Sharing the Secrets of Seabird Restoration

Seabirds dare to be different. They don’t sing. They don’t walk very well. And their preferred form of reproduction is forming huge, dense breeding colonies close to the ocean. This last trait puts their metaphorical and literal eggs in a few large baskets, which has made them vulnerable to exploitation over the course of human history. Market hunting, egg collecting, and other forms of resource extraction were particularly devastating to seabirds. Today, the added threats of overfishing, pollution, and climate change are pushing many species to the edge of extinction.

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 the entire suite of nesting seabird species that occurred in Maine prior to European colonization, reversing island- and state-wide extirpations that occurred decades and centuries earlier.

Because most seabird species share breeding traits, the Seabird Institute’s techniques have the potential to benefit bird species in other areas of the globe. But until recently there was no systemic way to disseminate this information to seabird managers around the world. To remedy this, the institute established the Josephine Daneman Herz International Seabird Fellowship, also known as the Herz Fellowship.

Josephine Daneman Herz was a conservationist and passionate birder who provided the original funding to start the fellowship. Almost every summer since 2009 (except during the COVID-19 pandemic), the Herz Fellowship has sponsored seabird managers, scientists, and students from around the world to come to the Seabird Institute, support the institute’s fieldwork, and learn its techniques. Thirty-five fellows have gone through the program and brought knowledge back to eleven countries. Herz’s son, Mike Herz, continues to support the fellowship because of the impacts he sees from it. “I believe the fellowship program is one of the most powerful stories the Seabird Institute and Audubon have to tell,” he says. “It’s not just hope. There are techniques and procedures that are tried and true that people can learn.”

These techniques have now benefited around a third of seabird species worldwide, according to Don Lyons, director of conservation science for the Seabird Institute. For example, five former Herz fellows have gone on to work on the conservation of Chinese Crested Terns, a critically endangered species previously declared extinct. One fellow, Zhongyong Fan, now leads China’s Zhejiang Museum of Natural History’s efforts to restore the species at its three most important sites, located off the coast of the Zhejiang Province and in the Taiwan Straight.

In 2025, fellows attended from Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. From June through August, they lived on the islands that the Seabird Institute manages and helped monitor, manage, and study the birds breeding there. In the process, each of them developed new skills, relationships, and inspiration to take back to the projects they work on in their home countries.

Dominique Espinoza Quirola

Dominique Espinoza Quirola's seabird summer kicked off with drama. After traveling from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Bremen, Maine, a storm kept Espinoza trapped onshore, and for five days she waited anxiously at the Seabird Institute base camp for her chance to get to the seabird islands. When the weather finally cleared, choppy waters soaked everything as her boat reached Eastern Egg Rock. Espinoza stumbled ashore and gave a flustered hello to the Seabird Institute staff who had gathered to greet her. Then she looked up and noticed the thousands of terns in the sky. This cacophony of seabirds was what she had come for.

The love that led Espinoza to this noisy rock began while working on her bachelor’s degree in marine biology. Birds weren’t her focus back then, but she happened to meet birders during a course to become a naturalist guide. Soon she was traveling with them to birding field trips and conferences across Ecuador. One of those trips took her onto the Pacific Ocean, where she saw seabirds like Waved Albatross and White-faced Storm-Petrels for the first time. Those birds captivated her. “I just had this feeling that I would like to—at some point in my life—be able to work with these animals,” says Espinoza.

Two years later, the Herz Fellowship fulfilled that wish. Unlike most Herz Fellows, Espinoza hadn’t worked with seabirds before, so there was a lot to learn. Her days typically started at 6:00 a.m. with three hours of observing terns and Atlantic Puffins from a blind and concluded with nest checks in the late afternoon. “I remember that at the end of each day I was dead. [After dinner] I would go straight to bed,” she says.

Those exhausting days rewarded her proportionately with knowledge. “This project opened a ton of possibilities for me and I got to learn so many techniques for studying these animals,” she says. She learned how to capture, band, and place geolocators on terns, puffins, razorbills, and storm-petrels. Learning the different handling techniques for each species and how to minimize their stress was particularly useful to her. For example, she learned that when Black Guillemots become stressed, their feet become hot.

Espinoza sees a big need in coastal Ecuador for the skills she learned as a Herz Fellow. According to her, the seabirds nesting along continental Ecuador receive much less study than those on the Galapagos Islands. Espinoza hopes to change that. In the long run, she wants to work with coastal communities to study and conserve seabirds there. Getting a master’s degree in seabird conservation will likely be her next step towards that goal.

