12 October 21
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Also, why don't his big fans like Leif Erickson?
(As much as it kills me to admit it, I can’t suggest St. Brendan’s Day—May 16—because his Navigatio reads more like Gullivers Travels spiced up by Ray Harryhausen. Brendan meets Judas, who sits on a wet rock on feast days as a break from being in hell. There is an island of sheep and an island of blacksmiths. Also, sea monsters, a gryphon, and demons who drag one of the crew into a volcano and down to hell. They also run into a guy named Paul the Hermit, who wears only hair and is fed by otters. I don’t know about voyages but I think Brendan certainly may have gone on a trip or two.)
While you all ponder that, there is a real-life bit of Columbus’s true legacy being acted out in northern Minnesota. The Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, the only pipeline still carrying Canadian tar-sands oil, has become operational. Local environmentalists and Indigenous people have been actively resisting the pipeline for a long time, and a lot of them have been hauled off to the hoosegow for having done so. Which prompted this amazing recent story in the Guardian. If you wondered what it would have been like to live in the Gilded Age, when law enforcement was a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate power, well, you could ask the people in Minnesota about that.
Enbridge is replacing the Line 3 pipeline through Minnesota to carry oil from Alberta to the tip of Lake Superior in Wisconsin. The new pipeline carries a heavy oil called bitumen, doubles the capacity of the original to 760,000 barrels a day and carves a new route through pristine wetlands. A report by the climate action group MN350 says the expanded pipeline will emit the equivalent greenhouse gases of 50 coal power plants.
Police have arrested more than 900 demonstrators opposing Line 3 and its impact on climate and Indigenous rights, according to the Pipeline Legal Action Network. It’s common for protesters opposing pipeline construction to face private security hired by companies, as they did during demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline. But in Minnesota, a financial agreement with a foreign company has given public police forces an incentive to arrest demonstrators.
And there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with that, as anyone can see.
Brandon Thyen, Chisago county sheriff, requested Enbridge reimbursement when his deputies were assigned “to protect the construction workers and equipment from activists and protesters”. On 29 July, Houska said Line 3 opponents, who identify as water protectors, attempted to stop the drilling, under skies that were thick with wildfire smoke from the west. “We were met with rubber bullets and Mace by a big line of police officers from multiple counties shooting at us at point blank range,” she said.
The Enbridge No. 3 is a terrible idea on just about every level. First of all, any planet serious about the climate crisis would keep the tar sands in the ground. Second, this pipeline not only endangers the pristine Boundary Waters area, but also it ends up at Lake Superior, where can be found 10 percent of the world’s freshwater supply. And it’s not like the project hasn’t already fouled its way across the landscape. From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Forced by state regulators, Calgary, Alberta-based Enbridge has launched a major cleanup effort in Clearwater County to repair the aquifer crews punctured during construction in January. Artesian groundwater has been welling up for more than eight months near this rural community, wasting at least 24 million gallons and threatening to dry out two rare and protected wetland areas nearby called fens. "I just don't want people losing precious water," said Jenna Olson, who works at the gas station in Clearbrook, population 464. "That's something serious.”
The breach is a significant blunder on one of the largest construction projects in the state's recent history, but it's been largely out of public view given the location and the fact the company failed to tell regulators about it for several months. The state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) revealed the problem only last month when it ordered Enbridge to pay $3.3 million for the damage and gave it 30 days to stop the uncontrolled flow of water.
Why any state would continue to do business with these people is beyond me. From WCCO:
A challenge is still pending in federal court to a permit granted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but that case didn’t block construction. Opponents can still ask the state Supreme Court to review a clean water certification granted by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
The pipeline is operating now without a clear permit. Also, it is being sued by wild rice.
Also, a novel “rights of nature” lawsuit is pending in the White Earth tribal court. It names Manoomin — the Ojibwe word for wild rice — as one of the plaintiffs. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has asked a federal appeals court to block that case. “We are confident that the (tribal) court will hold that the rights of wild rice should supersede the rights of the Canadian multinational … And we will ask the federal government to uphold the decisions that are made in our court,” [Winona] LaDuke told reporters.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day than having a native crop sue a greedy multinational invader.
Protesters take part in the Women's March and demonstrate against Texas's S.B. 8, a near total ban on abortion, in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 2, 2021. (photo: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty Images)
The judicial back-and-forth on the abortion law shows why the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Texas won’t be enough.
“This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right,” U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman said in the order blocking the law. Two days later, Texas successfully challenged the judge’s order before the notoriously anti-abortion 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
By Friday night, the abortion ban was back in effect. The dizzying turnaround was not unexpected: Texas was always going to appeal the judge’s order, and the 5th Circuit was always going to side with the state.
Last week’s events offer a painful reminder of the difficulties — by design — that those seeking to fight the Texas abortion ban in federal courts will face. The Justice Department is right to bring the suit against this blatantly unconstitutional law, but the architects of the abortion ban ensured that it would be shielded from scrutiny in federal court, constitutionality be damned.
There was a good sign in the wrangling: The federal government finally got involved in a state-level reproductive rights issue, something preceding Democratic administrations had been loath to do. Yet if the Justice Department lawsuit reflects the Biden administration’s willingness to buck conventions around federal inaction, we should demand far more than this likely doomed legal intervention when it comes to reproductive rights.
