018. First Dates & Gateway Birds
Getting birdy over Puffins on a first date in Maine.
We’re walking through the quaint New England downtown of Rockland, ME. A coastal community drawing artists and creatives alongside fisherman and blue collar workers who have lived here for generations. Main Street has been blocked off by flashing blue lights to allow local vendors safety as they set up their wares among the old brick buildings. Maine-made soaps, honey, and wood carvings displayed with love and care beneath little white tents.
This is a first date. It’s been a minute since I’ve been on a first date. I am finding my bearings again as I remember all the first date questions:
Q: “Where did you grow up?” A: "I know I said I was in Maine on the app, but I actually grew up overseas and most recently have been living in Washington state. That's where I just came from a couple weeks ago." Q: "What brought you here?" A: "I'm doing a year at woodworking school. I love being a therapist, but I'd like to make woodworking my full-time gig so I'm out here learning some new skills and looking for inspiration."
Like most women I know who are dating, I’ve texted a screenshot of wood-working guy’s photo along with his full name, our plans, a timeframe, and what I’m wearing to my close friends under the title: “IN CASE I GO MISSING.” Friends of single women who are dating anticipate these texts. Instead of alarm, the husband of my closest married friends responds with, “He is fucking adorable.”
We spend a few hours with coffee cups in hand exploring local shops and walking to the Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse. Cormorants and gulls sun themselves on surrounding rocks as the morning warms up. Sand pipers appear to be walking on water as they scour the seaweed and kelp beds floating at the breakwater’s edges for mid-morning snacks. A friendly seal pops their head above the waves, curiously observing the humans in front of them. Temperature creeps into the mid-eighties and we find our way back into the shade, admiring Maine’s coastline dotted with small islands in the distance. Vinalhaven’s ferry passes us by, escorting passengers out to sea.
Meandering through the vendors downtown, I notice a small storefront titled, Project Puffin, with ties to the Audobon Seabird Institute. Puffins have absolutely captured my attention. If you’ve seen one, and you have a heart, then it’s obvious why.
They are an easy bird to love by sight alone; tiny, and colorful, and clumsy. I’ve heard puffins referred to as a gateway bird. It begins with curiosity about this tiny feathered friend, and ends with you traveling vast distances by car, or boat, or plane, searching remote landscapes for other birds in the early hours of the morning. You see one puffin and before you fully understand what’s happening, you’re aiming for a Big Year.
Ali Ward, host of the incredibly fun podcast, Ologies, interviewed Puffinologist, Jill Taylor, for an episode all about these fascinating birds back in June ‘24, and I have been hooked on them since.
Precious Puffin Facts:
Puffins Sound like: “angry chainsaws.”
Billing: Puffins rub and tap bills as a sign of pair-bonding with mates, and to show affection with their friends.
Rafting: Puffins will gather in the water by the hundreds for a communal float during breeding season creating a formation referred to as, “rafting.”
Wheeling: Non-breeders of the puffin colony will spend hours flying together in figure eights over the colony cliffs in a behavior called, “wheeling.”
Glowing Bills: Puffin’s bill plates have ultraviolet properties that make them glow under certain light!
Relationships: Puffins are monogamous and live for around 25 years.
Tiny: Puffins are only about 8 inches tall and weigh about 500grams. Smol babies.
Not a Penguin: Penguins and Puffins are not related. Just seems like they should be.
I ask wood-working guy if he minds wandering inside the information center with me before breaking for lunch. With enthusiasm, he spends the next eight minutes engaging in conversation and questions as I chat up the front desk worker, Amy. Amy tells us Project Puffin has helped raise Maine’s puffin numbers from just two in the whole state, to hundreds through their years of conservation and education efforts.
The shop walls are lined with everything puffin. Greeting cards, wood carvings, t-shirts, books, all depicting the cute tuxedo bird with a brightly colored bill. My date picks up a puffin embroidered dog collar and says, “Looks like something Morris needs…” to which I nod in agreement.
I mention to Amy how much I love all of the artistic interpretations of the birds throughout the small shop. Amy smiles and produces four square panel canvases from behind her, all displaying different seabirds found along the coast of Maine, hand painted in various styles. She tells me this fall they are doing an art auction to fundraise for conservation efforts. Anyone can paint a coastal Maine bird on a canvas and donate it to the auction. She reads the excitement on my face and asks if I’d like to participate, “One thousand percent yes, Amy.”
Wood-working guy and I exit the information center and I carry the blank canvas around for the remainder of our date. In an even nerdier turn of events, I start sharing puffin facts with him, walking the very fine line between endearing and eccentric. He listens attentively and comments on how it seems like he’s been missing out on the bird-scene, and Maine might just be the place to dive in. I chuckle at the phrase ‘dive in’, “Wait, did you already know puffins are excellent divers?!”
Sciencey Puffin Facts:
Four types of Puffins: Atlantic Puffin (found in Maine!), Horned Puffin, Tufted Puffin (many in Alaska), and the Rhinocerous Aucklet (hot-topic puffin).
A part of the Auk family: This family of birds also includes, Razorbills, Common Murres, and Black Guillemot (saw my first Black Guillemot this summer on a sea kayaking trip off the coast of Deer Isle, Maine).
Breeding Season: May to August puffins are breeding, and will return to the same islands each year. This is the best time to see them, and when their bills and eye ornaments will be in full color! Puffins begin breeding between 4-5 years of age.
Migration: For the 8 months outside of breeding season, puffins migrate out to sea and essentially float around the ocean until it’s time to return to their home islands.
Colored Bills: Puffins develop “bill plates” for breeding season — the vibrant orange, yellow, and red bills we recognize. As breeding season comes to a close these bill plates peel off, like a sunburn, leaving their bills a dull grey.
Parenting: Both parents spend time incubating the egg, foraging for fish, and raising their puffling (omg, puffling). Pairs typically have one puffling each season.
Nesting: Puffins build burrows by tunneling under grassy hills and into cliff-sides.
Food & Diving: Puffins dine on fish, and can dive more than 160 feet deep!
Different species of Puffin are close to endangerment or considered to be in critical numbers throughout the Northern Hemisphere due to various factors such as a history of being hunted, and climate change warming the ocean, impacting their food sources.
Puffins are now considered a protected species, and due to efforts like Project Puffin through the Audobon Seabird Institute their numbers are growing. You and I can join their conservation work through donations, volunteering, building awareness — whose to say this is the first man I’ve lured into the Puffin Info Center on a first date — and even making art.
Stay nerdy, readers.
So how did Mr. Woodworker guy work out?
Wonderful. There is something endearing about those tubby little birds. Thanks God for making puffins