What does it take to bring a seabird back from the brink—and can we keep it there? We travel from a rocky island of Maine to a tiny restored island in coastal Louisiana to learn the astonishing comeback stories of puffins and pelicans. This is a hopeful story about how innovative ideas can save wildlife — and asks whether it’s enough in a rapidly changing world.
CREDITS
This episode was reported by Katelyn Harrop and Michael McEwan and hosted by Executive Producer Carlyle Calhoun. Eve Abrams edited the pelicans story. The puffins story was edited by Carlyle Calhoun. The episode was fact-checked by Philip Kiefer with help from Shruti Gautam. Sound design by Rebecca Nolan and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
ALLY: the puffins are very charismatic.
DON: they have a strikingly colorful bill.
ALLY: They're very social
ALLY: You know, everyone that looks at a puffin, you just wanna go, oh my gosh, it's so cute.
INTRO
CARLYLE: It’s easy to fall in love with the Atlantic puffin – the black and white seabird with its bright orange legs and red beak and almost miniature penguin-like body. The puffin has become an icon of the Gulf of Maine…you see puffins on mugs on t-shirts, stuffed animal puffins everywhere. It’s hard to imagine that not too long ago, puffins had nearly vanished from Maine.
I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change.
Today, we bring you a tale about seabirds that begins on a rocky island off the coast of Maine where an innovative idea to save puffins was born back in the 1970s that changed everything…not just for puffins but for struggling seabirds everywhere.
First up, reporter Kateylyn Harrop takes us to that rocky island, and then reporter Michael McEwen brings us back down south where we meet a very different bird that still exists on the Gulf coast today, thanks to the story of the puffins. The majestic brown pelican.
[SEABIRD SOUNDS TO TRANSITION]
KATELYN: I’m out on Eastern Egg Rock… a bouldery island just over an hour north of Portland in the Gulf of Maine. It’s a tiny scrap of land, just seven acres in total, but… it’s unbelievably vibrant. Not with the energy of humans, or at least not primarily. But with the presence of seabirds. Black guillemot, laughing gulls, common terns. Between rocks, on ledges, in brush, and in the nearby water – from everywhere you look, there comes an ornithological symphony.
I’m walking with Ally Ballard, an ecologist on the island. Right at our feet, in a nest to the side of our path, a new life is beginning.
ALLY: you can see the chick inside. It's alive and it's about ready to hatch at any moment
And out on the edge of the island, loafed in a pack of more than a dozen, is the species I’ve boated sixeight miles out from shore to see.
Neon beaked, comically waddling, quiet in call and compact in stature… the Atlantic Puffin.
I’m also accompanied by Don Lyons. Director of Conservation at the Audubon Seabird Institute. After several weeks of monitoring tides and coastal conditions, I’d met up with him at Audubon Seabird HQ, for a ride out to Eastern Egg rock on his research skiff.
DON: We're gonna head pretty much straight south from here, uh, in Muang Bay.
It’s a half hour ride dotted with the buoys of lobstermen and coniferous tree-lined islands.
DON: I've heard estimates that there's perhaps 4,000 or so islands in Maine.
And of those thousands of islands, seven are categorized as seabird conservation islands maintained by Audubon researchers like Don for more than half a century. Including Eastern Egg Rock. As I look around at the seemingly endless number of birds, it’s hard to believe that just decades ago, this island was a very different scene.
It all started way back in the 17th Century when European colonizers appeared on the land of the Wabanaki people in Miscungus Bay. In addition to enslaving and killing native communities, these colonizers began to hunt Atlantic Puffins, attracted to their meat and shiny feathers.
DON: populations of seabirds, many colonial waterbird, uh, were really diminished in the 1800s.
By the latter half of the 19th century, Maine’ Atlantic puffins had been hunted to the brink of their existence.
DON: As recently as, uh, 50 years ago// Atlantic Puffins// they were functionally gone.
Functionally gone. Meaning this species… a species that can tell us so much about the health of our ocean… almost ceased to exist in the gulf of Maine.
