Stephen Kress has studied Atlantic puffins for more than forty years, so you might think that he knows everything there is to know about them. He’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t. Until very recently, in fact, neither he nor anyone else even knew where the little rascals were most of the time.
Puffins used to be common in Maine, but the population was almost wiped out by hunters in the early 1900s. When Kress, a wildlife biologist, arrived in the state in the 1970s, puffins lived on only one island. At the time, most biologists thought seabirds had an unbreakable connection to their birthplaces, but Kress wondered if young birds could be taught to accept another island as home. He and his fellow members of the Audubon Society-sponsored Project Puffin transplanted puffin chicks from Nova Scotia to Maine’s coastal islands, spent a summer raising them by hand, and watched as they left for the open ocean, hoping that they would eventually return to Maine to breed.
There’s a certain category of mundane but distinctly unpleasant discovery: The blueberries you just mixed in your oatmeal explode mold into your mouth at 6 a.m. You read that 
My kids are really into this cartoon called The Octonauts. It’s about a group of undersea rescuers and researchers (there’s a penguin medic, a sea otter marine biologist, a polar bear captain, among others, plus a group of squeaky-voiced creatures called vegimals.) In one of their (and my) 
