How The Adorable Atlantic Puffin Came Back From Near Extinction | Nightly News Films

foreign [Music] this is the story of the adorable Atlantic puffin [Music] it's rainbow colored beak in sharp contrast to its black and white feathers the Puffin had become so prized at one point puffins were almost lost to Extinction [Music] on Eastern egg Rock Island here in the Gulf of Maine in the early 1970s before Society fully embraced conservation a young Renegade biologist named Steve Kress decided to stand up to the inevitable inertia he called it project Puffin project Puffin started in 1973 because people that hunted all the puffins hunt off of that Island to do what to eat them to eat them and to take their feathers because back in the day feathers were used for pillows they were used for mattresses they were used to decorate women's hats and for all those reasons people killed puffins and you thought to yourself we can restore the population they ate them all they were gone and I thought what a loss isn't this terrible that some people have taken them away and future Generations can't enjoy them maybe we could make a difference maybe we could bring them back and that had never been done before it had never been done before with a seabird to see how the audacity of one man resulted in success requires a bumpy ride 45 minutes southeast of Bremen here on this protected Island almost 50 years after project Puffin began the birds are thriving most encouraging down in those crevices between the Rocks biologists this year are counting a healthy population of newborns what do we have here this is actually a baby puffling yes okay the term for a baby Puffin can I touch yeah it was so soft how old do you think this this little one is oh that's maybe about 10 days old 10 days so all the colors like in the beak that's not in birth no that'll come in later and even within like the first couple years it's kind of drab and then once we get up to breeding age three four years old that's when they really start having the beautiful colors what's it like holding it it's like a light little fluff ball it's super light yeah is it okay oh my God I was so warm very warm very warm puffin's breeding is especially encouraging because in recent years climate change has become a new challenge since the 1980s the rate of warming in the Gulf of Maine has been nearly tripled that of the world's oceans last year 2021 a marine Heat Wave resulted in the highest sea surface temperatures ever recorded and that is a problem for puffins adult puffins dive into the water to find food for their chicks most preferred Herring see how Slender they are but as the water warms Herring go deeper and farther from Shore and butter fish move in butterfish are not a bad fish they're pretty high calorie fish their name is butter fish and there's a reason for that but they have an odd body shape um they're very tall or deep bodied we would say and sometimes they're so deep bodied that they're just physically too large for the chicks to swallow them so the Butter fish has this odd body shape so it's like it can't get it down the throat exactly and so we see chicks trying to swallow these fish for long periods of time and it eventually just not working they they discard it and it means that the adult puffins wasted a trip the chick did not get fed anything and so it disrupts uh the the feeding process global warming that wasn't on Steve Kress's radar back in the 70s what you did is remarkable but why should we have cared about this bird anyway so these birds tell us about the world they tell us about the oceans and because the oceans cover two-thirds of the planet they are messengers of what's happening at Sea and what happens is he affects not just puffins but people and everything on this planet that's why we have to listen to what the puffins have to say are we listening some people are listening more people every day nearly extinct in the 70s to today we're on five Coastal main islands there are an estimated 2600 Atlantic puffins thriving project Puffin a success story but with a new and even bigger challenge global climate change Kerry Sanders NBC News Eastern egg Rock Island Maine foreign thanks for watching our YouTube channel follow today's top stories and breaking news by downloading the NBC News app

Channel: NBC News

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Length: 5min 47sec (347 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2022