The Puffin Plan
Restoring Seabirds to Egg Rock and Beyond
Fifty years ago, a young ornithologist named Steve Kress fell in love with penguins. After learning that hunting had eradicated their colonies on small, rocky islands off the coast of Maine, he resolved to bring them back. So began a decades-long quest that involved collecting chicks in Canada, flying them to Maine, raising them in coffee-can nests, transporting them to their new island home, watching over them as they grew, and then waiting - for years - to see if they would come back. This is the story of how the Puffin Project reclaimed a piece of our rich biological heritage, and how it inspired other groups around the world to help other species re-root in their native lands.
Derrick Z. Jackson is an award-winning former columnist for the Boston Globe. An accomplished photographer, his column was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and his UCS blog won a 2018 first prize from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Stephen W. Kress is a world-renowned ornithologist and Executive Director of the National Audubon Society's Seabird Restoration Program. He teaches at Cornell University, where he is a Laboratory Associate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.