Going silent for decades… until the 1970s, when Stephen Kress, a young Cornell graduate student with a passion for seabirds, came to Midcoast Maine. The Hog Island Audubon Camp on Muscungus Bay, to be exact.
DON: he began to become familiar with the local environment and noted, uh, that puffins were absent from, uh, a couple islands that they had, uh, been documented to nest on here in Muscongus Bay, uh, kind of in his new backyard.
By the time Kress first came to Hog island in the late 1960s, puffins had been functionally gone from the islands for more than a century. While this breed of puffins were still plentiful further north in places like Canada, Iceland and Russia, almost no living person had ever even SEEN a puffin in the Gulf of Maine. Their presence had been largely lost to memory.
Kress, an aspiring ecologist and educator, saw an opportunity.
DON: he took on the goal of trying to restore puffins to an island here.
And not just any island. Eastern Egg Rock. Where we’re headed now. An island that, more than a hundred years ago, had been home to a healthy Atlantic puffin colony.
DON: he thought it might be something he'd be at for a few years and then he'd move on and his. Career. Uh, but, uh, the effort, uh, it was significant.
Kress’s vision was, to say the least, unorthodox. He wanted to RELOCATE puffin chicks, at just a few days old, from healthy colonies in Canada, to this decimated island in Maine where Atlantic Puffins had once lived.
It had never been done before, and many experienced research scientists considered it… kind of crazy.
But Kress wasn’t deterred. He believed Atlantic puffins were the perfect species for this method. In part, because mature puffins only lay one egg a year, making them relatively easy to monitor and study.
DON: puffins are unique, uh, among // many birds in that their fledglings, their chicks are completely independent. Once they leave the island, they don't get fed anymore by their. Parents, they don't get any training from their parents. They instinctively go out, uh, and locate and catch food for themselves.
They also have incredible, natural honing abilities. If the experiment worked, these transported puffin chicks would be likely to come back to this island as adults and lay their own eggs. Kress hoped this could be the key to jumpstarting a sustainable puffin colony on Eastern Egg Rock.
Determined to make his vision a reality, Kress wrote letter after letter to Canadian officials. He was asking for permission to translocate a series of puffin chicks from the plentiful colonies in Newfoundland… a pretty similar climate environment to the one here.
And to his surprise… they agreed. Six puffins, and not one more, could be taken from Newfoundland and transported the nearly 1,000 miles to Eastern Egg Rock as a test case.
With funding support from Audubon, Kress transported the Canadian chicks.
They traveled in individual make-shift carriers. Each made from a tin can covered in breathable burlap to simulate the solitary burrow each chick is raised in.
DON: moving. Uh, young chicks that are just a few days old, uh, down here and hand raising them.
Kress and a team of other early-career scientists took up residence in tents on Eastern Egg Rock, working around the clock to care for the relocated puffins. They thawed and cut fish to hand feed to the chicks, banded their legs, and created artificial sod burrows to house them in until the chicks were ready to fledge, or take flight.
And by the end of the summer… they did. The first translocated puffins set out to sea. Kress and his team now had to wait in hope that they’d return.
DON: Puffins… it takes several years before they're ready to nest themselves// that can be four or five, six years.
Kress stayed busy. His allocation of Canadian puffin chicks had increased from the single digits to 100 per year, and he continued to raise them by hand as he waited for the first generation of puffins to return. Hoping his experiment would stick.
And then on June 12th, 1977, six years after the first chicks were transferred to the island, Kress spotted something magnificent.
A mature puffin, sporting one of his own bands, landed in the waters off Eastern Egg Rock. It was the first hint that this ambitious project just might work.
But there was a problem. The birds made it to the water -- but they had no interest in actually coming on land to breed. Which, you remember, was the whole POINT of the experiment.
DON: puffins, like many seabirds are very social nesters. They nest in colonies often. The larger, the better, when uh, birds are returning to a location that doesn't have an existing colony, it can take even longer for them to get comfortable and. Get kind of things figured out.
KATELYN: No one wants to be the first.
DON: No one does.
