2024 Petit Repeat!

Howdy all from our weathered island home! Normally we start our opening blogs with a intro of all the crew, but this season will be a little different. I am so happy to say our whole crew is returning for the 2024 season!! So I’ll keep introductions short and sweet!

Most of the crew from 2023!

My name is Amanda! I am the crew supervisor for this season, and was previously in 2023! This will be my 5th season out on Maine seabird islands, so I am so excited to spend it on PMI. Working with me from the west coast is Devin. This will be their second season here in Maine! I’ll save the rest of the intros for when we get out full crew in early June. We will also be getting some new faces and will be a total of 6 this season, so its going to be a full house this season!

Now for the island, all of our local birds are returning in a heap this season. We already have confirmed active Atlantic puffin and Razorbill burrows with eggs! Our terns are growing in number and have been seen bringing good fish for their prospective mates. Unfortunately, PMI was not spared from the winter storms that bashed the Gulf of Maine. Most all alcid burrows have either been shifted or completely lost in the large swells. It is both impressive and disheartening to see such large scale loss of breeding habitat. With that being said, the MCINWR biologists and crew have created and deployed artificial burrows in hopes of providing these birds with options. The puffins seem to be using them in lieu of rocks or sod, so our crew is optimistic.

As the birds settle, we will have so much more to share with yall on the mainland. Until next time folks!

Amanda

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Chicks are Taking Over PMI!

Welcome back to our very foggy island! Early July has been wet but we are hopeful to see sunny skies for the next few weeks. As the midpoint of the season rolls around, the island is teeming with life! I felt like now is a good time to introduce all our young friends that are making work that much cuter!

Tern soup! Two young Common tern chicks waiting their turns to be measured.

A large portion of the work we do revolves around our Terns. This ranges from work with the adults to regular check-ins with chicks! Our 1st Tern chicks made their appearance on the 18th of June. I like to think of these freshly hatched chicks are “chicken nuggets”. As they get older, they go from nugget, to chunky, and finally to beautiful. We are hopeful to see our first tern chicks leave our island paradise in the next week or so!

A behaved Arctic tern chick posing with Devin.

While the main attraction of most visitors are the Puffins, I’d like to show y’all the real alcid cuties! Our Razorbill chick finally allowed us to capture and band it. These personally are my favorite chicks on these colonies. With pale yellow mouths and distinct whistle calls, they really have stolen my heart. Additionally, their bands are extremely unique. Where most bands are circular, Razorbill bands are triangular!

A young Razorbill showing off its yellowing mouth.

Another Top contender for cutest chick are the Black guillemots. While may be simple black fuzzballs, its their personality that makes them so perfect. I have never met a chick so eager to attack. From the day they are born, they will bite, hiss, and charge whoever dares invade their burrow. These cuties are a crew favorite to measure, as you will always have something silly happen in the process.

This Guillemot is not very happy about being measured…

And finally, the chicks you all have been waiting for… Puffins!!

Our plumpest puffin on the island, breaking the scales at 365 grams!

Even with all the species we look after, Puffins make everyone on the crew say “AWEEEEE”. Our puffin chicks are getting fed well, with lots of large Sandlance coming with our adults. Lovingly called “chunky muffins”, some of our productivity chicks are becoming hard to fit out of their burrows!

An adorable Atlantic puffin chick showing off its big feet!

It is safe to say our island is properly invaded by chicks of all shapes and sizes. In the next few weeks, we as a crew will see them grow and eventually fledge! While its sad to see them go, they bring a new generation of breeding birds to the gulf of Maine. Until then, we will savor every minute we get with these birds!

From our fluffy shores to yours

-Amanda

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A Rainy PMI June

Howdy! Hi! Hello!

It has been a minute since we’ve given a PMI update, so here we go! The reason for our lack of posting has been due to Solar issues on the island. As some may know, our electricity and internet come from an awesome solar set up. What wasn’t so awesome was when our solar had some parts break down, leaving us in the dark. But with the amazing people at Maine Coastal Islands, we have a generator to keep us going. And with our WiFi back up and running, lets check in on what the birds have been up to.

