VINALHAVEN, Maine — For more than 50 years, researchers with what's now called the Audubon Seabird Institute have spent their summers on islands off the coast of Maine, studying birds like puffins and tern. They've helped protect the growth of populations once nearly lost to Maine's coast.
We had the chance to Zoom with a field researcher who lives on an island off the coast of Maine for four months out of the year, studying the birds, their habitats, and their rituals. It's something Coco Faber has done for the past nine summers, five of which were spent on Seal Island. It's a not-so-glamorous life in a tent totally disconnected from the mainland, but Faber and her fellow researchers wouldn't change a thing.
Faber said what keeps her coming back to the island is being able to see those birds return.
"I love this project, I love the island, but it's also like I wanna know what happens!" Faber explained. "There are burrows on the island where I could tell you everything that happens from that one specific burrow every year for the past five years. Getting to have that kind of knowledge of a place and of a species and an individual is so compelling."
"Just this morning, I was sitting in a blind looking around and I saw a puffin and I was like, 'That one looks pretty young,'" Faber added. "You can tell the shape of the bill and stuff if they're a younger bird. And I was able to read the bands on it, and then I looked it up and that bird was one that my friend, who I work with, banded two years ago. I know what burrow it's from, I know what the parents are like. So you get the reward years later sometimes of seeing who came back, who made it to adulthood."
That attachment can make watching pufflings like Ama fledge the burrow a little bittersweet, though. Ama has spent her first few months in front of many eyes through the Audubon's puffin burrow camera, offering a livestream to viewers all around the world. Faber was the researcher to band Ama, which will be helpful when—or if—Ama returns to breed in three to five years.
"We have this kind of backstage pass to this whole world that most people just don't get to see or experience. And even for us, the burrow cameras give us this access that we wouldn't have otherwise. There's stuff that we've learned from these cameras that no one's ever seen before because the puffins are living a lot of their life underground," Faber said.
"We have really dedicated viewers of our cams and something that we're always impressed with here, too, is just how supportive and loving and caring we feel like our specific puffin community is," Faber added, noting it means a lot to them, especially when island life can feel disconnected at times.
That said, what is island life like for four months out of the year?
"We have a little cabin, we have tent platforms, so there's a crew of usually four to five people here and we each have our little tent and then the cabin is sort of our shared space. We do not have running water. We do have solar power here and actually, because of the cams, we have WiFi, which is wild and luxurious," Faber joked. "I think a lot of people are like, 'Oh they must be eating out of cans for four months,' but we get supply runs every couple of weeks with food and water and we have a pretty great time out here. Everyone who works out here pretty much loves it."
They also love the research on these seabirds and learning more about how the world is impacting them, including climate change.
"We are working in these restored colonies, so these are places where there were historically nesting seabirds at one point, they were extirpated or nearly extirpated, and now we have these colonies that are growing for puffins, especially," Faber explained. "We find more new burrows every year. There are more new breeding birds every year. So the birds are doing these really exciting and difficult things, and so we feel we need to be doing more to kind of match how much effort the birds put into feeding their chicks to come back migrating every year back to the island. It's so very hard to be a bird and they have so much against them already that we think about what we can be doing to do our part."
Faber and her team will leave the island in mid-September once most of the birds have started their journey away from Maine. They'll likely pick up researching jobs in other parts of the country, and then return to Seal Island next May.