NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Nightly News Films: Protecting Puffins

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Adorable, rainbow-beaked Atlantic puffins were once so prized that they were nearly hunted to extinction. One man is responsible for their resurgence in population: biologist Steve Kress. NBC News’ Kerry Sanders travels to Eastern Egg Rock Island in the Gulf of Maine to learn more.

This is the story of the adorable Atlantic puffin. Its rainbow-colored beak in sharp contrast to its black and white feathers. The puffin had become so prized at one point, puffins were almost lost to extinction. On eastern Egg Rock Island here in the Gulf of Maine, in the early 1970s, before society fully embraced conservation, a young renegade biologist named Steve Kress decided to stand up to the inevitable inertia. He called it Project Puffin. Project Puffin started in 1973 because people had hunted all the puffins off of that island.

To do what? To eat them? To eat them and to take their feathers. Because back in the day, feathers were used for pillows, they were used for mattresses, they were used to decorate women's hats. And for all those reasons, people killed puffins. And you thought to yourself, we can restore the population? They ate them all. They were gone. And I thought, what a loss. Isn't this terrible that some people have taken them away and future generations can't enjoy them? Maybe

we could make a difference. Maybe we could bring them back. And that had never been done before. It had never been done before with a seabird. To see how the audacity of one man resulted in success requires a bumpy ride 45 minutes southeast of Bremen, here on this protected island, almost 50 years after Project Puffin began, the birds are thriving. Most encouraging, down in those crevices between the rocks, biologists this year are counting a healthy population of newborns. What do we have here? This is actually a baby puffling.

Puffling? Yes. It's a term for a baby puffin. Can I touch? Yeah. Oh, so soft. How old do you think this little one is? I would estimate about 10 days old. 10 days. So all the colors like in the beak, that's not in birth? No, that'll come

in later. And even within the first couple years, it's kind of drab. And then once they get up to breeding age, three, four years old, that's when they really start having the beautiful colors. What's it like holding it? It's like a light little fluff ball. It's super light. Can I feel?

Yeah. Is that okay? Oh, my God. Oh, so warm. Very warm. Very warm. Puffin's breeding is especially encouraging because in recent years climate change has become a new challenge. Since the 1980s, the rate of warming in the Gulf of Maine has been nearly triple that of the world's oceans. Last year, 2021, a marine heat wave resulted in the highest sea surface temperatures ever recorded. And that is a problem for puffins.

Adult puffins dive into the water to find food for their chicks. Most preferred, herring. See how slender they are? But as the water warms, herring go deeper and farther from shore. And butterfish move in. But as the water warms, herring go deeper and farther from shore. And butterfish move in. Butterfish are not a bad fish. They're pretty high-calorie fish. Their name is butterfish, and there's a reason for that.

But they have an odd body shape. They're very tall, or deep-bodied, we would say. And sometimes they're so deep-bodied that they're just physically too large for the chicks to swallow them. So the butterfish has this odd body shape. So it's like it can't get it down the throat. Exactly. And so we see chicks trying to swallow these fish for long periods of time and it eventually just not working. They discard it. And it means that the adult puffins wasted a trip. The chick did not get fed anything. And so it disrupts the feeding process. Global warming.

That wasn't on Steve Kress's radar back in the 70s. What you did is remarkable. But why should we have cared about this bird anyway? So these birds tell us about the world. They tell us about the oceans. And because the oceans cover two-thirds of the planet, they are messengers of what's happening at sea. And what happens at sea affects not just puffins, but people and everything on this planet. That's why we have to listen to what the puffins have to say.

Are we listening? Some people are listening. More people every day. Nearly extinct in the 70s to today, where on five coastal main islands, there are an estimated 2,600 Atlantic puffins thriving. Project Puffin, a success story, but with a new and even bigger challenge, global climate change. Kerry Sanders, NBC News, Eastern Egg Rock Island, Maine.