Island Census

As June rolls around, an island census is in order. With the help of some awesome volunteers and staff members, set out to count all the Tern, Eider, and Laughing gull nests on the island. We accomplish this by walking in a tight formation throughout the whole colony. This season is shaping up to be interesting. We found around 961 tern nests, and a handful of Common eider nests. This number is significantly lower then recent years, and brings a lot of questions as to why. Food seems to be a common theme, and most likely played a role in our lower numbers. We noticed in our Tern trapping efforts that adults body conditions were not the best. Birds were lighter then what we would expect, suggesting that food may not be as available in the surround waters. Additionally, early in the season, Butterfish were being brought back to the island rather then Hake, Herring, or Sandlance. These silver dollar looking fish look like a good meal, but cannot be swallowed by the terns.

Our wonderful cenus crew, all smiles for the foggy weather!

Tern Tagging

One of our goals this season with Tasha was to deploy tracking tags on terns. These tiny solar powered tags allow us to see where our terns are traveling. Additionally the type of tag we have deployed allows us to download the data without needing to recapture the birds multiple times, relieving a lot of stress on the terns. With the great effort of Maine Coastal staff and crew members, we have successfully deployed 8 Common tern and 4 Arctic tern tags.

Some incredible tracks of Common terns. They seem to mostly go north of the island to feed, but birds do have a mind of their own.

Some questions that are driving this tagging effort relate to food, movement, and climate change in the Gulf of Maine. Some of our first tracks are showing Arctic terns traveling as far as 125 Km and Common terns traveling upwards of 40 Km. this data is super interesting, and we will be sure to keep you all posted on any discoveries!

Chicks!

A fresh Black guillemot chick from the boardwalk.

On a much brighter note, we are starting to see chicks all over the place! Our first tern chicks were seen on the 18th! These cuties are shaped like fuzzy chicken nuggets, and always put moral at an all time high! Additionally, we have had our first Atlantic puffin, Razorbill chicks, and Black guillemot chicks as well! In the next few weeks, we should continue to see a rise in hatching, and will start to check up on our Pufflings (be prepared for more cuteness).

All smiles for the first tern chicks in our productivity plots!

Hopefully we will be back on the grid in the next week or so, and bring more regular blog posts with it. Feel free to comment any questions you have, or even anything in particular you want to hear more about. Cheers until then!

From our shores to yours,

Amanda

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Long Awaited PMI Updates!

Hello all, Hallie here!

First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who joined the Friends of MCINWR and Bar Harbor Whale Watch for coming out to PMI on the fundraiser pelagic! It was so nice to be able to talk to all of you, and I cannot thank you enough for all that you do. This work would not be possible without the generosity of those who support us, and for that the seabirds thank you! Now, for some island updates!

Terns

Our terns are doing really well! As I am writing this, I am seeing fledglings take their first clumsy flights at around 26 days of age! We recorded our first fledgling Arctic Tern just over a week ago now, with Common Terns following shortly thereafter. Despite sea surface temperatures warming, hake and herring were still brought back in abundance, resulting in lots of healthy fledglings! It looks like we have had a productive season for our terns, which is quite the relief after last year’s poor season. Seeing these birds take flight always makes me emotional — we put so much work into making sure that these birds have a safe spot to reproduce and seeing the first of them take flights and head out to sea always makes me choke up! It definitely makes all of the hard work, the poop bombs, the hits on the head, and the long days so worth it.

Razorbills

It has been a record-setting season for RAZO here on PMI! We have documented a total of 6 razorbill eggs, a new high for PMI! We bid adieu to two strong and healthy chicks this past week, both of which will be joining their fathers out at sea for the remainder of their chick-rearing period.

Black Guillemots

We have chicks! We are currently sitting at 61 known BLGU burrows, with around 60 healthy and happy chicks! The largest of our chicks is already a whopping 290 grams, and we are still expecting some to hatch in the next few days! We have also been working hard to recapture adults when possible and have captured a total of 15 so far, 8 of which are adults that have been banded previous years! We have documented BLGU bringing back a variety of fish this year, including four-bearded rockling and rosefish in addition to their most common prey item the rock gunnel!

Atlantic Puffins

We have pufflings — and they are already huge! We completed our first sweep of the puffin colony to document hatching on July 1st, and to our surprise found chicks larger than I expected! It seems that the puffins on PMI were early to nest as well, with our estimated first-hatch being on June 17th! We currently have documented 83 active burrows and 45 chicks with more hatching every day! Each puffling gets a series of 2-3 measurements this month, so we have been working hard to document their growth! In addition, we have captured 37 adults on nests! So far, it seems that the chicks are growing around 6-10 grams per day with our largest chick being 270 grams! It is quite the relief, again, to see healthy chicks after last year’s poor season. Micro-puffins no more, we have fat and healthy chicks that will hopefully start fledging in around 3 weeks!

