The puff(in) piece we all need right now

With all the craziness going on in our country – and the world – there’s no better time to broach a subject of fascination… the Atlantic puffin. Consider a piece on puffins, you might say, before you spend the next four months immersed in the bloody sport of political season.

Their brilliantly colored beaks and tuxedo feathers make these extraordinary birds look like a cross between the king penguin and Toucan Sam, the animated Froot Loops cereal spokesman most of us can remember. The puffin may be small in size, waddle cutely, and look like a child’s toy, but its tenacity for survival is nothing short of inspiring.

In the United States of America, this bird is only found in Maine.

A few months ago, my wife and I realized that we’d been living here for a few years, but had never seen these iconic creatures of our adopted home state. So she made reservations, which culminated in our boat trip a few weekends ago from Port Clyde to Eastern Egg Island, the rocky home to hundreds of nesting pairs of Atlantic puffins.

We also saw seals and sea eagles, and lobsters pulled from a local trap, but we were both charmed by these strange little sea birds.

Yes, at first because they’re so incredibly cute – they’re known as “the clown of the sea” – but the more we learned about them, the more fascinated we became. We happened upon the Project Puffin Visitor Center in downtown Rockland, Maine, after our cruise and bought a bunch of puffin trinkets for the family – keychains, stickers, even a stuffed animal.

These puffins’ wings are small, but they can fly (unlike penguins). Their beaks look short on their cartoonishly large heads, but when they dive underwater, they can collect various small fish to bring back to their young. It also turns out that the Atlantic puffin is the official bird of Newfoundland, Canada—my father’s mother’s birthplace—and in fact, half of the species that live in North America breed there in Witless Bay, according to Cornell University.

What I find truly amazing is how these beautiful birds spend most of the year – including the coldest months – on the open seas of the Atlantic Ocean.

Susan Meadows, manager of the Project Puffin Center in Rockland, says puffins typically return to the island where they began their lives during mating season. Females lay only one egg each season. It takes about six weeks for the egg to hatch and another six weeks for the chicks to be strong enough to go to sea. According to Meadows, it takes another three to five years for them to return to their nesting island.

“Baby puffins are not raised in open seawater, but young puffins (6 weeks or older) mature fully on the water,” she said. “Puffins usually mate for life, but if they are unable to raise a healthy young or if a partner dies at sea, they will find another partner.”

They live for about 30 years; the oldest puffin ever recorded lived to be 41 years old.

Hunted for their meat, feathers and eggs, by 1901 only one pair of puffins remained nesting on Matinicus Rock off the coast of Maine, although small colonies remained on Petit Manan and Machias Seal Islands, Meadows says. In 1973, an ornithologist named Dr. Stephen Kress brought five puffin chicks to these Maine islands from Newfoundland. He and his colleagues transported another 2,000 by 1989.

Today, the three islands managed by Project Puffin—Eastern Egg Rock, Matinicus Rock, and Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge—are home to more than a thousand breeding pairs of puffins. Machias Seal Island has more than 8,500 pairs.

“They are also in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Scandinavian Islands and Russia,” Meadows said.

For the sake of completeness: there are two other species of puffins: the horned puffin and the tufted puffin. These are both found in Alaska and spend the winter in California, among other places.

“Puffins are extremely resilient,” Meadows noted. “They can withstand 100-foot waves, and the data we’re collecting shows them adapting to a changing environment.”

I think it’s really cool that Maine is the only state that can claim the Atlantic puffin as a resident, even if it’s only during the warmer months. Think about it: the only way people can see these remarkable seabirds in the U.S. is by taking a boat to one of the small islands off our coast.

If you do, you’re in for a spectacle.

For more information, visit Project Puffin Visitor Center | Audubon Seabird Institute. The center, located at 311 Main Street in Rockland, is part of the Audubon Seabird Institute.

D. Allan Kerr is quite certain that we will soon be embroiled in the dirty business of national politics.

This article originally appeared in the Portsmouth Herald: Kerr: The piece we all need now