loading . . . The Artist Showing Seabirds Home Wild Life
05.05.2026
# The Artist Showing Seabirds Home
The woman at the heart of a long-standing avian restoration program blends art and science to attract birds back to lost habitat.
###### Story by Heather Hansman
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Some of the decoys are more intricate than others. To make a convincing brown noddy, you need to carefully blend the transitions between the bird’s dark body and its light throat. Terns, though, can pick up on symbolism: to replicate one, you only need to stick a smaller gray block on top of a larger gray block and draw a red slash for a beak.
Figuring out how to make wild birds think decoys are real is the work of Sue Schubel, also known as “Seabird Sue.” For the past decade, she’s made the decoys at the core of a global seabird restoration program, one predicated on the idea of social attraction—that seabirds will nest in places where they see other birds doing the same. Some 95 percent of seabird species nest in groups, and decoys can encourage them to return to habitat from which they’ve been extirpated, or encourage them to take up new, safe habitat.
“These techniques have benefited a third of the seabird species around the world, including some of the most endangered,” says Don Lyons, director of conservation science at Audubon’s Seabird Institute, which runs the program. “The use of decoys really takes advantage of their behavior and breeding biology to preserve them.”
Audubon supplies many of the decoys used in seabird conservation projects, both through projects of its own and by sending decoys to other organizations. Since 1973, when the organization’s seabird program began, Audubon has sent decoys representing 55 different species to locations around the world, including brown boobies to Australia, masked boobies to Mauritius, and terns to the Netherlands. Schubel hand paints around 500 a year from her workshop in a converted barn steps from the ocean in Bremen, Maine, a tiny town in the lower third of the state’s craggy coast.
Each decoy is the product of Schubel’s decades of experience in both zoology and art. With a few brush strokes, she can capture the black wing tips and bright-blue eyes of Australasian gannets, or the sharp-lined eyes of brown noddies. And as these decoys make their way into the wild, they offer unique insights into the art—and the science—of the social lives of seabirds.
**Using decoys** to attract birds is an old practice with a proven track record. Archaeologists have found remnants of clay decoys from ancient Egypt and fakes made of reeds and plants dating back thousands of years in what’s now the United States. These rudimentary decoys functioned similarly to the elaborate ones used by modern hunters. “Hunters are tricking [birds] saying, ‘Here’s a good safe place,’ then shooting them,” Schubel says. “We’re not tricking them.”
Instead, decoys used for conservation invite birds to sites that are actually safe. After biologists and field crews have restored vegetation and managed predators on a formerly degraded island or remote shoreline, they install fake birds to convince the real ones that they can nest or find mates there. It’s not that the birds are completely fooled—more that they’re initially attracted by the decoys, then find their own nesting zone.
“It’s like going to a diner with no one in the parking lot. That’s a bad move,” Schubel says. “You want to go to a place that other birds are giving a rave review. Once you have some birds on the site, they do the attracting for you.”
Both Schubel’s own journey and that of the Audubon decoy program started with Atlantic puffins. Like many seabirds, puffins are tied to their natal sites, and those in the Gulf of Maine return from their winter fishing grounds—largely off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts—to nest on the same islands where they hatched. Until the mid-19th century, hundreds of pairs of puffins flocked each April to the storm-battered hunks of granite that dot the Gulf of Maine to lay their eggs. As human populations grew, though, people built homes and towns atop puffin habitat; brought predators, like mice and cats; and hunted the birds for their eggs, feathers, and meat. By the 1900s, only one tiny population of puffins remained in the Gulf of Maine, clinging to survival on a single island.
To restore the population, an Audubon team initially focused on Eastern Egg Rock, a 3-hectare (7-acre) outcropping of granite and native grass 9.5 kilometers (6 miles) off the coast, where puffins had last been seen in 1885. After the team got rid of the mice and cats, Audubon ornithologist Stephen Kress, who was living at a camp on a different coastal island at the time, translocated chicks from Canada. Hoping to entice those birds to return to Eastern Egg Rock after their winter migration, he decided to try placing wooden decoys on the island’s bluffs. Fortunately, puffins have such distinctive coloring—black and white bodies, bright orange beaks and feet**—** that it was fairly simple to make realistic-looking decoys. And they worked better than anyone hoped.
By the early 1980s, Kress’s work had helped Eastern Egg Rock become the first restored seabird colony in the world, prompting the team to start working to restore other bird populations with decoys, including common tern populations in Maine. Around the same time, Jim Henry, founder of Vermont-made Mad River Canoes, and his wife, Nancy Henry, got involved. A passionate conservationist, Jim also knew how to engineer finicky plastics thanks to his time building boats, and he thought Kress’s project could benefit from his expertise. He built 19 two-piece epoxy molds that the program still uses today; from those 19 molds come dozens of different species of birds.