Leach’s Storm Petrel

We have been working hard this year to permanently mark and label LESP burrows here on PMI! There is a lot of useful information that comes from being able to track who nests in specific burrows each year, so we have installed numbered metal cattle tags on stakes next to active burrows! We have currently found 56 observable burrows (“observable” meaning we can stick a small camera inside and see the contents of the burrow, not all of them are easy to see inside of!) that are active with adults, eggs, and/or /chicks (we found our first chick yesterday on 7/15!)) We still have around 20 more burrows to examine, but we have checked around 150 known burrows so far this season and are anticipating having around 65 permanently marked and active LESP burrows here on PMI! I am hoping that the extra work being put in this year will result in us understanding our nocturnal friends a bit better here on the island!

Avian Influenza

I have been asked this question a lot: how is the HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza) situation on PMI? So far, it seems that our terns and alcids have avoided it so far. We have put in a lot of extra work this year to deter the laughing gull colony, and that actually has resulted in our nest predation rates being as low as 1.2% (significantly lower than any other year previous). I strongly believe that it has had a secondary benefit of keeping our colony safe from HPAI, as gulls are vectors for this disease. Green Island, our close neighbor, has unfortunately had a lot of documented gull deaths from HPAI this year. Our team here on PMI has put in a lot of effort trying to deter gulls from hanging around, and we are doing our best to try and prevent this from affecting our birds. So far, so good.

Again: Thank you again to everyone who has supported us! I hope you all had a lovely seabird cruise with Bar Harbor Whale Watch. The seabirds and us biologists thank you tremendously!

Until next time!

Hallie, Petit Manan Island

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Tufted Puffin? Wait… TUFTED PUFFIN!!

Hello everyone! Hallie here!

I am sure many of you bird aficionados know — Petit Manan Island has been in the (bird nerd) news this week! We had an incredibly rare visitor to our island, and here is the story told by the person who discovered the bird, Kaiulani Sund:

“Resighting is one of the things I really enjoy doing here on Petit Manan.  During and after my stint I like to take pictures of the birds through the scope. I have a lot of photos of terns, razorbills, murres and puffins and once in a while I get a photo of a bird that is new to me. I ask Hallie or Nick to identify it as I don’t know much about different birds that hang out on Petit Manan!  Last week, while doing some routine Atlantic Puffin resighting from Lobstah blind, I saw a bird that resembled a puffin, but was definitely unique compared to our Atlantic puffins. Thinking it was just another bird that I would ask about, I took a photo and continued resighting. When I returned, I told them I saw another bird that I didn’t know and when I showed Nick the photo, he was ecstatic! He ran to get Hallie and showed her the photo, as well as Linda and Jill, two of the biologists who were on the island for the day. Everyone was freaking out and very excited! They told me it was a Tufted puffin; a Pacific Ocean species.  What was it doing here on the Atlantic Coast!? This sighting is only the third record for a Tufted in Maine and the fifth time one has been seen in the Atlantic.  Since I don’t have any background in birding, I didn’t realize how rare it was to see this puffin but seeing how excited everyone was when they heard about it made it that much more special!”

The first sighting — photo taken by Kaiulani Sund

Hallie again: the million-dollar question I’ve been asked this week is why does this happen? It is really hard to say, especially with seabirds. With land-based birds, it is easy for them to get blown far and wide by storms or follow the wrong path for migration, however seabirds like puffins *really* do not like flying over land at all, in fact they spend the entirety of their lives at sea and only come to land to breed. Even then, they hardly ever fly directly over land — I have only ever seen a handful of ATPU fly over Petit Manan, and we are only a 16 acre island! Most likely, instances such as this are only going to increase in frequency. Areas of the Arctic that once were frozen are now opening up to passage as the ice melts, allowing birds to more readily find themselves on the wrong side of the world. Climate models predict Arctic sea-ice will be non-existent during summers as soon as 2050, and that will likely have a tremendous impact on seabird migrations. Another theory is that this is the same bird that made a star appearance on Machias Seal Island in 2014! Puffins are indeed a long-lived species, with some of our resident ATPU living well beyond 30 years, so it very well could be the same individual. If it indeed is, where has it been for 8 years? Lots of questions to be asked, but not many answers. One thing is for sure, we all were excited to host this unlikely visitor for just short of 24 hours and are always hopeful it will return! Next up, hopefully the famous Steller’s Sea Eagle will make an appearance!

