At the Annual Meeting and Dinner, Stephen Kress will receive the Eisenmann Medal, the Linnaean Society’s highest award, given for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur.
Worldwide, about one-third of all seabird species are threatened because of invasive predatory mammals, marine pollution, and effects of climate change. Against this grim background, Steve’s success in the restoration of Atlantic Puffins and other seabirds to coastal islands of Maine is a beacon for hope. This inspiring story demonstrates that people have the capacity to return seabirds to historic nesting islands and proactively help them find secure nesting places. His presentation will provide examples of how methods developed for bringing puffins back to Maine are helping create new colonies of endangered seabirds worldwide.
Steve will discuss how restored colonies of puffins and terns are providing fresh insight into the changing marine climate of the Gulf of Maine. His research demonstrates that puffins and terns can serve as indicators of the health of key forage fish populations. He will also share the recent discovery of the previously unknown winter home for puffins—and explain how this discovery helped establish the “Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument.”
Stephen Kress is Vice-President for Bird Conservation for the National Audubon Society and Director of the Audubon Seabird Restoration Program and Hog Island Audubon Camp. In this role, he supervises 13 islands in Maine that are home to more than 42,000 nesting seabirds of 23 species, including most of Maine’s rare and endangered seabirds. Methods that he developed in Maine such as chick translocations and social attraction are now standard practice worldwide. He is co-author of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.