In a cabin on Seal Island, 21 miles off the coast of Rockland, Coco Faber reached for last year’s island report. She opened the book to a chart showing how many active razorbill burrows have been confirmed over the years.
“Some people might find charts boring, but if you want to understand how the story is unfolding, you have to understand the trends over time,” Faber said. “I really love looking at long-term data sets like this and realizing that my crew is part of the story.”
There was a record-setting story to tell this summer about razorbills, chunky black-and-white birds that stand about 16 inches tall. Razorbills are cousins of Atlantic puffins and the closest living relative to the extinct great auk.
There is no official record of razorbills having historically nested on Seal Island. They were hunted to the extent that Arthur Herbert Norton, a leading expert of Maine’s natural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, saw no razorbills in the state from 1894 to 1923. A 1989 article in American Birds said the razorbill “has the distinction of being perhaps the rarest breeding seabird in the continental United States, with under 200 breeding pairs.”
The bird began breeding on Seal Island in 1999, possibly attracted over from other islands by the successful reintroduction of puffins by conservationists with Project Puffin, now called the Audubon Seabird Institute. But unlike the puffin population, which grew on Seal Island to a record 672 pairs in 2024, the reestablished razorbill population grew at a painfully slow place for several years, stuck at just one breeding pair for the first five years and taking nine years to cross the 10-pair mark.
Finally, after creeping up to 36 pairs by 2017, the razorbills took off. Between 2019 and 2025, the number of active breeding burrows nearly doubled from 60 to 113. This year, Faber and her crew of Juliana Ramirez, Leah Volak, Claudia Halbreiner and Eden Reck identified a record 127 active nests.
“It’s magical to see razorbills fly in with fish,” Volak said. “They look all black and white, but when they open their mouth, the inside is bright and yellow. It’s something to see.”
A couple of weeks later, at the end of the seabird breeding season, Faber’s crew and all the crews on seabird research islands from Cape Cod up to Nova Scotia shared their findings at the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group conference at the Audubon Hog Island Camp in Bremen.
The crew of Eastern Egg Rock, led by Alison Ballard, identified a record 213 active puffin burrows. The crew of Petit Manan Island, managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and led by supervisor Courtney Naughton, saw a record 103 burrows. While no official census was taken on Seal Island, Faber’s crew identified nearly 100 new active puffin burrows.
For razorbills, besides the record on Seal Island, Eastern Egg Rock recorded its first-ever-known razorbill nesting, with the successful fledging of a chick. The crew of Matinicus Rock, led by Coco Faber’s twin sister Tracey Faber, identified a record 419 nests. Petit Manan counted a record 8 razorbill burrows.
The growth in Maine’s razorbill and puffin populations comes as the Gulf of Maine, which has been warming faster than 99 percent of the ocean, has seen a temporary pause in its heating up over the last couple of years. Five years after a disastrous breeding season for alcids and terns because parents could not find fish for chicks amid record sea surface temperatures, most of the reports at this summer’s conference were delivered with smiles.
Outside of one heat wave in July, razorbills were able to find a bounty of sand lance and Atlantic herring and puffins were generally able to munch on plump haddock, sand lance, hake, herring and an unusual amount of squid. On Eastern Egg Rock, puffins were observed for the second straight year catching river herring as well as ocean herring.
The introduction of river herring in their diets could be because of dam removals and herring run restoration projects, said Michelle Staudinger, an associate professor at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences.
Common terns and the federally endangered roseate tern did well this summer. The White and Seavey Islands had a record number of roseate nests, and its highest count of common tern nests in five years. Stratton Island had its third-highest count of common tern nests and a strong year for roseates. Also a haven for waterbirds, Stratton Island had a record number of more than 200 pairs of nesting glossy ibis and its first-ever nesting of yellow-crowned night herons, a species much more common in the southeastern part of the country.
Stratton also had what might be a game-changing success in protecting the least tern, which is listed as endangered in Maine. Least tern colonies have often been wiped out by black-crowned night herons. Over the years, researchers have used lights, lasers, bangers and screamers, and banged pots to try to scare away herons. They even tried to use a mannequin. All to no avail.
“The herons eventually figure it out,” said Stratton supervisor Ben Becker.
This summer, researchers erected a slightly electrified fence around part of the colony. Island supervisor Ben Becker said there was no predation within the fence. Only 2 chicks hatched outside the fence, but 31 hatched inside it. “I’m hopeful this method will stick,” Becker said.
The one sour note to the summer was a poor breeding season for Arctic terns. For whatever reason, the parents could not find food for chicks, not even invertebrates, especially when the summer heated up. Many chicks starved to death.
Staudinger called it a “head scratcher” as in many years, Arctic terns, the world’s long-distance migratory champion, arrive in the Gulf of Maine in poor condition, perhaps from climate change affecting its food supplies between here and the Antarctic ice shelf. This year, it was the other way around. Out on Seal Island, the Arctic terns arrived “with good feathers and good body shape,” Faber said. “But once they got here, they couldn’t find much of anything.”
That was not the case for puffins and razorbills.
Claudia Halbreiner, who is a zookeeper at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, said it was a thrill to reach under burrows on Seal Island to measure and weigh healthy puffins in their natural environment. “You feel how sturdy this bird is,” Halbreiner said. “You instantly have so much more appreciation for how it makes it out there.”
Among those at the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group who were particularly gratified to hear about the good fortunes for alcids was Richard Podolsky. One of the earliest participants in Project Puffin, he wrote the 1989 report on the then-rarity of razorbills. He said their resurgence represents a “multigenerational success story,” demonstrating that decades of dogged restoration can create the conditions for natural expansion.
Podolsky said it is proof that people “really can change the future of a species.”
This story appears as part of a collaboration to strengthen investigative journalism in Maine between the BDN and The Maine Monitor. Read more about the partnership: bangordailynews.com/the-maine-monitor