PROJECT PUFFIN AND HOG ISLAND AUDUBON CAMP

PROJECT PUFFIN AND HOG ISLAND AUDUBON CAMP - MORRIGAN DEVITO

Author name

In June, I had the opportunity to attend Hog Island’s week-long “Joy of Birding” camp thanks to sponsorship I received from Hog Island and Red Rock Audubon. Directed and led by Holly Merker, co-author of Ornitherapy and whose work as a birding guide focuses on the healing power of birds and nature, we learned about leadership in birding, how birds boost our physical and mental wellbeing, and of course– puffins.

After the first Audubon nature camp was hosted here in 1936, today Hog Island staff and volunteers offer a myriad of programs— from family and teen camps to programs geared towards general birding, fall and spring migration, art, field ornithology, and more. Running concurrently with our “Joy of Birding” was a teen camp, where students from around the country got to see conservation up close with field workshops in bird banding, seabird biology, and many other lifechanging experiences.

If there’s a heaven for birders, Hog Island is it. With a wealth of wonders waiting among the mossy red spruce forests, rocky coastlines, and sea snail-studded tide pools, there is no shortage of things to discover and learn on the island. But Atlantic Puffins continue to take the center stage (or rather, the eight miles east stage), and for good reason, considering they almost went locally extinct.

Yet puffins are not the only birds brought back from the brink in this landscape. Every Osprey and Bald Eagle we spotted during camp was a testament to the conservation work of dedicated biologists, writers, teachers, and community members who spoke out against the use of the pesticide DDT in the 1960s. DDT, which was discovered to cause eggshell thinning in raptors after they ate contaminated prey, caused widespread declines.

Meet Project Puffin

With the exposure of DDT’s harm and the words “environmentalism,” “conservation,” and “sustainability” first entering public consciousness, Atlantic Puffins, in all their clownish glory, waddled their way onto the conservation scene. Stephen Kress, a camp instructor in 1969, read in a book about Maine’s birds that the Atlantic Puffin’s historical range once included Eastern Egg Rock and other small islands in coastal Maine. Local puffins were hunted to extinction because adults and eggs made easy targets, and with that realization, Project Puffin was born.

On my camp’s “puffin watching day”, Eastern Egg Rock was shrouded in a tantalizing fog that coyly lifted for one or two moments before descending over the waves again. But for all the fog’s attempts, we still saw the craggy rocks where Kress and his team diligently hand-reared puffins in sod burrows from 1973 to 1986, the rocks disjointed and multilayered as if the ocean haphazardly stacked the island together. Spread across the small island were observation blinds that biologists sit in for hours on end, and sometimes we saw terns mobbing the biologists on the island as they walked to and from their duties.

And of course there were lots of puffins. Puffins on the rocks, puffins in the air, puffins in the water. Rafts and rafts of puffins paddled, dove, and flew together, and a couple even mated on the waves. All of this to the soundtrack of Common Terns screeching and humans oohing and ahhing at every bird—some others including Arctic Terns, a razorbill, black guillemots, common eiders, laughing gulls, and more.

When Audubon camps used to visit Eastern Egg Rock, students would observe it as a thriving gull colony, filled with plucky Greater Black-Backed and Herring Gulls– no puffins and few terns in sight. And though visitors delight in puffins today, Kress faced plenty of criticism and challenges with bringing them back. For starters, Atlantic Puffins were never endangered in Maine, their northern populations were thriving, and wildlife reintroduction was still nascent at the time— its focus on captive breeding and releasing raptors like Peregrine Falcons back to their former range after DDT was banned in 1972.

Kress and his team relocated the first batch of baby puffins from a colony in Newfoundland, transporting them back to Maine in 1973. Their hard work was only just beginning, and the puffin team worked through triumph and tribulation alike for the next decade. Their trials took the form of heat, rain, hurricanes, mites, a plethora of predatory gulls, and more. Despite the odds, they successfully reared hundreds of relocated puffins every spring in handmade sod burrows, feeding them fish round the clock. But there was a problem. Year after year, adults were not returning to breed on Eastern Egg Rock. Had they died at sea? Were they going to breed on other islands with larger colonies? Had they forsaken Egg Rock?

Enter the Decoys

Every evening after the day’s activities, our camps mingled outside, eating delicious food prepared by the chefs and served by the ever-smiling Friends of Hog Island camp volunteers. Following dinner was a different presentation each evening in “The Fish House”, a cabin/library/meeting room space filled with field guides, natural history books, and even a Gannet that hung from the eaves.