So Kress tried his FIRST in what would be a series of creative solutions to get the birds on board.
DON: that hatched the idea to consider using decoys to attract them to the island, to show them that the island was a safe place.
Researchers began using hand carved wooden decoys, made to look as realistic in size, stature and color as possible, with the goal of luring these puffins out of the surrounding waters and onto shore where they could lay their eggs. Essentially, they were trying to fake them out.
This was another wild idea. While decoys had been used as tools for hunting and crop protection around the world – to the best of Kress’s knowledge, they’d NEVER been used as an aid for conservation.
But even with the artistic effort of the scientists, it wasn’t quite enough to convince the shy puffins to come to shore en masse.
DON: decoys don't move around much. So they're not very stimulating to birds after they've been there for a little bit.
So Kress and his team decided to try yet another off-the-wall idea. Boxes covered with mirrors…
DON: so that, uh, birds, including puffins can see themselves and see some motion.
… and even a sound system to go with them, blasting out recordings of bird calls.
DON: Certain species are very vocal. If they come to a colony, uh, and spend time amongst decoys that are silent, they may think that, uh, there's a predator nearby or, or, you know, some risk causing birds to be quiet.
so we, uh, use automated, uh, sound playback systems to play calls of species that are very vocal // to assist the attraction.
And these experimental, multi-media ideas? They worked. Within days of the decoys and mirror boxes and call recordings hitting the island, puffins were back on land, loafing on the island’s edge and exploring the rocky terrain.
It was a huge success, but the researchers were waiting on one more important benchmark. A goal finally hit eight full years after Kress translocated those first six puffins from Newfoundland.
On the fourth of July, 1981. For the first time in more than a century, a puffin returned to Eastern Egg Rock holding a bill load of fish, ready to feed a newly hatched chick.
The first independently spawn generation of Atlantic Puffins had returned to Muscungus Bay.
And they kept coming. Every year, in late April and early May, puffins return to the Gulf of Maine to lay a new generation of eggs. Setting a precedent for seabird restoration efforts across the globe.
DON: original application of what has been learned here // using techniques like decoys and mirror boxes and sound recordings, uh, and translocation of chicks // now has been applied, uh, over 800 times. // and has benefited around a third of all the seabird species in the world, including some of the most critically endangered species.
From albatrosses to the African Penguin in South Africa – the list of seabirds benefiting from these restoration efforts continues to grow across our planet’s coastal systems.
And now, forty-plus years later, the work of Project Puffin continues in Muscungus Bay.
Ally Ballard is the Eastern Egg Rock Supervisor at Project Puffin, She’s the ecologist who showed me the tern chick just hours from hatching when I landed on the island,
As a career field ecologist, she spends much of her year traveling the globe, working on bird restoration projects.
This summer, she’s leading a team of research scientists tasked with studying the progress of seabird species on Eastern Egg Rock, including the Puffins.
ALLY: sorry, I should have had us clean up a little bit more. No, not at all. Don't even, um, it's quite messy in here.
She spoke with me from what has been nicknamed the “Egg Rock Hilton.” It’s the same tiny cabin built by Stephen Kress and his fellow scientists in those first pilot years. Part living room, part ranger station, part kitchen… and perhaps the only place on the island that’s even remotely protected from the cries of its resident birds.
ALLY: we have lots of goals that we have set throughout the season to understand how the birds are doing. Um. As far as their hatching success and their productivity and how many, um, chicks are fledging every year, and how healthy they are and the types of food that they're eating.
ALLY: My biggest thing this season was to try and be able to identify as many individual puffin breeding pairs as possible. // So at this current moment in time, we have 108.
For Ally and Don, protecting Atlantic Puffins isn’t just about protecting one member of the region’s biodiversity. It’s about protecting an incredible source of knowledge. Think of Atlantic puffins as petite research scientists. Hitting parts of the oceans that are tough for humans to get to.
DON: they're visible. They nest on land. They also go out into the ocean every day looking for fish. They're out there sampling the ocean environment for us. they basically report back to us every time they bring fish in.