Schubel’s trajectory to becoming Seabird Sue unfolded on a parallel track. In 1984, she started volunteering for the puffin program, then became an Audubon research assistant. She’d spend summers on the windswept Maine islands, collecting data on chicks and protecting them from predators, and then travel for other seasonal research work in the winters, studying petrels in the Galápagos Islands and avian paleontology in the Cook Islands. In 1996, she was working in California, restoring a common murre population after an oil spill, when Kress asked her to make a sound system to enhance the decoys Audubon was deploying in the area, because common murres, like many other birds, respond to both audio and visual cues. With the sound system complete, she began helping the Henrys make the murre decoys. Then in 2016, when Jim retired and donated his workshop to the Audubon program, she became the head painter.
Schubel brought an attention to detail honed from years of observing seabirds in the wild. “The skill sets all weave together nicely for me,” she says. She mainly makes decoys during Maine’s long, icy winters, working from an austere but cluttered workshop. Pictures of birds are pinned to paint-stained walls, and the space is crammed with paint cans, decoy blanks, and tools.
It takes about three days to make a decoy. Schubel starts by melting recycled plastic powder into two matching molds that make up each side of a bird. After removing the cooled plastic and connecting the two halves in a hollow form, Schubel individually paints each bird with latex house paint. “We use Benjamin Moore,” she says. “You can get any color you want.”
Picking colors is where the job gets interesting. Most birds have tetrachromatic vision, which allows them to see UV light that humans can’t, so Schubel says she’s conscious of how colors appear and change in the environment. “Some of the more challenging ones to paint are the ones that have a soft merging of colors, but I do love painting the gannets and the noddies, which have a really blendy aspect,” she explains. “I try to get specific eye lines for the brown noddies. The sharp line here really makes a difference for me as a human. But it might not make a difference for the bird.”
Even simple decoys can be surprisingly convincing. When the Audubon team members sent tufted puffin decoys to the Pacific Northwest, their trail cam revealed an eagle snatching one up. Other birds have been spotted offering courtship fish to decoys. “We’ve persuaded the predators—even the ones with eagle eyes,” Schubel says.
The decoys have fooled eagle-eyed humans, too. After researchers found that a tufted puffin had been visiting Maine—a rarity—they put a decoy out to see what might happen. The native Atlantic puffins were unfussed, but a bunch of birders spotted the decoy and posted pictures of it online thinking it was real. “The decoys are so convincing,” Schubel says, that “we’ve convinced the birds, the birders, and the predators.”
**Once Schubel sends** her decoys into the field, the next step is for field staff to determine how they’ll be placed in landscapes often hammered by winds and waves. Gannets, for instance, love to nest above high cliffs, so techs drill those decoys into the cliffs. Other species are glued to rocks, or filled with sand so they’ll sit heavy on the ground. Puffins, which stand upright, have to be cemented to the rocks.
Conservationists also have to think about how to group the decoys in the wild. Should they put them in pairs, or set them up as singles so they look available? They’ve found that some species, like gannets, adhere to a systematic grid pattern of nests built a beak’s-reach away from each other. Murres, on the other hand, like their nests packed tightly together.
The team often sets up sound systems to supplement the decoys, which brings its own challenges. The technology has to run for a whole season in harsh environments and be cued to seasonal changes, like the timing of dawn or dusk. “If the sound changes, it can spook the birds,” Schubel says. “Terns are very noisy, so if the sound dies, they’ll get very nervous and maybe leave. That’s because if an owl starts coming at night, the terns will go silent—that’s a warning.”
Although Audubon’s seabird program started to restore wildlife to damaged habitats, the organization also supports preemptive projects to move birds whose habitats are expected to be threatened by climate change to higher ground. Rising seas and increasingly aggressive storms are starting to wash away prime seabird nesting habitat, like the atolls in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands where the Laysan albatross nests. “This isn’t just about bringing birds back to a place they were lost decades ago,” says Lyons, of the Seabird Institute. “It’s also about planning ahead so species that are at risk for climate change have safe places in the future.”
Working on a project as audacious as seabird restoration requires such advanced planning. Many seabirds start breeding later in life, and lots of them— puffins and albatross included—only produce one egg a year. It can take years of maintaining habitats, keeping people away, and attracting birds before a population takes hold. Depending on the migration patterns of the species, it might take a few seasons before the birds even notice the decoys. Still, despite the challenges, Audubon and its partners have seen some clear wins.
The puffin-recovery effort in Maine has now restored the population to historical levels. On a series of islands off the coast of mainland China, decoys aided the recovery of Chinese crested terns, a species that hadn’t been seen for over 60 years and was presumed to be extinct until a photographer spotted a few mingling with another tern species. Today, there are more than 40 Chinese crested terns on the islands.
Schubel’s latest project is a batch of South American tern decoys for a conservation organization in Argentina. As with the thousands of other birds she’s painted, she’s fixating on colors—searching for just the right shade of gray and adding bright red beaks. When spring begins to creep up the Maine coast, she’ll release her art to the wild, sending the decoys to the other side of the equator to get battered by autumnal winds and waves. They’re meant to be out there on the rocks and cliffs, she says, showing seabirds where to come home.
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**Heather Hansman**
Heather Hansman is an award-winning freelance writer and the best-selling author of _Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow_ and _Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West._ Her reporting has appeared in _The New York Times, The Atlantic,_ and _Outside,_ among other publications. She lives in Durango, Colorado, right by the river.
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