the middle of a colony, it makes it all seem real," said Dr. Kress, seated in a plywood blind with laughing gulls perched inches above his head and guillemots flying past with rock eels dangling from their bills. "And you realize that none of the birds would be here without active management."

Imperiled seabirds worldwide have benefited from the restoration techniques pioneered in Maine, Dr. Kress said. Biologists have used decoys to establish new breeding grounds for the critically endangered short-tailed albatross on the Japanese island of Torishima (the primary colony there is threatened by eruptions from an active volcano) and have used recorded calls to encourage cahows (Bermuda petrels) to nest on higher ground as their nesting islands disintegrate.

Jo Hiscock, who spent the summers of 2004 and 2005 with Project Puffin, is working for the New Zealand Department of Conservation protecting Chatham Island taiko petrels from predators; once thought to be extinct, fewer than 150 of the birds remain.

Since 2003, the Herz International Seabird Fellowship of the Audubon Society has been supporting visiting biologists. Ms. Rodriguez is this year's Herz fellow.

On a rare evening on the mainland, at the project headquarters in Bremen, she said she was pleased to be learning transferable skills, "especially the social attraction techniques." She works for the Island Conservation and Ecology Group protecting seabird islands on the Pacific Coast of Mexico and will begin graduate school in September at the Institute of Ecology in Veracruz.

Mr. Zavalaga is spending his fourth summer as a supervisor on Seal Island in outer Penobscot Bay. A Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Mr. Zavalaga is focused on blue-footed and Nazca boobies in the Gal?pagos Islands.

Speaking over a tenuous cellphone connection from the remote island, Mr. Zavalaga said he hoped to apply his Maine experiences to restoring terns in Peru.

Three species of terns nest in Peru, and another was recently lost, the South American tern.

"In Peru, it was reported to have up to three colonies,'' Mr. Zavalaga said. "I was witness to the disappearance of the last one," on Isla la Vieja. "I saw the colony in 1996. But they had problems. On the island they had a lot of people disturbance and dogs and everything else. It was a disaster."

Dr. Kress said it was sometimes difficult to export the restoration techniques that have been so successful on the Maine islands. "That's one of the big challenges for developing countries," he said. "It's one thing to go back inspired. It's another to get funding for a project."

A habitual list maker, Dr. Cao said she had seen 137 species of birds in the United States this summer. Her favorite? "Puffin, puffin of course," she said. "They are so cute - tiny, very round, the large bill."

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