We went to Maine this year with two missions: (1) learn about (and eat) lobsters and (2) see some puffins. Maybe if we got a little greedy we'd add in see some humpback whales breaching and feeding (that's not too much to ask, is it?) and do a little sightseeing in Acadia National Park. But lobsters and puffins were for sure must sees (and eats). Couldn't go home without checking those boxes. No way!!
To take care of all our missions (and a greed list item), we booked three cruises in our three full days in state: a lobster tour out of Bailey Island close to Portland; a puffin cruise out of Milbridge; and a whale watch boat ride out of Bar Harbor where we were staying three of our four nights. We had an awesome plan. Just perfect.
But things did not go according to plan. We found ourselves on Sunday morning (the last full day we were in Maine) having not set foot on a single boat. Lobster tour? Cancelled due to the captain recovering from surgery. Puffin cruise? Cancelled due to fog. Whale watch boat? Cancelled due to winds. Maine was shaping up to be the 2020 of our 2021 vacations. Nothing was going our way. We did manage to reschedule the lobster tour but didn't whale watch at all and were left with precious few last minute options to find puffins.
So we pivoted. We moved (for a small fee) our noonish flight out of Bangor to a 5ish flight out of Portland and we told Avis we'd be bringing the car back to PWM instead of to BGR (for another small fee) so we could squeeze in a 10 a.m. puffin cruise out of Boothbay Harbor. A 6:15 a.m. departure out of Bar Harbor got us there with an hour to spare. And at 10 in the morning on the last Monday in June, with our flight home about seven hours away, our hopes of seeing puffins on this trip rested in the hands of a tour operator called Cap'n Fish. Here went nothing. And everything.
Our target that Monday morning was Eastern Egg Rock, a small island (or maybe rock in the ocean is a better term) about an hour's travel by Cap'n Fish boat from Boothbay Harbor. With 60 minutes travel each way and a 2-1/2 hour total tour time, that would give us about 30 minutes or so at the Island itself to observe hundreds upon hundreds of puffins swimming, flying, nesting and eating. Or so we hoped.
Maybe a few words about puffins is useful at this point.
Puffins are a true pelagic bird, which means they spend most of their time at sea alone looking for food. Yep, these milk-carton-sized birds that look like footballs with wings spend nine to ten months each year on the open ocean traveling and eating without setting foot on land. The other couple of months or so (providing they are old enough), they spend mating and nesting, which pretty much has to be done on land. Which is why we went to Eastern Egg Rock in late June this year.
There are four species of puffin in the world. We went to Maine in search of some Atlantic puffins and suffice it to say for the purposes of this blog post that the Atlantic puffin is the cute one; the horned puffin is close to the Atlantic on the attractiveness scale but the tufted puffin and rhinoceros auklet just pale in comparison. There are a total of about 10 million or so Atlantic puffins in the world today. About 90% of the age-eligible puffins who mate each year do so in various spots in Europe. Most of the remaining 10% end up in Canada somewhere. But a precious few spend their nesting time on a couple of islands off the Maine shore, which is the only spot in the United States where you can spot the Atlantic puffin.
And yes, we saw some, because there are pictures right below. But there's more worth writing and reading, I feel.
But our Cap'n Fish boat came with an ace in the hole: an Audubon naturalist who was there to narrate our entire experience. And she told us quite a few things that we didn't know. Say hi to Emmylou, although our connection with Emmylou was purely over the boat's sound system because there was no way we were leaving the bow to check out the pictures in her bird-spotting narrative on our trip out to Eastern Egg Rock. Although I'm sure we definitely missed some things.
The most important thing we learned on this boat trip about Eastern Egg Rock was that if we had made this trip 120 years ago, we would have been traveling to a completely puffin-less island because at that point man had completely wiped them out on that rock except for one nesting pair and it's tough to sustain a future population in the wild off just a single set of parents.
Turns out that man had been interfering with the puffin population on the island for quite a long time. Man's original interference with these puffins was through the practice of stealing eggs from the puffin nests for food. As invasive as that sounds, apparently when conducted on 300 or so nests, the egging (as it was called) of Eastern Egg Rock was actually sustainable. The eggs stolen, and I guess the distance involved, did not have an adverse effect on the bird population on the island.
The death knell for this particular puffin population was the "need" for feathers (or sometimes whole stuffed birds) to adorn hats in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Puffins on Eastern Egg Rock could survive a few stolen eggs. But wholesale killing of adult birds in the name of fashion was devastating. By 1901, there was a single pair of puffins left.
Seventy years later, there were still no nesting puffins on Eastern Egg Rock.
So in the 1970s, the Audubon Society launched Project Puffin in an effort to restore nesting pairs of puffins to the island. The theory here was that since man had played such a huge role in extinguishing the birds from the island, man also needed to play a huge role in restoring them. If there was one thing that 70 plus years of no nesting puffins proved, it was that nature wasn't going to just "right itself". Humans needed to be involved.