It’s also about protecting one species that can represent the experience of so many others. Also known as, the work of indicator species.
ALLY: birds like puffins are so important as far as ocean indicators of health. The, they're really good at being able to tell that story of how the ocean is doing by, you know, what type of fish they're bringing in, how high their weights are getting up, that we're seeing in productivity, how many of them are fledgling.
As indicator species, puffins also serve as something of an early warning system. For changes in ocean health, in species diversity, in coastal resiliency to our changing climate. And in the Gulf of Maine, a region warming faster than almost any other ocean surface on the planet… they’re raising some alarms.
DON: when ocean conditions are warmer here in the Gulf of Maine, uh, that changes the community of fish that reside here. Uh, some species. Become less abundant. // the species that really prefer colder water // may move deeper in the water or may move further offshore, further away from puffin and other seabird nesting islands.
Warming waters, paired with the overfishing of favored seabird food sources such as Haddock, mean that adult puffins are being forced to change the fish they consume and bring home to their chicks. And this can be a big problem, because… puffins swallow fish whole. And baby puffins? Their anatomy, it’s designed to only handle fish of a certain size. So if these alternative fish are, say, wider or rounder than the haddock and herring they’re used to, young puffins might not be able to eat them at all.
ALLY: we are seeing some butterfish… it is an unfortunate one because when the chicks are smaller if a parent brings back a butterfish, which is quite large and round, they actually won't be able to eat it, um, or they'll reject it.
Leading to potentially hungry chicks and taxed parents.
DON: They either have to swim deeper in the water, which is more work, and there are limits to just how deep they can swim. Um, or they have to fly farther from the colony to find fish. Um, and for puffins, uh, flight is a very, uh, a very energy intensive activity it's really telling us that conditions are changing so rapidly.
And Don says, these changing conditions, if they aren’t corrected, could put the historic work of Steven Kress and Project Puffin in jeopardy. When the project first started monitoring puffin reproduction in the 80s, roughly two-thirds of all puffins successfully raised chicks on Eastern Egg rock. But Since 2012, that number has dropped to just one-third.
Don says, if action isn’t taken, this trend could become permanent.
DON: Puffins live a long time// we have. One, one individual that we know is 36 years old. // So as long as adults are able to feed themselves, the population doesn't change very quickly. But if there's continuous failure to produce young over time, um, the population will inevitably decline. That's what we're most concerned about long term.
DON: there are, you know, very knowledgeable and thoughtful scientists and managers now that, that, uh, expect us to lose puffins again in the next 50 to a hundred years here in the Gulf of Maine. It's a very real possibility.
And if Atlantic Puffins were to disappear from the Gulf of Maine, the region would not only lose a vibrant and valuable species. A species widely embraced by the people of Maine… But also a key resource for monitoring the health of a rapidly warming region.
For now, the Audubon Seabird Institute is increasing their focus on managing nesting habitats and working with local fishing communities to do their best to compensate for the impacts of climate change on the region’s seabird populations.
ALLY: There's something very beautiful to me about the, the colony of these birds really working together and thriving together. But it's not just puffins that are important ocean indicators, it's seabirds all around the world, and all of all of them are being impacted one way or another, by climate change, by human impact.
Every Fourth of July Don and Stephen Kress, now in his 80s, make the thirty minute boat ride out to Eastern Egg Rock. They come to celebrate the historic day when the first puffin, carrying fish for its baby, returned to the island.
It’s a day that marks hope and perseverance. Perseverance of the puffins and the people who have dedicated their lives to supporting their return to Muscungus Bay.
And the restoration techniques developed by Project Puffin? They’re still in use all over the world, working to conserve and restore valuable indicator seabird species in the face of our rapidly changing climate.
MIDWAY:
Now we take you South from the Gulf of Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, to tiny Queen Bess Island, where another iconic seabird was also brought back from the brink of extinction.
It would almost be understating it to say Brown Pelicans are a symbol of the Gulf. I mean, the Pelican State is even the official nickname for Louisiana.
Here on Louisiana’s coast, we see them soaring and splashing across about any body of water… but this omnipresence is only because of recovery efforts decades ago that continue through today.
