Project Puffin: How We Brought Puffins Back to Egg Rock

This remarkable book chronicles the efforts of biologist Steven Kress to rejuvenate a once-flourishing puffin colony on Egg Rock, an island off the Maine coast, with puffin chicks from Newfoundland. With their large, colorful beaks, their upright posture, and their big, dark eyes, it's easy to see why puffins are popular all over the world. But for the past hundred years, puffins along the coast of Maine have been threatened with local extinction. Biologist Stephen Kress decided to try to bring puffins back to Maine with an experiment that had never been attempted before. Stunning color photographs on every page capture each step of this wildlife success story. As you learn about The Puffin Project, you'll also learn all about puffins how they are so wonderfully adapted to their ocean environment, how they catch fish, socialize, nest in burrows, and raise their young.

Gr. 3^-6. Written in the first person, this illustrated book tells of Kress' determination to reintroduce puffins to Eastern Egg Rock, an island off the Maine coast. Explaining that the large bird colonies in the area had been decimated by hunters in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Kress describes Project Puffin, which began in 1973, when he and his team of "Puffineers" moved a few puffin chicks from Newfoundland to Eastern Egg Rock. After a number of years, the puffins raised in their new home began returning there to raise their young, effectively establishing the colony destroyed so many years before. Excellent full-color photographs on every page record the stages in the project, the sights on the island, and the lives of the birds. A good introduction to wildlife management and an informative look at puffins, this book would be even more useful for classroom units in conjunction with Giving Back the Earth by Pete Salmansohn (0-88448-172-7), $9.95, a teacher's guide intended to supplement Project Puffin in particular and other seabird studies in general. A worthwhile addition to nature collections. Carolyn Phelan