Maine 2025 2: Puffins!

A raft of puffins, Eastern Egg Rock, Maine

1 June 2025

My poor little Canon PowerShot is a mere two years old and is falling apart. The battery door doesn't latch (that one is my fault), the articulated, automatic lens cap never fully retracts, requiring me to push the slats out of the way (not my fault), and has now shed a section and never fully closes (not my fault),  the lens is scuffed (because see previous), and now I think the focus motor is dying.

Nevertheless, one goes on an Audubon puffins cruise with the camera one has in one's pocket, and that's what we did on May 28.

The guide was an Audobon naturalist. The first third of the trip was getting out of the harbor and too Eastern Egg Rock.

The islands in the distance created an optical illusion of a vertical wall on the horizon.

This is Eastern Egg Rock, with my lens' scuff mark visible on the skyline near the center.

Tom's photos from his trip out here last year are much better than mine. I think he used the same camera I have, only his is still in one piece. I take mine on bike rides. It's been jostled and rained on and ocasionally dropped.

There were a few naturalists on the island. One was in a blind, taking pictures.

The puffin's call is a low moan. What we heard were the skwawks and screeches of herring gulls. 

Every closeup that was in focus was without puffins. I was mostly shooting blind, often into the sun, against the rocking of the boat. One of my blurry photos (not posted here) shows painted numbers over puffin burrows. They come ashore for a few months to nest, then spend the rest of the year on open water. This colony winters a hundred or so miles east of Massachusetts.

Puffins were once extirpated from the Maine coast. Using decoys and sound recordings, naturalists lured them back to several islands, Estern Egg Rock being one of them. Another is Seal Island, where a round-the-clock Puffin Cam is available to distract you from important work.

The ship's purser said that this was the largest group of puffins he'd seen in years. And I was unable to get more than a few in focus, none of them on the island.

These birds are ridiculous.

The bird on the right is a guillemot:

We were told that a group of puffins on the water is called a "raft." That I got this group almost in focus is nothing short of a miracle.

We passed a few lighthouses on our way to and from the harbor. I got better photos on our way back.

This one, we were told, was the only one around built on land. 

As I zoomed in over the open water, the image became more diffracted, winding up looking like paint-by-numbers.

This is how far from it we really were:

It was a perfect day to be out on the water.