GRIST • January 4, 2022
I stepped onto the battlefield of climate change, sidestepping carcass after carcass. In the grass were the remains of Arctic terns, common terns, and roseate terns. Along the boulders, researchers pointed out dead puffin chicks. As other climate war zones smolder with wildfire embers, are strewn with flattened homes, or marked by bleached coral, the signature of conflict on a seabird island in the Gulf of Maine is a maddening quietude. I was on islands managed by National Audubon’s Project Puffin. Over the last decade, warmer waters have slammed into the Gulf of Maine as forcefully as a hurricane. The first death blow was the flooding of nests with unhatched eggs. The second came to many of the chicks that hatched and then starved because of the heat wave. A third hit came with the rains. The question is whether the public cares. It is not too late, but our lack of commitment was on gory display last summer on the seabird islands of Maine. For all that Project Puffin and efforts like it have restored, climate change is coming at the birds with the speed of a 19th century plume hunter’s bullet. The next bullet comes for us.