All posts tagged: Issue 28 Essay

Return of the Puffin 

By JAMES K. BOYCE

Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK

puffin spreading its wings
On July 4, 1981, something caught Evie Weinstein’s eye as she was washing dishes in a tidal pool on Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless island off the Maine coast. An Atlantic puffin, a football-sized seabird, emerged from the pea-soup fog with something dangling from its beak. Evie dropped the dishpan, grabbed the binoculars slung around her neck, and saw that the puffin had a beak-load of fingerling fish. She had been waiting for this moment and knew at once what it meant: the bird was bringing food for a chick—a puffling, as they are called in children’s books—the first to hatch on the island in a century, and the first seabird hatched anywhere as the result of a conscious human effort to restore them to a place from which they had been exterminated.
 

Return of the Puffin 
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