AUDUBON • March x, 2026
Over the last 52 years, Audubon’s Seabird Institute, based in Maine, has pioneered ways to encourage seabirds like puffins, terns, storm-petrels, and more, to recolonize historic nesting islands. Many of their techniques revolve around the idea of social attraction, which often involves using decoys, mirrors, and playback of seabird recordings to trick birds into thinking that an abandoned colony is a popular place. Deceptive? Maybe, but also very effective. With the techniques they developed, the Seabird Institute has restored nesting seabird species that occurred in Maine prior to European colonization, reversing island- and state-wide extirpations that occurred decades and centuries earlier. To disseminate this information to seabird managers around the world, the institute established the Herz Fellowship.