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Petit Manan Updates

Hello all, Hallie here!

We have had quite the last few weeks here on Petit Manan! Where have we left off? We just had eggs last time I wrote! Now the island is progressing forward quite well!

GOMSWG: We had pipping eggs earlier than expected this year, which resulted in a quickly assembled team joining the PMI crew for a GOMSWG census on Saturday, June 11th. Despite feeling that the colony was way below normal occupancy, we came out with an estimated 1106 nests counted island-wide between 442 ARTE and 749 COTE. Remarkably, our persistence with laughing gull harassment resulted in the first ever near LAGU-free year on PMI — with only 3 nests counted during the census and 1 found post-census. This is a pretty crazy accomplishment considering last year had counts over 800 pairs. Although we have around 1,100 tern nests, we fear that a good number of eggs have been abandoned for reasons unknown. Our productivity plots are already showing around a 10% abandonment rate at the egg stage.

Terns! We now have chicks! Hooray! We found our first chick on Monday the 13th, and since then we have had quite a few popping up all over the island. Despite being inundated with bad weather, we have been plugging away with productivity checks, re-sighting efforts, and are planning to start productivity this week! Unfortunately, we still have yet to see any Roseate terns on-island but are looking every day for them!

Guillemots and Puffins: We completed our first full sweep for Black Guillemot nests and only managed to find around 47 burrows, which is lower than previous years. We will be doing another sweep this week to check for more burrows and are hopeful that the numbers will be higher! For Puffins, we now are up to 72 active burrows! We have yet to see any food carries from adults but are anticipating the arrival of our first puffling in the next 10 days!

Razorbills and Common Murres: We have seen increasing numbers of COMU on the island, but still no attempts to breed. We now have a confirmed 4 active burrows for RAZO and have had some incredibly high numbers of RAZO hanging around the island, with the highest count at 99 on June 3rd!

Others: Despite migration ending, we have still had a few really cool birds show up on PMI! My personal favorite was a Black-billed Cuckoo that appeared last week! A lifer for me! In addition, we had a few days of enjoying some beautiful white-rumped sandpipers, increasing numbers of Northern Gannets, and so many singing storm-petrels that I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night!

Hoping the season progresses well, the weather gets better, and the birds continue bringing back herring! Until next time!

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PMI Staff Introductions — PART 2!

Hello everyone, Hallie here! We are excited to announce that Dr. Natasha Gownaris and two of her students from Gettysburg College have arrived on Petit Manan Island! On their first day, we started capturing adult terns! After 2 full days, we have captured 10 Arctic Terns and 14 Common Terns, 8 of which we have taken blood samples from to gather more information on what they are eating and their overall health! Despite the weather, we will continue trapping adults until we *hopefully* have our first chick here this weekend! Give Tasha, Jehan, and Kaiulani a warm welcome to Petit Manan Island and the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge!

Dr. Natasha Gownaris

Hi all! I’m Tasha, a professor in the Environmental Studies Department at Gettysburg College. I’m originally from Queens, New York and have wanted to be a marine scientist since I was a kid. Gettysburg is a small teaching college, so much of my time is spent teaching and mentoring excellent students like the two you will meet here. I received my PhD in Marine Science from Stony Brook University, where my research focused on fisheries and food webs. While in graduate school, I fell in love with birds, so I next moved to a post-doc on Magellanic penguin demography at the University of Washington. My students and I are collaborating with USFWS to better understand how MCINWR seabirds are adapting their foraging behavior and diet in response to rapid climate shifts and extremes. I’m learning something new every day, and I am so excited for students to have the opportunity to work on this beautiful, diverse, and rapidly changing system.

Jehan Mody

Hi everyone! My name is Jehan Mody from Mumbai, India. I am an undergraduate student entering my junior year at Gettysburg College studying Biology and Environmental Studies! I have always had a fondness for animals and plan on working in ecology and conservation. This will be my first field job ever and my first time working with birds of any kind, so I am super excited to learn about the colony, do some important work, and gain vital experience doing so. I will also use this time on the island to collect data and think of a project for my final honors thesis. I’m looking forward to working with a great staff and some incredible seabirds on this beautiful island! Cheers!

