Atlantic Puffin greeting a wooden decoy

This puffin appears to be talking to the painted wooden decoy in this photo taken in the 1970s on Eastern Egg Rock, off the coast of Maine. Actually, the decoy was put out to attract young puffins back on the island some years after they had been transplanted there as chicks, and it appears to be working! Indeed, Dr. Stephen Kress pioneered this innovative technique in the 1970s to restore Atlantic puffin colonies off the coast of Maine. At the time, puffins had vanished from the island due to overhunting and human disturbance. Kress used wooden decoys painted to resemble real puffins and placed them across the former nesting grounds. He also played recordings of puffin calls to simulate an active colony. Young puffins, returning to land for the first time, were drawn to what looked and sounded like a safe breeding site. Over several seasons, these social attraction methods succeeded, and puffins began nesting there again. Kress’s approach has since become a model for seabird restoration worldwide, showing how carefully designed human intervention can help repair damaged ecosystems and bring species back from local extinction in places where natural recolonization would otherwise take decades or fail entirely without guided support by modern conservationists.