“Mothers are mothers everywhere,” Kay Garlick-Ott ’18 discovered.
“I’m holding a common tern chick in my hand,” she recalls, “and there’s an adult standing on my head watching, watching, watching over the chick to make sure I’m not doing anything suspicious with it.”
A biology major, Garlick-Ott was spending the summer after her senior year at Pomona College on Eastern Egg Rock, a seven-acre speck in the north Atlantic off the coast of Maine. The island is so tiny that Jacob Ligorria ’23, who’s also spent a summer doing research there, says the record for running around it is four minutes.
Garlick-Ott has spent seven summers working with Project Puffin, a longitudinal study of the reproductive success of puffins, terns, storm petrels and other avian species. It’s also a powerful source of data on ocean health.
Seabird colonies hint at ocean health
Seabirds “are like the canaries in the coal mine,” says Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, who has been studying various species of seabirds since 1993.
“They are telling us about the ocean and all the threats to wildlife—rising temperatures and sea levels, invasive species, pollution. That’s why they are so compelling.”
Over the past decade, Karnovsky—“Prof. K” to her students—has connected seven Sagehens with Project Puffin, now called the Audubon Seabird Institute. This year, Max Distaso ’28 and Mark Price ’28 did summer undergraduate research projects with the Maine-based group.
Karnovsky credits Project Puffin with pioneering conservation work now being replicated around the world.
The group, founded by ornithologist Stephen Kress, developed a technique known as Social Attraction, first used on small islands in the Gulf of Maine where hunting had decimated puffin colonies. Realistic puffin decoys and seabird soundtracks made the isolated spits of land appealing to the black and white birds with distinctive red, orange and yellow bills.
Like other seabirds, puffins “will only come to a colony if it looks like a ‘happening’ place,” Karnovsky explains.
“Now the colony is thriving again,” she says.
A ‘crazy’ research experience
A summer with Project Puffin “is a crazy experience,” Ligorria says. “It’s not for everyone."
Three months living in a tent on a small, remote island. Food delivered by boat every three weeks—unless a storm delays it. Water brought every two weeks, with rainwater collection in emergencies. And no days off.
“It’s exhausting,” Ligorria says, “and super exhilarating. I fell in love with it.”
The winged residents are not always glad to meet their new neighbors.
Garlick-Ott still remembers feeling overwhelmed the first time she walked into a seabird colony. “Imagine thousands of birds all flying up into the air, shouting at you, dive-bombing you, pecking you, pooping on you.”
“You just have to keep walking and make sure you’re not stepping on eggs.”
Day-to-day research is carefully plotted, with precise data recorded for the individual species. “Our job was to monitor the birds,” Ligorria says. “How many eggs are they laying? How many eggs are hatching? How many chicks are surviving? How fast are they growing?”
“It’s super-cool to be living inside the colony,” he adds. “I got such an intimate view into these wild creatures’ lives—from the day the egg is laid to the day the chick left the nest.”
Measuring seabird productivity and growth
Some nesting burrows are designated for measuring productivity, so Price found out how many eggs each burrow contained and whether the eggs hatched.
In other burrows, measuring growth was the goal.
“We’d take the chicks out of the burrow and weigh them in these little cups and measure their wing cord with a ruler,” he says.
The parents were not always thrilled with the process. The adult terns in Price’s colony “were always flying around, pecking our heads,” he recalls. Price assumed it was out of defense or parental love. “I had some foam under my hat because it does hurt” to get pecked, he says.
“They drew blood a couple times.”
Researchers seated behind a blind observe the type and quantity of food the parents feed their chicks. This information is important, not just for how it affects growth, but for what it says about conditions in the ocean where they fish.
“That was freaking amazing to me,” Ligorria says. “I can learn about the entire ocean without having to be on a boat.”
Some types of fish, usually those with higher nutritional value, are found in cold water from the Arctic. Others—including some strange-looking creatures—signal warmer ocean temperatures and often correlate with lower chick survival.
Karnovsky says the Gulf of Maine, where the islands are located, is one of the most rapidly warming bodies of water on the planet. Watching the colony day after day, week after week, is not always easy, she says, as the survival rate of chicks is low and the researchers cannot intervene.
“The two years I was supervising were some of the worst productivity years I’ve experienced—a combination of really poor food availability and some poorly timed storms,” Garlick-Ott says. “When you’re living out there, it’s really intense to see just how much these birds are up against every summer.”
As Ligorria’s first supervisor told him: “Where there’s a lot of life, there’s a lot of death.”
Opening conservation career horizons
Summers with Project Puffin often turn into years of seabird research and, for some Sagehens, a career direction. Two of Karnovsky’s students have gone on to study penguins, and another is focusing on bald eagles.
Garlick-Ott is a fifth-year doctoral student studying how environmental factors shape aggression in common terns. She is considering using her science background to inform policy at a nonprofit.
After two summers with Project Puffin, Ligorria spent a Fulbright year studying Arctic seabirds. He is now a field crew lead for a conservation organization in Kauai, monitoring endangered seabird collisions with powerlines.
The work is tedious, as is much field work. Ligorria starts his day at around 3 a.m., using military-grade night vision goggles in observation. His team documents what happens when seabirds approach powerlines and what interventions can keep them safe.
As a researcher, professor and mentor, Karnovsky has come to recognize over the years that some people are “just drawn to the work” with seabirds, as she is.
“Once you get involved with that work, you see there’s so much more to be done,” she says, “but there are also creative solutions and conservation successes.”
“It’s really inspiring.”