I've never met anyone who doesn't like a puffin.
They're probably their most graceful when they're swimming.
But then when they're walking, it's like who made you?
It's very awkward but cute, awkward, cute.
I've been here for four summers and I feel a connection here in a big way.
I love hearing the birds at all times of the day
because it means that they're doing OK.
They're all telling us things about the environment that we can't otherwise know.
So I like the term sentinels of climate change.
They are showing us something's wrong.
My name is Kay Garlick-Ott,
and I'm the island supervisor of Eastern Egg Rock Island.
It's a seven acre island in the Gulf of Maine, managed
by the National Audubon Society Seabird Institute.
The island hosts a team of researchers every summer.
We really live in the ecosystem and work with the birds for
conservation monitoring.
40 years ago, there weren't any puffins
breeding on this island, and there were maybe a handful of terns.
Now we have over 1000 terns.
It's a really good example of how human intervention can help
wildlife and conservation science on an island
like this can be a great tool for raising awareness
about the issues that the birds are facing and that we all are facing.
So we have six different species of seabirds that breed here.
Atlantic Puffin, Black Guillemot, Leach's storm petrel, three
species of terns, including common terns, roseate terns and Arctic terns.
Typically, researchers come out here in the beginning of May,
and then we stay until about mid-August or early August.
It's definitely an uncomfortable lifestyle.
We sleep in tents all summer.
We don't have running water, we don't have a shower.
So it is physically inconvenient.
Our neighbors, the birds can be very annoying, though.
They dive bomb us when we walk by.
They'll poop on us
and they seem to know exactly where to to where it's the most annoying.
But there is a beauty to it.
Being surrounded by nature and wild animals is an immense privilege
and not one that many people get to have anymore.
It is a really spectacular thing to be able
to stare into the eyes of a puffin.
At the beginning of the season, we're doing a lot of scouting,
and so we're trying to figure out where birds are nesting
so that we can track and monitor them over the course of the season.
Midseason, we're just trying to get as many observations in as possible
and whether that's resiting for puffins where we're reading their bands
and that tells us something about who's here.
What the population looks like this year or feeding studies where we're looking
at the fish they're bringing in that tells us something about the forage fish.
Herring seems to be the preferred prey species.
Of course, the herring stocks are dwindling
and we're not seeing it quite as much as we'd like to.
This year, we're seeing a burst of rough scad.
And usually when you see unusual fish, it means that they're having
a hard time finding food.
The data coming out do really show that we are seeing species move in
that wouldn't necessarily have been there
before that do prefer warmer waters, like butterfish.
The chicks, especially when they're early in development, just don't have the
the gape to take down a large butterfish.
They're bringing back these fish that the chicks can't eat.
The chicks don't get fed, so they're getting less food.
That slows down their growth rate.
Sometimes it means that they die, and it is something that's been happening
a lot more frequently in the last couple of years.
There might be a bad food here.
Every once in a while, there might be a bad rain event.
They can't regulate their body temperature,
so if they get wet, then that poses harm to them.
Those are some of the things that we see that cause a lot of mortality.
But climate change has exacerbated the effect of all of that,
and it's very depressing.
I think of climate change every day
in the trends of season by season, it's like screaming in your face.
But I also don't believe that you can create a better future
without envisioning it, and I really hope
that what I'm doing is making a difference and that other people feel inspired
to make a similar difference.
They're charismatic birds, and often people want to protect charismatic birds,
but they bring the entire island along with them.
It's intrinsically important
as an ecosystem I think that this exists and is healthy.