Kaiulani Sund

Hi everyone! I’m Kaiulani and I am from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I am a rising senior at Gettysburg college majoring in Environmental Studies and minoring in Data Science. This is the first time I will be doing field work and I am very excited! I’m so glad to be working with people who are passionate and hard-working; I am already learning so much from them. For my senior honors thesis, I will be looking at Common and Arctic Tern provisioning data as well as sea surface temperature. I am interested in seeing if individual adult diet flexibility during sea surface temperature anomalies has an effect on reproductive success. This experience is an amazing opportunity to start my research career and I can’t wait to learn more about PMI, the seabirds, and how our work is helping with conservation of these beautiful birds!

Thank you everyone so much for the continuing support! We read your comments on our posts and enjoy them thoroughly! See you next time!

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PMI Updates — We have eggs, and lots of them!

Hello all,

Hallie here! Nick and I are huddled by the fire, sipping warm drinks, and watching over our tern colony from inside today — 21 mph winds and thick fog have made for a perfect day to update you all on the island!

Whilst reviewing over protocols over a week ago, I explained to Nick that the average egg-laying date for the terns on PMI historically was the 25th of May. I said, “you have a few more days to relax before the island becomes chaos!” Little did I know, the terns would be laying eggs the very next day, on the 21st of May — one of the earliest dates the terns have laid since MCINWR has been tracking the terns in 1999. Nick had the luck of finding the first egg of the season, and his entire face turned into a massive smile, and we celebrated with a “woohoo!”. Today, the 27th of May, we now have well into the hundreds of tern nests, and lots of feisty tern parents ready to defend the next generation with smacks to our heads and poop-bombs. It is already chaos, and it is incredible.

The first egg found this season — an Arctic Tern egg!

Nick and I also completed our first search for puffin and razorbill eggs. Equipped with a brand-new burrow scope and lots of enthusiasm, we *literally* bent over backwards to check well over 100 burrows over a two-day period. We are happy to report that we already have around 50 puffin eggs being incubated by faithful parents, and 3 razorbill eggs! We expect the number of active burrows to increase over the next few weeks and are hopeful that this year will be a productive one for both species.

A puffin and its egg found with our new burrow camera!

On to our other birds, we have well over 20 Leach’s storm petrel burrows that are active. I took Nick outside around 10pm on a beautifully clear, starry night for the full petrel experience, and we were greeted by dozens of them calling from around the island and flying around our heads. We have already seen guillemots exploring the shallow rock burrows that we spent days constructing and will do our first check for eggs this coming week. We also have around ten common eider nests, with the mothers diligently incubating day-in and day-out. Things are already productive on this beautiful island.

A Leach’s storm petrel in its burrow — taken with one of our small burrow scopes!

And lastly — the migration fallout this season has been nothing short of incredible. Both Nick and I are avid birders and have completed seasons of seawatch. It is safe to say if something shows up here on PMI, we will find it. We have had some pretty incredible birds show up including Solitary Sandpiper, Hooded Warbler, Mourning warbler, Caspian Tern, and Pine Siskin. So far, we have detected 88 species on this island!

Solitary Sandpiper — taken by Hallie

Signing off here on PMI! Happy bird watching.

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A New Season – PMI Staff Introductions (Part 1)

Hello from Petit Manan Island!

The birds are back, and so are the interns! Meet your PMI staff (part 1).

Island Supervisor – Hallie Daly

Hello everyone! You may remember me from 2019 — I was one of the island interns on PMI! Since working with MCINWR last, I have worked in Acadia National park to monitor seabird migration, and then on to do seabird and cetacean surveys off the coast of CA in the Great Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary! In addition, I spent the majority of 2021 working in Kauai with critically endangered Newell’s Shearwaters, Hawaiian Petrels, Band-rumped storm petrels, Laysan Albatross, and working as a horseback tour-guide! Even after all of these great experiences, the work I have done here on PMI has always been the most rewarding and memorable. I have never before worked a job where the staff are so supportive, the seabirds are so abundant, and the work is so important and impactful. I am excited to be back for another summer with the seabirds!

