seabirds

This is the inspiring story of how a beloved seabird was restored to long-abandoned nesting colonies off the Maine coast. As a young ornithology instructor at the Hog Island Audubon Camp, Dr. Stephen W. Kress learned that puffins had nested on nearby islands until hunters drove them away in the late 1800s. To right this environmental wrong, Kress resolved to bring puffins back to Eastern Egg Rock. Yet bringing the plan to fruition meant convincing skeptics, finding resources, and inventing restoration methods at a time when many believed in “letting nature take its course.” Today, Project Puffin has restored more than 1,000 puffin pairs to three Maine islands. Even more exciting is that techniques developed during the project have helped to restore rare and endangered seabirds worldwide. Further, reestablished puffins now serve as a window into the effects of climate change. The success of Dr. Kress’s project offers hope that people can restore lost wildlife populations and the habitats that support them. The need for such inspiration has never been greater.

Enduringly popular, Puffins are perhaps the most immediately identifiable of seabirds with their decorative bills and distinctive gait. Yet when they take to the air they wheel and turn with great agility and underwater these stocky little birds use short specially adapted wings to propel themselves through the water in pursuit of small fish. Surprisingly little was known about Puffin ecology until recently thanks to their preferred breeding habitat being underground on remote islands or hard-to-reach coastlines. Now Euan Dunn discloses all we have learnt about them as a result of technological advances, and provides a revealing account of their life cycle, behaviour and breeding, what they eat, how they interact in their busy colonies, and where they migrate to in winter. Euan also exposes the mounting threats Puffins face and offers advice on the best places to see them. Each Spotlight title is carefully designed to introduce readers to the lives and behaviour of our favourite birds and mammals.

An endemic species of North America, the double-crested cormorant is an iridescent black waterbird superbly adapted to catch fish. The first Europeans settlers in North America quickly deemed the double-crested cormorant a competitor for fishing stock and undertook a relentless siege on the birds. This book explores the roots of human-cormorant conflicts, dispels myths about the birds, and offers the first comprehensive assessment of the policies that have been developed to manage the Double-crested cormorant in the twenty-first century. Conservation biologist Linda Wires provides a unique synthesis of the cultural, historical, scientific and political elements of the cormorant’s story. She discusses the amazing late-twentieth-century population recovery, aided by protection policies and environment conservation, but also the subsequent U.S. federal policies under which hundreds of thousands of the birds have been killed. In a critique of the science, management and ethics underlying the double-crested cormorant’s treatment today, Wires exposes “management” as a euphemism for persecution and shows that the current strategies of aggressive predator control are outdated and unsupported by science.

Seawatching is the challenging act of identifying waterbirds in flight. Since more than one hundred different species can fly past an observation point, often at great speed or in tightly packed, mixed-species flocks, identification of these distant shapes can be a mystery. The keys to the mystery, the subtle traits that unlock the identity of flying waterbirds, be it wingbeat cadence, individual structure, flock shape and behaviour, or subtle flashes of colour, are revealed in this guide. Though commonly called seawatching, this on-the-fly observation and identification method is by no means restricted to the coast. There are impressive waterbird migrations on the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and many inland lakes and rivers. Nor is it restricted to migrating waterfowl, as the principles of flight identification apply as effectively to ducks flushed off a pond as to distant migrating flocks. Like “Hawks in Flight” and “The Shorebird Guide,” this guide breaks new ground, provides cutting-edge techniques, and pushes the envelope in bird identification even further.

Reaktion Animal Series. Albatross looks at the place of these iconic birds in the lives of different peoples and societies. The albatross’s remarkable ease in the air and its huge wingspan strikes all those who observe them, and the huge journeys they undertake across the oceans inspires awe. The bird has been celebrated through proverbs, folk stories, art, and ceremony, most famously in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. People have engaged with the bird over the last two centuries, from those who sought to exploit them to those who devoted their lives to them. Writers, artists and documentary makers have all focused on the albatross and its place in the human imagination has been demonstrated throughout history. The book concludes with a consideration of the bird’s changing significance in the modern world, as well as threats to its continued existence and its prospects for the future.