Every summer, a handful of interns and research assistants are selected from hundreds of applicants to camp in primitive conditions on a tiny, treeless island several miles off Maine's coast. Their ...

After contorting under boulders for puffin chicks, chasing skittish tern chicks in the weeds and sitting as stone-silent sentinels in bird blinds to observe feeding and behavior, the five-person ...

But not to the rest of Maine. Islands that puffins had once inhabited had become enemy territory, occupied by colonies of large, aggressive, predatory gulls that thrived on the debris generated by a ...

PORT TOWNSEND — A lecture on puffins will expand their image as cute, fluffy seabirds to tough, agile and resilient survivors of the harsh northern seas. John Piatt, Ph.D., director of the World ...

THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA — The R/V Puffin sliced through uncharacteristically calm waters near Smith Island, a lopsided pancake of land often buffeted by wind and waves at the end of the strait.

Hundreds of seabirds clung to Williamson Rocks, a guano-covered cluster of stone and grass rising just above the high tide line in Burrows Bay, near Anacortes, Washington. The spectacle drew a flurry ...

Atlantic puffins spend much of their lives beyond human view, scattered across the cold waters of the North Atlantic. They only return to land during breeding season, and even then, only in remote ...

The puffin hops into a crevice between two rocks, presumably to deliver the fish to a hungry chick, and bounds back up to mingle with other puffins before its next expedition. Each puffin pair raises ...