Reporter Michael McEwen heads down to coastal Louisiana to hear how Queen Bess Island is a leading example of that success, even as it also faces persistent, existential challenges.
That story after the break.
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I’m idling just off the rocky shore of Queen Bess Island, well-south of New Orleans and near where the windy Barataria Bay opens into the Gulf of Mexico.
JON: “The big thing to see when you come across here is look straight across the island and what you'll see is just stacked up birds. It's literally rows and rows and rows of birds.”
Spotting those rows and rows of birds is Jon Wiebe, both captain of the pontoon boat I’m riding on and interpreter for our trip more than two miles into the bay… and there’s really no one better. Jon manages coastal restoration work for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, his employer for 20 years. Which is to say, he’s been out this way a few times.
Jon’s pointing out at a sight familiar to him but almost beyond belief for me… an extraordinary amount of birds, as far as we can see, standing so close and in such large groups they have to take short flights – only seconds long – to get around each other.
MCEWEN: “It's almost like a, like a flowering plant. JON: laughing “Yeah, exactly.”
But instead of flowering plants, we’re looking out over a unique barrier island full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of brown pelicans. It’s Louisiana’s first and most successful attempt at restoring the iconic seabirds to the state in roughly the last half century… which really means ever. With us on the pontoon boat are Melinda Repperger and Kelly McNab – two longtime conservationists with Audubon Delta, an office of the national organization which works to protect birds and their habitats. Even Melinda and Kelly can’t believe how many pelicans they’re seeing.
MELINDA: “ Oh my goodness...Hard to get up with your eyeball… There are so many out there…
JON: “Wait until you get to the back end.”
MCNAB: laughing in shock “that is incredible…”
And in this part of the Gulf, where the once critically endangered pelicans were close to extinction, that’s a really special sight.
Beyond the thousands of birds, Queen Bess itself is also a kind-of living laboratory for developing methods to address some of the state’s most urgent coastal challenges – like land loss, and sea level rise. Because these are existential threats both Gulf pelicans and Gulf residents face.
Jon says recovery on Queen Bess has been incredible. Even these longtime conservation folks are astounded by it.
WIEBE: “ It is without a doubt a huge success story. We're looking at somewhere in the nature of 26,000 nests that were documented. 24.” MCNAB: “Wow.”
WIEBE: “Yeah.”
MCEWEN: “On the island?
WIEBE: “Yeah.”
MCEWEN: “Wow.”
Each year, scientists have observed around 4,000 pelican nests on Queen Bess. So over the six years Jon has been restoring habitat on the island that comes to about 24,000 nests. That’s a lot of pelicans! And hopefully, a lot of future pelicans. It’s a big deal – maybe more here than anywhere else. Because not so long ago, there were really no pelicans on Queen Bess at all.
What changed is that Jon helped recreate a thriving pelican habitat here, in a place that was almost destroyed. And this is no easy feat: creating habitat is REALLY hard in a dynamic, deltaic place like coastal Louisiana, where land erodes and washes away in storms. More on that later. But for now, I’m only thinking about the success of this pelican mission: I’m reminded of that line from the movie Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come.
JON: “ so the ability to elevate these habitats, to create conditions that, for a project like this that'll last at least 20 years for generating benefits for that is, is huge for this. That's one of 10 remaining historic brown pelican colonies that we have in the state.”
Out here, at this thriving brown pelican habitat, it’s the kind of Spring day in the northern Gulf you write home about, where the light blue horizon gradually fades into deep up where you’re looking for clouds and find none. There's small oil wells and occasionally a lone pelican diving below the surface for fish or cruising up higher for a better look. Out here you can hear the wind before you feel it.
For all of us but Jon, it’s our first time seeing this restored island. It is surreal, and I get that increasingly rare feeling of being somewhere intended solely for animals, and not humans, in any way. And it’s remarkable in more ways than one. As recently as the 1960s, brown pelicans had virtually disappeared between the Texas - Mexico border along the Gulf all the way to just north of Tampa Bay.
