I’m excited to be teaching on the new Audubon Society’s Puffin Islands course, a week-long residential course on Hog Island, Maine (US). After the course I will head out to Matinicus Rock, where my collaborator Steve Kress from Cornell University has been studying puffins for many years. Steve wants to track the feeding movements of the birds, and so we will deploy tiny GPS trackers on the birds like I did in 2018 in the UK, Iceland and Norway. I will then cross the border to visit Canada’s Machias Seal Island, long-term study colony of Tony Diamond from the University of New Brunswick, where we will also try to track “his” puffins. Environmental conditions and prey species have changed in the region in recent years, and tracking the feeding movements and behaviour of puffins in the area will help us understand how they may be affected by these changes.
Annette Fayet 