There was just one problem: puffins return to nest on the land where they were born. No hatching on Eastern Egg Rock, no adult puffins to return there because they broke through their shells elsewhere.
The solution? To put it simply...birdnapping. It was determined that pufflings (that's a baby puffin and yes, that's actually what they are called) would register their birthplace as Eastern Egg Rock if they were relocated there within the first couple of weeks of their lives. So that's just what naturalists did. Right after hatching, they swiped the pufflings from another location, brought them to Eastern Egg Rock, put them in artificial burrows (puffins nest underground) and hand fed them until they grew strong enough to leave.
Then they waited for them to come back and nest. For five years. Because puffins don't mate until they are five. In those first years, the puffin chicks could be anywhere in the world. The world wouldn't know if the experiment worked for five years. In the meantime, they repeated the exercise four more times.
By the time we got underway from Boothbay Harbor, we felt pretty optimistic about seeing puffins that day. When we parked our car, the employee who took our money made sure to tell us there was no guarantee that we would see puffins and then quickly told us he couldn't remember a trip ever NOT seeing puffins. Plus we noted the ticket booth had a disclaimer about the likelihood of not seeing whales on a whale watch but there was no such warning about not seeing puffins. Emmylou's narrative only made us more positive that we'd be successful. And sure enough, when we got close to the island, we saw dozens of puffins floating in rafts (yes, that's the term) together. Mission accomplished.
There is something completely satisfying about seeing the object of a single species quest that is indescribable in its fulfillment. I went to see bison in Yellowstone in 2011 and alligators in the Everglades in 2014 and the first encounter with each of those animals was joyous, only to be overcome with waves after waves of the same species that made the pilgrimage to those two places completely worth it. Puffins in Maine got me that same thrill, although admittedly, we could not stick around for hours and just watch the way I did with my first bison and alligator experiences.
These birds are like little dolls or porcelain versions of birds or something like that. They are absolutely completely so well put together and they look perfect when floating on the water in great numbers or standing up, usually all in a line, on the rocky shores.
But in the air, not so much. The description that I used above about footballs with wings (I copied that from multiple sources; not taking credit for that one) is so accurate. They are awkward flyers who beat their wings up to 400 times per minute and look like they need to do that to stay aloft. I can't imagine how much energy these little birds expend in their nine or ten months out on the open ocean. We watched albatrosses (another pelagic bird species) down in New Zealand glide effortlessly over the open seas; puffins seemed like the antithesis of the albatrosses we saw and completely ill-suited to months away from land.
Admittedly, puffins use their wings not just to stay airborne but also to swim. They can dive up to 200 feet below the surface of the water using their stubby wings to power their compact bodies deeper into the seas than many other species of birds. It's still difficult to imagine them out to sea for months at a time.
We got some amazing looks at puffins on the water and in the air. More, by far, than I ever imagined we would. These things were literally everywhere. But it is extremely difficult to take good, fully focused pictures of puffins in action (meaning landing on or taking off from water or in flight) while on a boat on seas with some pretty good swells. There are many, many almost awesome pictures where the subjects were thrown to the bottom or top of the camera viewfinder by the roll of the ocean. The picture below is the most frustrating near miss. The puffins at the top of the image, victims to a dip in the ocean that cause me and the camera to drop unexpectedly, would have made an awesome picture if they were center frame.
In real time, our looks through the camera were fleeting and we were unable to focus in any sort of detail on the on-shore subjects before the sea yanked the camera lens away from our viewing point. There are a lot of blurry or unfocused images of rocks and sky that show absolutely nothing. On the other hand, the furious snapping of the camera got us some pretty decent looks at what we had difficulty seeing really well with the naked eye.
The downloading of the pictures from the camera after the cruise itself gave us a chance to re-live the experience itself as we looked at what we had actually taken pictures of. I especially love the picture below because we got a puffin in mid-landing. They really are like little compact bombs ill-equipped to fly for any sort of duration when you see them like that. This is my favorite picture of the day, despite the hazy background.
We got super unlucky with the weather on this trip. The fog and the wind looked like it would cancel any chance we would have to see these funny birds we'd been chasing for a little more than seven years. But we sometimes we manage to make our own luck. I don't like paying for moving flights and returning rental cars to different locations, but the money we spent doing that was definitely worth it. It got us probably THE signature experience of this trip and definitely cost us way less money and time than it would have to come back to Maine.
Not that I'm ruling out a return trip to Maine, but we can easily add a whale watch to a number of locations I'd like to visit. We just can't do that for puffins. We had to make this work. I'm so thrilled that we did. Definitely worth the later flight home. Box checked. And in such an amazing way.
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