Even members of my family, from Florida, can barely remember seeing any Gulf pelicans at all; but a generation later, when I grew up, pelicans were ubiquitous and seemingly always trying to steal my catch when I was fishing or clipping my head with their wings when I was out surfing. Pelicans were so ingrained in my childhood that I even have an image of one permanently etched into my left shoulder as a sort of mascot of home. But before I was born, there was quite a bit of history.
Way back, in the early 1900’s, during the Gilded Age, ladies loved wearing huge feather plumes in their hats. And Hunters targeted pelicans across the Gulf. President Teddy Roosevelt, the famous conservationist, wanted to put a stop to the pillaging. He described plume hunters as pirates, and wanted them arrested. So, through an executive order, he created the Breton Island Bird Reservation – now the Breton National Wildlife Refuge – where, minus the hunters, brown pelicans thrived. Here’s Roosevelt:
ACTOR READS: “Birds should be saved …because of reasons unconnected with any return in dollars and cents… to lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, —...why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”
Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for conservation became part of the national identity, and arguably motivated conservation efforts not just for pelicans, but for Puffins in the Gulf of Maine as well.
But that conservation push wasn’t enough. A half century after Roosevelt put a dent in plume hunting, pelicans faced yet another threat – one that nearly decimated the entire population including in the Gulf. This time the culprit was a commonly used pesticide called DDT.
ARCHIVAL: “This diabolical weapon of mo dern science saved millions of humans, but killed billions of insects. Man, with this newly discovered force, has at long last gained an upper hand in our age old struggle.”
Our age struggle against pests.
During World War II, the military developed DDT to protect soldiers fighting in the Pacific from mosquitoes.But once the war ended, they wanted to do something with their new invention. And they turned to big agriculture, particularly in the Midwest. Farmers used planes to spray DDT on their fields to combat pests eating corn and soy crops.
And while it was incredibly effective for controlling insects, the downstream impacts were devastating for birds, and especially pelicans. Like other farm runoff, DDT made its way into streams and rivers, eventually draining into the Mississippi and then the Gulf. Plants, fish and other animals – like reptiles and insects – absorbed DDT through the air, water and what they ate. At the top of this toxic food chain, were pelicans eating loads of DDT laced animals.
This biomagnification of DDT severely impacted Gulf pelicans’ ability to nest and raise another generation of pelicans. Melinda, from Audubon Delta, explains:
MELINDA: “So when the birds would go to incubate their eggs, the eggshells would just crush underneath the birds.”
DDT made the shells too fragile.
It took a couple decades for scientists and public officials to realize this. Other birds – ospreys, bald eagles, hawks: these bird populations were rapidly declining too.
Then, in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which exposed DDT contamination to a national audience. Here’s Carson reading from that seminal book – arguing why DDT should be known as a threat to everything alive – not just birds and targeted pests:
ARCHIVAL: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.”
Public outrage swelled and spurred the country’s environmental movement, says Melinda.
MELINDA: “I think in the 1960s and was when they really started to understand the harmful effects of DDT and how it was making the egg shells really fragile.”
In 1963, brown pelicans were declared locally extinct in Louisiana… and they were barely hanging on in neighboring states. So… in 1972, a newly-created Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT production and use. As DDT slowly made its way out of the environment, pelican populations could return to their natural processes like hatching young.
GEARY: “And then from there, we just kind of saw that natural expansion and colonization as those birds would, you know, s- seek out new sites, uh, to breed on as well.
Brock Geary specializes in pelican behavior and ecology at the University of Pennsylvania.
GEARY: “And that continued up until around the turn of the century, to the point where, you know, we’ve got tens of thousands of birds currently.”
But wildlife officials still faced the same problem: virtually no pelicans were left in Louisiana.
So officials sent teams of researchers to another state – my home state– who selected over 1,200 young pelicans, and brought them here, to Queen Bess Island – which became the state’s first successful nesting colony for pelicans since DDT nearly made them extinct.