Tomás Tamagno

Tomás Tamagno came to Seabird Institute from the Patagonian coast of Argentina, where seabird colonies have attracted the attention of foreign exploitation since the 19^th century. Companies from France, Great Britain, and the United States slaughtered thousands of penguins per day to harvest fat for lamp oil. They also extracted nutrient-rich guano to make fertilizers, destroying nests and entire seabird colonies in the process. Today, direct exploitation may have stopped, but other threats remain. Overfishing depletes their food supplies and invasive mammals—rabbits, cats, rats, and armadillos—eat the vegetation that seabirds nest under, consume their eggs, and cause erosion.

Fundación Rewilding Argentina is a nonprofit that works to reverse these trends in Patagonia. As part of this, they monitor and restore seabird colonies in the Patagonia Azul Provincial Park, which holds colonies for endangered Magellanic Penguins and Olrog’s Gulls, Southern Giant Petrels, and Imperial Cormorants. Tamagno supports these monitoring efforts as a field technician. “Even small threats can be dangerous,” he says. “That’s why it’s important to keep track of the population of the colonies and to avoid getting to a point where it would be too late to act to protect them.”

During his fellowship, Tamagno, learned several new monitoring techniques, like weighing and measuring chicks and tagging and banding birds. “All the experience that I’ve gained here will help me to apply these needs in Argentina, which is perfect, because all these techniques are things we are seeking to start implementing in our project with our own species, in our own place,” he says.

While learning individual techniques is important to him, understanding the broader management of the Seabird Institute is even more so. Seeing how scientists at the Seabird Institute run complex, long-term seabird restoration projects provided him with invaluable insight for his long-term conservation goals. The Seabird Institute’s systemic, organized data collection is one of the most important things he wants to bring back to Patagonia Azul.

The fellowship also provided motivation on a personal level. “It’s very inspiring to see so many people so passionate about these birds and these ecosystems,” he says. “I think that it really inspires me to…put all this knowledge and experience into my own ecosystem and do my best to improve the conservation of them.”

Rafael Revorêdo

On Brazil’s northeast coast, in the city of Galinhos, Rafael Revorêdo studies the distribution of Roseate Terns, a species that breeds in the Caribbean and on the north Atlantic coast of North America. As the terns leave their roosting colonies each morning, they run the risk of colliding with power lines in the low light of dawn. Revorêdo leads a project to mitigate the risks for a nonprofit called CEMAM. With partners, CEMAM developed an effective way to reduce tern collisions by installing markers on power lines that make them more noticeable to terns. Key to their success was using radio telemetry to identify where the terns most often traveled.

Revorêdo wants to replicate this success across Brazil. As a PhD student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, he is studying the movements and distribution of Roseate Terns to identify other places in Brazil where terns are likely to collide with power lines and offshore wind farms. By mapping these risk zones, he hopes to mitigate threats proactively.

Doing this requires capturing terns, putting telemetry tags on them, and using radio telemetry to track them. Revorêdo came to the Seabird Institute eager to learn these techniques. As a Herz Fellow—first in 2024 and again in 2025—Revorêdo learned how to capture, tag, and analyze telemetry data for Roseate Terns, storm-petrels, Razorbills, and Atlantic Puffins. “Coming here and being a fellow in this program let me improve all these abilities,” he says. Through abundant, hands-on experience, he's now able to tag terns independently.

One incredible experience during his fellowship captured the importance of fostering ties and knowledge-sharing between far-flung research projects. Last February, Revorêdo was part of a collaborative effort between the Seabird Institute and CEMAM to band and place geolocator tags on Roseate Terns in Brazil. When he returned to Maine last summer, he recaptured one of those terns. “This was a big thing. It was incredible,” says Revorêdo. The tern’s telemetry tag contained the first high-resolution GPS track of the complete migration of a Roseate Tern in the Maine population, he says. That track showed the bird crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Puerto Rico to Maine. It also showed the bird flying through an area that has been leased by an offshore wind farm. He notes that these discoveries only happened by working together across the hemisphere.

These skills will aid his work not only in Brazil, but also in collaborations across the Western Hemisphere. Currently, he is helping create a Roseate Tern research network across the Americas. When he returns to Brazil, Revorêdo will be responsible for recapturing seabirds tagged in northeast North America, downloading their location data, and sharing them with this network to improve conservation across their range. “We are definitely being connected by the birds and by the research,” he says.