Lined up along one of the shelves were seabird models– brightly painted puffins, oystercatchers, terns, and more posing like colorful toys for bird-inclined children. But these were no toys. They were decoys—because in 1977, the first decoy puffins were crafted and placed as a strategy to lure the puffins back to Eastern Egg Rock. Much like us humans chatting and swapping stories about our day as we waited for the evening’s presentation to begin, seabirds are highly social and vocal in their nesting colonies. When it’s time to breed, they go where the other seabirds are– safer from predators like gulls and raptors, as well as mammals like raccoons and mink.

Enough puffins were fooled by the decoys that they started returning to Eastern Egg Rock, and by 1981 pairs began nesting. This had a ripple effect in bringing other puffins to breed, much to the joy of Kress and his team. And this was all because the puffins were convinced by the decoys, as well as mirror boxes and audio playback of tern vocalizations (which puffins feel safer hearing because terns chase away their gull nemeses) that there was already a thriving puffin colony there. And it wasn’t just puffins that returned. The tern playback was soon joined by tern decoys, and then Common, Arctic, and Roseate terns began nesting as well. Eastern Egg Rock was looking more and more like its historical image.

The decoy method was so successful that it is being used today as a conservation tool globally for endangered and threatened seabirds. Now called the “social attraction method”, this strategy helped Kress and his team expand their puffin rearing and tern-attracting to other islands in the Gulf of Maine. Today, seven islands are home to 100% of Maine’s Roseate Terns, alongside 80% of its Common Terns, and 65% of its Arctic Terns all thanks to the attraction strategies that developed under Project Puffin’s wings.

State of the Seabirds

It’s tough to be a bird, no less a seabird. Many seabirds today are considered “tipping point” species according to the 2022 State of the Birds Report, projected to lose half of their population in the next fifty years if conditions remain the same. Among their challenges include warming oceans, plastics, loss of nesting habitat, overfishing, and more.

“Project Puffin”, renamed the Audubon Seabird Institute to encompass the program’s growing number of projects, has provided us with critical information on the health of our seabirds and oceans. In the Gulf of Maine, Atlantic Puffins are now feeling the effects of climate change, though their population is still rebounding. Their home waters are warming triple than that of the world’s oceans as currents from the arctic (the Labrador Current) and the Atlantic (the Gulf Stream) channel warmer water into the enclosed, “bathtub-shaped” region—meaning the warm water has no exit.

Warmer waters mean less of the puffin’s favorite food: small hake and herring. And unlike humans, who are subjective about the word “favorite”, for puffins this means they’ve evolved to feed their young fish of this size. Any bigger and the babies choke and may die in their burrows, never seeing the waves that call them. Any smaller and they may not get the nutrition they need, setting them up for failure on the unyielding sea. Puffins are the proverbial “canary in the coalmine” for the state of our oceans. And alongside them are other sensitive seabirds like terns, razorbills, guillemots, and more.

A Final Reflection

If Project Puffin teaches us anything, it’s that conservation is a dynamic story. Puffins and other seabirds are facing challenges that Kress and his team may not have imagined. But at the same time, there may be solutions that we have not yet imagined. The more people we connect to nature, the more ideas and conservation we are cultivating.

At camp, I noticed that our conversations had many common threads– how birds have changed our lives for the better, how we help birds in our communities, and our worries and hopes about the future. Above all, whether we were “list birders,” “backyard birders,” “vacation birders,” or something else altogether, many of us came away with ideas we want to bring back to our own community—I heard people say they were going to set up bird feeders at retirement homes, volunteer for their local Audubon chapter, take their grandkids birding, and more.

It’s not so different here in the Red Rock Audubon community. Our history as a chapter is more recent, and our conservation challenges are very different, but it is our love of birds and belief that we can make the world better for birds and people that connects us and all our different skills. It’s one thing to be a birder, but it’s another thing to be a birding leader. Leadership can look as simple as pointing out birds to your friends, or as in-depth as volunteering to lead a birding event.

Regardless of how you share your love of birds with others, as a birding leader you seek to foster people’s experiences of joy and wonder with everyday birds—and that is crucial in conservation, whether you’re looking at desert birds or seabirds. So how can you cultivate those experiences for yourself and others?

If you’re interested in attending Hog Island Audubon Camp, check their camp schedule— there are still some vacancies in 2024’s camps, and 2025 camps will be announced this October. And to learn more in-depth about Project Puffin and some current seabird conservation projects, join my Zoom presentation on July 10!