It’s a lot like what Stephen Kress, the Puffin expert, did in the Gulf of Maine to help that seabird species rebound: bring young puffins down from Canada. And those pelicans on Queen Bess? They're thriving– thanks to those who brought them here.
MELINDA: “ I think it's interesting how they went to Florida and retrieved some of those birds In the late sixties and into I think 1978, brought some of those birds back here to initiate the nesting again.”
In bird-biology-parlance, relocating birds like this is known as translocation, or taking young birds or even eggs from one area where populations are healthy, like much of Florida’s Atlantic coast in the 70s, to jump start populations hundreds or thousands of miles away. Over the next 40 years or so the pelican population rebounded. And by late 2009, pelicans were even removed from the federal endangered species list. It was a HUGE recovery success, says Melinda from Audubon Delta.
MELINDA: “And so it just goes to show you how if we give them the right things, they can be successful.”
[Strongest/best nat sound of pelicans in mangroves that I have plays here to really set scene, then fades out…]
Those right things begin and end with habitat.
And if you want good habitat, the first thing you need is land. In a region like coastal Louisiana, where land is actively disappearing, you have to build it. That means moving sediment from one place to another to physically create more land. On Queen Bess, Jon has seen that process unfold from the very beginning.
JON: ”So just to give you sort of a history here, so Queen Bess, as far as the size that we have right here, is 36 acres. When we started, it was less than five.”
Wow. In just six years of rebuilding Queen Bess, the island’s grown more than 7 times in size – and transitioned into what is now a thriving, year-round colony – and not just for pelicans. Shorebirds and seasonal migrants from as far as Patagonia also spend time here.And that success connects back to the work of Stephen Kress and Audubon on a group of seabird conservation islands some 1500 miles north – in the Gulf of Maine.
There, like here in Louisiana, scientists identified ideal habitats and translocated birds to literally restart colonies where populations were locally extinct. Now, scientists are watching them flourish in both places.
Jon’s been to Queen Bess dozens of times, but he’s still awed when looking out at the rows of heads, almost like white poppies bouncing around in the strong breeze cutting across our boat.
His awe makes sense. Jon has seen terrible things happen in the Gulf, and to Queen Bess, namely, the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, when a deepwater oil rig owned by BP exploded and gushed crude oil into the water, unchecked.
ARCHIVAL: “The images leave you in awe – flowing oil stretching for miles. Officials say oil is still pouring out, literally 5 thousand barrels a day, costing BP nearly $15 million dollars a day to clean up. But BP isn’t the only one paying the price…”
Among those paying the price were pelicans. Within weeks of the explosion, that iconic Gulf image of the brown pelican perched on a dock piling soon became pelicans laden with slick, black oil. Remember: pelicans had just been taken off the Federal endangered species list the year before. And now, pelicans were again dying in droves. The estimates of pelican deaths after the spill hovered around 27,000. Brock Geary, the pelican ecologist, was writing his dissertation at Tulane after the BP Oil Spill.
GEARY: “We of course saw the amount of mortality that we did and the birds that were introduced into rehabilitation centers…just kind of gave us a sense of the scale of disturbance that the oil spill had.”
The spill was really the first major environmental threat to brown pelicans since DDT was banned – some 40 years earlier. But the oil spill’s impact… was even bigger. Because even if the spill didn’t kill some pelicans, it made this part of the Gulf a bad place to live for those who survived.
GEARY: “They might not be able to continue to successfully raise young in a degraded ecosystem like that. And so the thinking was, how many of these birds just kind of picked up and left, and tried to breed somewhere else?”
So after all those decades of conservation success, pelicans were now either dying en masse or leaving again.
The BP disaster – which happened about 100 miles southeast of Queen Bess –remains the single worst oil spill in U.S. history. Jon says the oil made the island really exposed. It became ground zero for oil washing in with the wind or tides.
JON: “This island takes wind, wave and oiling for that matter, and would go completely over the island. It was nesting season when this was going on, so we had nest loss. But then you had all of this habitat damage as well.”
