MAINE MONITOR • September 18, 2022
“It’s as if the birds came back with a vengeance,” said Dallas Jordan, who with Becky Howell managed Pond Island for National Audubon’s Seabird Institute and the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge. “You can’t overstate what that all means,” Jordan said. “It’s amazing to see the birds come back. But when you look at the big picture, we’ve entered a cycle where the birds can’t rely on anything anymore. They’ve evolved for thousands of years to be accustomed to reliable sites. They’re long-lived birds, so they can handle a bad year here and there. The question is what happens with more bad years.” What the birds come back to depends on whether people decide that a calm summer buys time to take the warming waters seriously, or whether it merely inspires a complacency that guarantees the next calamity.