RECENT ARTICLES

October Birding Forecast

September 27, 2025

By Alex Harper October is a month of intense change for bird diversity in southern Nevada. The experience that one might have at the very beginning of the month is likely going to be very different from the end. Throughout the month, transiting birds arrive with gradually intensifying cold fronts coming from the north. These colder temperatures begin to suppress insect activity, forcing most insect-eating birds to move to lower latitudes where food is more consistent. Many of our vireos, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers and tanagers will spend their winters anywhere from Mexico to South America. In these locations, they are as equally at home as they are in North America, and there are enough insects and fruit-bearing trees to accommodate the diversity of residential birds and the snowbirds. Like passing waves, each front helps to propel birds to the north into southern Nevada, while moving other birds out to more southerly areas. The assemblage – the totality of birds represented at one location during a snapshot in time – also take on an identity that marks a later stage of songbird migration. These are the more cold-tolerant species of birds that can find food and survive under colder conditions, and many of them signal the approach of winter. Sapsuckers, flickers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Yellow-rumped Warblers and White-crowned Sparrows are some of these, and they will become more noticeable throughout southern Nevada’s popular birding sites. Migratory flocks of American Robins may join our resident robins, and Brewer’s Blackbirds begin to appear more and more in all the places we’d expect to see Great-tailed Grackles. Some are passing through to areas farther south, while many others will establish wintering territories in parks and neighborhoods. There is still very little known about how birds establish themselves individually over the landscape in these ways, but this is happening for all of October in southern Nevada. Sparrow diversity changes drastically during this phase of migration. Chipping and Brewer’s Sparrows continue to move out towards grassier areas such as Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, the Sonoran Desert and Mexico. Savannah Sparrows move into weedy areas and even ballfields in suburban parks. Lincoln’s quietly take over stands of invasive Phragmites or wetland edges. Dark-eyed Juncos prefer grassy parks with groves of trees. Look through amassing groups of boisterous White-crowned Sparrows for Golden-crowned and White throated Sparrows. Many sparrows will take advantage of the bounty of seeds that were produced during the closing growing season. At wetlands, transient shorebirds have mostly moved in and out, and waterfowl begin to move in. Southern Nevada hosts about twenty-five species of geese and ducks. Many of them will be arriving from wetlands in the Great Plains, Great Basin, or beyond. Visit the bird preserve or Las Vegas Wash in the morning and watch the numbers of waterfowl moving in and out of the region to appreciate the volume of ducks that move through the Las Vegas Valley. October is a great month for wildcard birding. During October, more irruptive species may be absent or present. Irruptive species are species of birds whose movements are dictated by resources that are less influenced by altitude and are more influenced by other factors. In the Western United States, Red-breasted Nuthatches and most finches tend to be the most irruptive, since their food sources are usually cone-bearing trees. Birds gravitate towards crops of successful trees and avoid areas with less success. This can be problematic if more trees in more regions begin to fail. Witnessing Red Crossbills, Evening Grosbeaks and other montane finches in the Las Vegas is possible in October. Finches are often moving between mountain ranges looking for good pine, fir or spruce crop and drop into lowland parks to drink water. Other wildcards could be wayward eastern songbirds that are out of the range that we expect them in. Warblers are especially prone to showing up, and the classic areas to look for uncommon species are areas that have tall trees, some groundcover (the more, the better) and water. Some popular places to search for many migratory land birds include Corn Creek Field Station, Floyd Lamb Park, the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve, Clark County Wetlands Park, and Craig Ranch Regional Park. The more you get out with the intention of noticing more, the more chances there are to notice the birds that stand out as different. Get out on the days following cold fronts and observe the changes since the last one. There are insights to glean from those experiences, and they are all useful in your own endeavor to understand the movements of birds around you. .