Hallie holding an adult Atlantic Puffin on PMI back in 2019

Intern – Nick Giordano

Hi everyone, I’m Nick Giordano, born and raised in Westchester County, New York. I graduated from SUNY ESF in Syracuse in 2018 and have been doing avian work ever since. I did waterfowl and gull surveys for the New York City reservoirs soon after graduation and was lucky enough to work with Piping Plovers on Long Island after that. My most recent field job was down in Cape May as the 2021 Avalon Seawatch Counter, which really ignited my passion for seabirds. I am looking forward to monitoring all the bird species on the island and watch them fledge their young by the end of the season. I can already tell I’ll be working with some great people and I’m so excited that I have this opportunity to protect and look after some incredible birds.

Nick holding a Piping Plover on Long Island

Special thanks to everyone who has made yet another season of seabird conservation possible! Let’s hope for a good one!

PMI 2022

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End of Season Snapshot – PMI

It may be a little late since we left the island on August 10^th, but it felt right to give one final glance back on the 2021 field season on Petit Manan Island. As you could imagine, the days after PMI have been busily spent reincorporating back into a ‘normal’ way of life and for many of us, getting ready to head back to school or for myself, navigating the open road of unknown I’m accustomed to after seasonal field work. 

As was predicated in previous posts, 2021 was not the year of years. Quite frankly, it was one of the worst on record in the past 20-plus years in regards to breeding success and productivity. Common and Arctic Tern productivity rates sat at a feeble 0.12 and 0.16 chicks fledged per pair while Atlantic Puffins barely tipped the scale at 0.10 chicks/pair. To put this in perspective, of the 85 tern nests we monitored with over 150 eggs, only 12 chicks made it and of the 87 puffin burrows, only nine fledged.

Fully feathered puffling, one of the last on island and ready to go.
(Note, under normal conditions, the chick would be much heavier.)

Things seemed to fair better for Black Guillemots and Common Eiders which fledged 1.03 chicks per pair for guillemots and at least 100 eider ducklings based on consistent high counts since we don’t directly monitor them. We also saw two Razorbill chicks fledge from five total nests which is another sign of hope more made it. 

Partially feathered Black Guillemot chick waiting for its day to fledge.

Reasons for the poor tern and puffin success are yet to be fully determined but from the looks of things, it seemed weather played the biggest factor for terns and prey availability for puffins. Terns maintained feeding rates of 1.08 and 1.86 fish/nest/hour for Common and Arctic Terns with hake and herring, the fish we like to see, making up over 70% of the diets for each species. What was most noticeable though is that after several bad weather events and in dense fog, many of the chicks got too wet and couldn’t thermoregulate and likely perished from exposure. Puffins fed less frequently and feeds we observed were often filled with low quality butterfish which were often found discarded during burrow checks. Oddly too, many of the pufflings exhibited slow or abnormal growth development which we termed ‘micro-puffins’ which is also indicative that food seemed to be the issue.

Interestingly enough, this season did however see high counts for many of the alcids with tallies topping out at 378 puffins, 316 guillemots, 75 Razorbill, and 24 Common Murre. Overall numbers of terns went up 32 pairs from 2020 census data so with such robust attendance and prospecting, the hope is that many of these birds return and start breeding on PMI in the years and seasons to come. One focus for the offseason is to build more artificial habitat to supply more suitable nesting areas for birds that may not have found a spot yet.

Given seabirds are long-lived species, the hope is that they will all rebound and have better luck next year unless what we saw in 2021 becomes the trend. The state of the ocean and global climate hang in intricate balance quickly tipping in the wrong direction for many of these birds and ecosystems elsewhere. There’s no saying this is just a blip or new normal but regardless, everything possible should still be done to optimize the chances for these birds into the future. 

As I have learned, these birds are indicators for many things for ourselves so if there isn’t want for them, there should be want for us. We can each do our part and simply following along with our blogs is one way for that as you have heard the story and can hopefully share it. We truly appreciate each and everyone of you that tune in once or regularly.

Three months of what ‘home’ looked like aside Petit Manan Light.

With that, the time to put a close on the season at PMI has officially come. I’ll forever cherish the many moments of my time there; all the new firsts, the chicks I grew most found of, the time with the crew, and the simplicity of being back under island-life. I look forward to carrying forward my experience and am excited for the many to come after us. My thanks to everyone who was a part of this season and made it possible, it was still very much worth it.

The final farewell as we sailed off the island.

PMI Supervisor, Ryan P.  

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