It's been nearly 40 years since Atlantic puffins were brought back to Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless, uninhabited island off the midcoast at the mouth of Muscongus Bay.

Project Puffin was the first in the world to restore a seabird colony, and its methods have been copied by conservationists all over the world. But the puffins of Eastern Egg Rock still depend on their human stewards to survive.

Stephen Kress, director of seabird restoration at the National Audobon Society, steers a motorboat toward the island, about 8 miles north of the tiny fishing town of Bremen. He's bringing two college interns and a volunteer with Project Puffin to stay on the rocky outpost for a couple weeks. A half hour ride from the mainland, the island's craggy silhouette emerges from the seaspray.

"This north part of the island from you can see our little research cabin and that's the small building in the middle and a couple little out buildings next to it", says Kress.

"You're also starting to see a lot of bird activity ahead of us. There's over 7,000 nesting seabirds on this seven-acre island."

Kress slows down the boat so he can moor it.

"So we're going to slow down a little bit," he said. And as he does, a little black-and-white bird with a large bill splashed with orange flutters by. It looks like a shorter, chubbier version of a penguin.

"There's our first puffin just flew by -- that little white belly bird, very rapid wing beat. That's a puffin," said Kress.

Once hunted for its meat and feathers, the mild-mannered puffin had all but disappeared from the state by the late 1800s. Then in 1973, as a young birding instructor in Maine, Kress began transplanting hundreds of downy puffin chicks from Newfoundland to Eastern Egg Rock, and later on to several other Maine islands.

"There's two more puffins to the right," he said.

Kress lured the sociable birds back to the islands to nest with wooden decoy puffins and mirrors. Today a record 109 puffin pairs waddle about peaceably on Eastern Egg Rock, among terns and guillemots. More problematic are the laughing gulls - 2,000 pairs of them. They compete for and steal food from other seabirds.

The gull's calls grow deafening as Kress and company climb the seaweed--covered shores. But even more of a threat are the herring gulls and great black-backed gulls that swoop in from other islands and feed on puffins and other prey. Juliet Lamb's job as island supervisor is to protect the vulnerable at all costs.

"So we'll walk single-file and call back 'nests' and 'chicks,' if we see them in the way," said Lamb.

Wearing a baseball cap and clothes streaked with white bird droppings, she leads the group through bird colonies to get to the field camp.

"And also the birds as you can see will be divebombing you to protect their nests, so be prepared," said Lamb.

For the last three summers, Lamb has been arriving on the island in May to discourage the bigger gulls from breeding there. The mere presence of people ususally does the trick, but sometimes arm-waving is in order. Lamb sees this intervention as leveling the playing field for the prey birds.

Lamb said, "the gulls are more generalist feeders so they could exploit a lot more food sources especially human-created food sources such as garbage dumps."

Gulls also go after old bait dumped by lobstermen, and whole flocks will follow fishing boats.

"Our responsibility as biologists is to start restoring some of the stuff that we've destroyed as a human population," said Lamb.

Part of Lamb's work is to keep a kind of inventory, checking to see that puffin and tern chicks haven't been snatched by gulls, and to ensure that they're healthy. Today, Lamb takes the student interns into a tern colony, where they weigh squawking chicks, and measure their wing spans.

Kress, in the meantime, has set off toward the edge of the island. He climbs inside a 3-foot-square plywood bird blind to observe dozens of puffins loafing on a granite boulder. It's inside the cracks of boulders like this where puffins raise their chicks.

"Y-33 who just breeds over that hill over there, that bird I had in the back of my car brought from Newfoundland in 1977," said Kress. "And so obviously that bird I'm particularly fond of. She's a little female that has lived in the same crevice her whole life. She's 33 years old now."

Kress doesn't have to bring puffin chicks to Maine anymore. But he's always thinking of new ways to protect the ones who've made Eastern Egg Rock their home. He motions outside the blind.

"Do you see there's someone sitting out in that field with a yellow raincoat in this direction. It's a scaregull. We bought a rubber mask of Arnold Schwarznegger and our interns wore the same mask when they were walking around the island so they would think they were our interns," Kress said. "That was my thought."

Some interns also get training on how to shoot particularly aggressive gulls with a rifle, athough Kress says that's a rare occurrence, and hasn't happened this summer.

A more common strategy of keeping predators in check is to destroy the eggs of laughing gulls, which are a particular threat to terns because they share breeding habitat. Each summer, the interns go around poking tiny holes in hundreds of eggs. The tool of the trade, "the end of a utility flag -- a metal rod," said Michael Forsyth, a college student from Georgia. He says by piercing the brown speckled eggs, but keeping them whole, the female laughing gulls might continue to sit on them, instead of laying new ones.

"You know it's hard because the laughing gulls are amazing birds in their own right," Forsyth said. "I feel like it's a real balancing act between all the different birds that come here and the management of every species."

Back at camp, Kress says restoring the puffin colony has meant making a lot of hard decisions. But the way he sees it, Eastern Egg Rock is the puffins' ancestral home and they deserve to be there.

"This is a very special place because it is the first restored seabird colony in the world," Kress said. "An important message to take that with it is that people brought the bird back and people are going to have to be here in the long-term to make sure that they stay here."

Case in point: Kress says that eagle numbers are increasing. And, while eagles help thin out the gull population, they like to eat puffins, too.