September Birding Forecast

August 28, 2025

By Alex Harper If there is a light at the end of the tunnel of the dog days of summer birding in the Mojave Desert, it begins sometime in September. The warmest and most uncomfortable days are mostly behind us, and the birds register this too. If you struggled to get outside in August, you’ll find the birding opportunities more motivating. The movements that began in August are only more amplified in September. Shorebirds have been engaging in southbound movement for weeks now, congregating around reservoirs, wetlands, the Las Vegas Wash, and ephemerally flooded dry lakes. Avocets, curlews and Wilson’s Phalaropes pour in from the kettle ponds of the Great Plains or lakes of the Great Basin. Yellowlegs and Solitary Sandpipers transit on their way from the spruce bogs of Canada and Alaska, and dowitchers and Red-necked Phalaropes may be coming from open tundra of the northern edges of the North American continent. Adults are the first to arrive in late summer; first of year birds tend to arrive later, needing time to learn how to feed and fatten up on their own after being born earlier in the year. Riparian areas and parks begin to invite and harbor more songbirds. These birds may be coming from breeding territories throughout the Western Lower 48. In the weeks that follow, we will see birds that are arriving from farther distances. This makes sense; songbirds that are departing from Alaska and Canada tend not to arrive before birds that started their autumn migration somewhere in northern Nevada, Idaho, or eastern Oregon, for example. It stands to reason that the Orange-crowned Warblers, some of the Yellow Warblers, Brewer’s Sparrows and Western Tanagers, and Black-headed Grosbeaks that we see in early September may not have come from too far away to get here. The first Wilson’s Warblers that we see are probably from neighboring states as opposed to ones coming from British Columbia or the Yukon. Additionally, it is the insect-eating birds that we observe the most in September. Flycatchers, vireos, warblers and tanagers need to vacate out of the areas where insect activity can be quickly shut down by the first cold fronts. These birds make haste to destinations that support insect and invertebrate activity year-round, such as the Sonoran Desert, lowland Mexico, and tropical regions of Central America. Birds that can rely on seeds have more flexibility since their food-sources aren’t affected by temperature in the same ways. Sparrows may begin to appear more in October while finches may not begin to peak until November. Interesting birds are often observed by the vigilant, and the vigilant are up early and at the “honey holes” at the right times. These sites include Cactus Springs, Corn Creek Field Station, Floyd Lamb at Tule Springs, Clark County Wetlands and Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve, but virtually any park can attract higher volumes of birds. Infrequently seen or rare birds are often at sites amongst the regularly occurring birds for the same reasons that the habitat is attractive-looking and may have “retentive qualities” such as water, reliable food sources, and safety from predators. Outside of the suburban and urban Las Vegas Valley, spring-fed canyons can be especially interesting to visit. .

August Birding Forecast

July 31, 2025

By Alex Harper The birder that gets out in August will be rewarded with observations of migration and post breeding activities of local birds. By late summer, most birds in the northern hemisphere have wrapped up breeding. The young born this year are often now on their own, no longer dependent on their parents. During most of August, many birds are engaging in what is known as post-breeding dispersal . Post-breeding dispersal is exactly what it sounds like. After breeding and nest-rearing, adult and young birds alike spend time moving away from the nest territory. They will search for food in suitable habitat, and maybe make slow movements southward throughout the day. In short, they are searching for food and fattening up for their upcoming migration in the fall months. Look for local birds wandering into your neighborhoods in the late summer; newcomers may not be migratory but birds wandering locally. You can think of this as birds reshuffling their territories, with the young birds trying to fit in. This is distinct from migration, which often comes after post-breeding dispersal in the fall for those species that migrate. Migration is better thought of as a seasonal movement between an animal’s suitable breeding range and its suitable wintering territory. Both places serve as critical places for an animal’s survival, so much so that it is beneficial to the species to move in between the two every year of its life. In August, plovers, stilts and avocets, and sandpipers continue to move in and out of the region. Some of these characteristics include bills that are adapted for feeding on the many organisms that live along environments with shorelines. Shorebirds tend to be capable long-distance flyers, and the shorebirds species that we encounter in Nevada breed in tundra or boreal forest in Canada and Alaska. They may spend their winters in Mexico or Central and South America. Southern Nevada is a stopping point for some of them, and they congregate near the few suitable water sources. When these shorebirds stop here, they are usually stopping over to refuel. Look for yellowlegs, dowitchers, phalaropes, and various sandpipers at Clark County Wetlands, Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve, and the upper Las Vegas wash. While in shorebird habitat, keep an eye out for unusual herons and egrets, as well as Black Terns. High-elevation mountains like the Springs and Sheep Ranges promise of water and cooler temperatures and invite migratory birds as well. By early August, hummingbird migration is in full swing. The canyons and hillsides of the higher elevations are ripe with blooming penstemons and thistles, and they continue to entice the odd Calliope or Rufous Hummingbirds, and they will duel with Anna’s, Black-chinned, and Broad-tailed Hummingbirds for rights to flowers. Some songbirds will begin to sneak through as well. In late August, it can be fruitful to hang out by springs in the Spring Mountains. Deer Creek Picnic Area is a great place. Find any water running by a picnic table and sit by the water. Listen and watch, and eventually you may notice songbirds. They may come in waves of small groups that might be made up of birds of many ages, sexes, and species. These are known as mixed flocks. You may see migratory vireos, warblers, grosbeaks, and tanagers that are coming from other mountain ranges from farther north joining birds that spent the summer in the Spring Mountains, for example. It’s impossible to tell the newcomers from the locals apart, but the fluctuations in numbers during migration help to give part of the plot away. .