We had the great pleasure to join our friend and colleague Steve Kress last week as naturalists on a Natural Resources Council of Maine — and a boat filled with about 80 NRCM members — to see one of Maine’s most sought-after birds, the Atlantic puffin.

Steve is a bird conservation celebrity, known for his decades-long work to restore puffins and other seabirds to islands on the Maine coast and elsewhere.

Our trip was on a classic Maine summer coastal day, with very little wind so that the boat ride out to Eastern Egg Rock from New Harbor about the Hardy Boat was calm and easy.

Everyone aboard was by the scenery and wildlife — when some harbor porpoises showed us their glistening gray backs, baring that characteristic blunt triangle of a dorsal fin, the entire boat seemed to erupt in a thrill.

But it was the birds with those improbably huge orange and black bills (the puffins) that everyone wanted to see. When the first one appeared as we neared Eastern Egg Rock and sat in the water as if posing for us, we all immediately felt like the trip was a success.

Cameras snapped and the “oohs” and “awes” of delighted bird enthusiasts gushed up throughout the boat.

For the next 30 minutes or so, as we circled the small, flat island, we always had puffins in view. Many were carrying fish in for the young that they were rearing deep in rocky burrows around the island’s perimeters. One even splashed and bathed about 50 feet from the boat for quite some time, seemingly unperturbed by the presence of a boat filled with 100 humans watching its every move.

Sadly, there was a time when puffins needed to be more concerned about boats and humans. Maine’s nesting seabirds were virtually all severely decimated by the beginning of the 1900s when the birds and their eggs were slaughtered for food and later for feathers to supply the trade in decorations for fashionable hats. Nesting colonies of gulls and terns disappeared from most of the Maine coast.

Black guillemots were thought to number less than a hundred pairs and Atlantic puffins were gone from most islands where they had nested. Most seabirds are long-lived and produce few offspring per year. They are what ecologists call “K-selected” species and are in contrast to “r-selected” species that typically have short life spans but produce large numbers of offspring every year.

Atlantic puffins lay only a single egg each year. It takes four to five years for a young bird to reach breeding age. All of this means that it is not easy for a puffin population to grow quickly, and it’s why the historic breeding site at Eastern Egg Rock was not recolonized naturally after the colony was wiped out. Steve Kress had the audacious idea that he could jumpstart a puffin colony on Eastern Egg by flying in puffin chicks from Newfoundland, where they are common, and hand-rearing them for release on the island.

As a young Cornell University graduate student he started doing just that in 1973. Little did he know that he would need to keep doing it for many years and then continue to shepherd his puffin flock for decades. But he did, and Eastern Egg Rock now has a thriving Atlantic puffin colony that fuels an ecotourism industry that helps support boats and other Maine businesses in both Boothbay Harbor and New Harbor.

Steve has an excellent new book out that describes his journey to bring puffins back to Eastern Egg Rock. We highly recommend it. The book is called “Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock” and is published by Yale University Press. By all means, go out and see the puffins. They are a spectacular bird. But we also encourage you to read about the history of this fascinating bird.