The prisoner looks up at us from his metal enclosure. Huddled in a corner, he freezes against the wall, hoping we haven’t seen him. But as the beam of our flashlight comes to rest on him, he’s gone. With a flip of his wings, he dives beneath the surface of the shallow pool, disappearing into the shadows of the enclosure.
“Well, crap,” says one of my companions. “He’s not going to be easy to rescue.”
***
When my friend asked me if I wanted to join her doing Puffin Patrol, it sounded almost too fantastic to be real. But it is: run by the Newfoundland and Labrador Chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Puffin and Petrel Patrol is a program that provides an extra helping hand to newly fledged seabirds which have lost their way.
The program takes place in the communities surrounding the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve. The reserve is home to the largest breeding colony of Atlantic puffins in North America, and the second-largest colony of Leach’s storm petrels in the world.
This is what the word ‘puffling’ conjures for me…
The puffins (and petrels) nest in burrows on islands close to shore. They lay only one egg, and after it hatches, the puffling remains in the burrow for 6-7 weeks. (Can we just pause here to enjoy the fact that baby puffins are called pufflings? Whenever I hear that word, I immediately picture the tribbles from Star Trek…)
The trouble starts when it’s time for the pufflings to leave the burrow. They fledge at night, giving them protection from predators as they first venture into the outside world. For centuries, pufflings have emerged from their burrows in the dark and followed the light of the moon and stars out to sea.
But growing development along the coast poses a problem for the fledglings. An increase in the number of houses and businesses also means an increase in artificial light. More and more, pufflings are being drawn towards the streetlights, headlights, and house lights that illuminate the shoreline. Many of these confused travellers land on dark streets, and fall victim to traffic mishaps. Even those that avoid this fate are unlikely to make it back to sea without help.
This is where the Puffin Patrol comes in. Every night during the fledging season (mid-August to early September), volunteers armed with butterfly nets patrol the streets of the coastal towns near the ecological reserve. When they find a stranded puffling, it is scooped up in a net and placed into a plastic bin to await release the next morning.
Releases are sometimes done from a boat, but also frequently occur on the beach – and they gather quite a crowd. While biologists weigh and measure the birds, and fit them with a band to allow for identification if they’re ever recaptured, CPAWS takes the opportunity to tell the watching group a bit about puffins.
Watching a freshly released puffling make his way out to sea.
So not only does the Puffin and Petrel Patrol help two species of birds, both designated as vulnerable by the IUCN, it’s also a great outreach tool. In addition to the public releases, locals and visitors alike can volunteer to be patrollers, providing they sign up in advance. Since its inception in 2004, the program has attracted hundreds of volunteers, and has captured the imagination of Canadians across the country: to date, it’s been the subject of a picture book and the focus of an episode of The Nature of Things.
***
It’s a foggy, cool night in mid-August, and my first time out on patrol. As I don a fluorescent safety vest and arm band reading “Puffin Patrol”, it feels a bit surreal that we’re going to spend the next few hours wandering around in the dark looking for stranded pufflings. Only in Newfoundland.
At first it’s a fairly quiet night, with only a few teams reporting puffling encounters, and I start to think that maybe our services aren’t needed. But as we make the rounds of a local fish plant, my friend shines her flashlight into the flat-bottomed barge used to take waste offshore for disposal. There’s a shallow pool of water at the bottom – and there, pressed into a corner, is my first puffling.
As soon as the light hits him, he dives under the surface, eventually reappearing on the far side of the enclosure. The barge is several feet below us as we stand on the dock, and we realize quickly that to get him out of his prison, we’re going to need a longer net.
As we turn to leave, we come face to face with another puffling, only a few feet away, looking for all the world like he wants to know what we’re up to. As we stare at him, he begins sidling towards the edge of the dock and the barge – until my friend makes a sudden, heroic lunge with the net. One puffling trapped on the barge is more than enough to deal with.
Up close and personal: a puffling being banded prior to release.
We stow our captive safely in a plastic bin and take him to Puffin Patrol headquarters, then return to the first puffling to see what we can do. But even with a longer net, as soon as we come anywhere close, he disappears under the water and pops up at the other end of the barge. We can only access the end closest to us, so we are forced to wait for him to come back within reach. At one point, we actually do get him in the net – but as we lift it towards the dock, he jumps right back out.
It’s getting late and we’re all tired and frustrated…but we persevere. We’re not leaving the puffling to die if we can help it. It’s well after 1 a.m. when we get him in the net again. This time we take no chances, holding the open end carefully against the side of the barge as we lift the net, giving the puffling no chance to escape.
And then he’s in our (gloved) hands, looking none too pleased with us as we place him into his plastic bin. But that’s okay. We’re pretty pleased with ourselves, because we know that tomorrow morning he’ll be going in the right direction, headed back out to sea.
Dispatches from the Field 