Jon was one of many who worked the long recovery process – cleaning up oil and putting out absorbent boom to block that oil from coming ashore. It took years and culminated in a landmark, 20 BILLION dollar settlement between BP and the U.S. government. – which ironically, funds land restoration across Coastal Louisiana and specifically on Queen Bess Island.
The first step in building m ore land – – is dredging sediment from elsewhere and depositing it on the targeted, disappearing island.
Next comes habitat creation: planting vegetation whose roots hold the sediment in place AND attract pelicans looking to nest. Because Queen Bess is so important for birds, officials prioritized it as the first location for restoration efforts. But there were major lessons to learn. Like: turns out, timing is key.
JON: “... this was our first project, so we went through and we did everything all at one time. And so we come out here and the pelicans were like ripping, literally ripping the plants out of the ground and making them into their nests, which is like, well. That's what we wanted them to do, but…”
But maybe not quite yet.
It might sound over simplified, but a lot of Jon’s job is looking at where the pelicans are nesting, how well they’re taking to vegetation, and whether certain areas of the island need maintenance.
But this restoration process can be tricky in a political climate which questions the value and impact of big environmental projects.
Recently, Louisiana’s Governor Jeff Landry cancelled a cornerstone of the state’s coastal restoration plan – a major river diversion project meant to mimic the continuous, centuries-long process of the Mississippi River’s landbuilding.
ARCHIVAL: “Louisiana’s biggest coastal restoration project is scrapped, and now a smaller alternative may develop in its place.”
But many argue a smaller alternative can’t address Louisiana’s colossal amount of coastal land loss.
On top of the political challenges, Louisiana’s coastal restoration fund is nearing a fiscal cliff. Less than five years from now, in 2031, BP will stop paying penalties into the 20 BILLION dollar settlement which has funded the state’s coastal restoration work. After that, no new major funding is on the horizon.
Melinda oversees restoration for beach-nesting and migratory birds in the northern Gulf.
MELINDA: “ When I look at all of this, and I think about the price tag, the first thing that comes to my mind is how do we keep this going? It's awesome that this came out of the BP oil spill, right? Many wonderful things have come out of a horrible tragedy, but where do we go from here? How do we keep this going?”
It’s a really good question.
Standing on Queen Bess, on the fruits of this recent recovery effort, I consider how banning a pesticide is a lot easier than reversing land loss – especially because land loss is driven by much larger forces like climate change.
Brock says even though Louisiana’s current pelican population is robust, it’s also increasingly limited.
GEARY: “ There is no shortage of pelicans in Louisiana, or on the Gulf Coast broadly. But breeding activity for pelicans is increasingly concentrated on a few really high-priority sites, of which Queen Bess is one. But we have far fewer islands than we have in past decades.”
16 years after the BP spill, and sixty years after near-extinction from DDT, we might have to save pelicans again, only this time the threat is even more daunting.
GEARY: “So when some sort of disturbance like a storm might, like, really severely impact one of those sites, you know, birds are left with fewer options than, than they previously had… in every state but Texas, pelicans are estimated to be on the decline again.”
In a way, many of us in South Louisiana are also dealing with dwindling options of where to live.
It’s clear what the main threat is: habitat loss. And scientists say the reasons for that threat are also clear: climate change, subsidence, oil and gas development, worsening storms. Yet the state is rapidly moving away from solutions with broad scientific consensus.
I wonder if the Gulf’s reverence for the pelican might be more than just iconography, but instead a shared experience of what it means to really keep living here. …,. If we can’t continue to protect the crucial 37 acres of habitat on Queen Bess, how can we realistically protect thousands of miles of Gulf coast?
The Pelicans' struggle is also our struggle.
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UPDATE:
CARLYLE: I want to leave you all with some good seabird updates. This year, for the first time scientists tracked 196 puffin nests so far on Eastern Egg Rock, it’s a new record high and up from 188 counted in 2019. It's not a major jump, but shows that the population is remaining stable on the island. And down here in Louisiana, the Chaneleur Islands, which are another of the brown pelicans largest historic nesting colonies, recently received 90 million dollars for restoration, a huge step in protecting this vital habitat.