When the Texas abortion ban came into effect in September, after the 5th Circuit canceled a hearing on its constitutionality and the Supreme Court declined to intervene, I argued at the time that we cannot rely on the courts to defend reproductive rights. Roe v. Wade is for now, but perhaps not much longer, still on the books. Nonetheless, in Texas, an abortion after six weeks — before many people even know that they’re pregnant — is illegal.
Constitutional challenges to the abortion ban appear stymied from the jump because the law permits private individuals, rather than state authorities, to bring civil cases against abortion providers, along with anyone believed to have aided a person in accessing an abortion, including an Uber driver taking someone to a clinic. For every successful case, these bounty-hunter plaintiffs will receive $10,000; unlike most civil litigation, the plaintiff need not even prove that they have been harmed in any way.
S.B. 8 relies on the doctrine of “sovereign immunity” as protection against federal court challenges: Individuals can enforce their constitutional rights only against the government and its agents, but private citizens are to be the plaintiffs in S.B. 8 cases.
Notorious 5th Circuit
A group of abortion providers did try to block the law on constitutional grounds — as a contravention of Roe — by suing a number of Texas officials and judges. The 5th Circuit rejected the suit, arguing that state officials were the wrong defendant targets because S.B. 8 asserts that state actors cannot enforce the law.
There are, of course, legal holes to poke in the abortion ban’s armor, as the Justice Department is attempting. The government rightly claims that the law violates the constitutional rights of people to access abortions before so-called fetal viability — which is true, but a fact that likely won’t see the law overturned. The lawsuit also claims that the abortion ban violates federal law “by purporting to prohibit federal agencies from carrying out their responsibilities under federal law.”
However meritorious this claim, the federal government’s efforts may come to nought. First it has to prove that it has standing to sue Texas in federal court in the first place. A party must be able to show that they have been directly harmed by the party they are suing in order for the case to be heard in federal court. It’s not clear that the government reaches this standard, which is a further vile irony, given that plaintiffs bringing S.B. 8 civil suits need have suffered no personal harm to sue an abortion provider.
The limits of the government’s case are, of course, not simply a matter of possible de jure flaws. The 5th Circuit is a profoundly right-wing court and stands as a consistent barrier to reproductive justice. The support the judges have shown Texas in this case so far can be expected to continue.
This is the same appeals court that upheld an absurd previous attempt by Texas to shutter abortion clinics by demanding that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinics where they work — a law eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. Last year, a 5th Circuit ruling permitted Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to block access to abortions as part of a Covid-19 executive order banning surgeries and procedures that were not “immediately medically necessary.”
“The court is notoriously ideological and results-oriented — and, with the addition of four new Trump-appointed judges, is poised to become even more so,” The Intercept’s Jordan Smith wrote of the 5th Circuit in 2019.
Other Paths
Legal scholars have highlighted other avenues the Justice Department could take to challenge S.B. 8. For example, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was passed to protect the civil rights of previously enslaved Americans who were targeted by white supremacist vigilantes; the same law could apply to would-be bounty hunters in Texas.
“The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. “If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?”
It’s certainly a strategy to be embraced — but one that presumes anti-abortion vigilantes will be deterred by the threat.
It goes without saying that Congress should cement the right to abortion into legislation, but without abolishing the filibuster, no such effort can currently succeed.
If the president meant what he said in vowing to “launch a whole-of-government effort” to protect the right to abortion in Texas, then we must demand that he live up to his word swiftly. S.B. 8 will not be the last of such schemes. The Food and Drug Administration should immediately permit the sale of medical abortion pills in pharmacies and through the mail, rather than in person through a medical professional. The pills should be made available on demand without prescription.
There are other untapped federal resources that should be deployed in this crucial fight, if the government is truly committed to protecting what is left of the right to an abortion. “The U.S. government could stake out places and supply personnel for abortion provision, governed by federal laws, that are not subject to state restrictions or, for that matter, to lawsuits under laws like SB8,” wrote Mary Ziegler and Rachel Rebouché in the Washington Post. “Federal employees would be immune from lawsuits commenced by private citizens.”
As Republican states have decimated reproductive rights over the years, grassroots activists have consistently led the way in enabling people to access abortions, be it through sharing resources, circulating abortion pills, housing people needing to cross state lines, or building national networks not reliant on the hierarchies of major nonprofit organizations. If the federal government wants to stand up for reproductive justice, it is these grassroots activists who should be looked to as the experts in the field.
Such is the state of the United States criminal legal system that if even the government wants to protect constitutional rights, it will need to learn to skirt the law. To be sure, the executive branch in this country has a long history of taking extrajudicial action for far less noble causes.
Those on the front lines of the fight for universal abortion access have long looked beyond the courts and the law; we have every reason to demand that the government do the same.
The U.S.-Mexico border fence in Nogales, Arizona. (photo: Ariana Drehsler/AFP/Getty Images)
A report by a federal watchdog shows how the Trump administration flagged at least 51 citizens for interrogation at the border based on evidence as flimsy as once having ridden in a car with someone suspected of aiding the migrant “caravan.”
A ProPublica story in May first revealed the involvement of the counterterrorism team. But the new report, from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, shows the unit’s assignment was far broader than previously known.
According to the report, at least 51 U.S. citizens were flagged for interrogation — often based on evidence as flimsy as once having ridden in a car across the border with someone suspected of aiding the caravan.
Thirty-nine of those Americans crossed the border shortly after being flagged and were detained and interrogated. All of those interrogations, the report found, were conducted by members of the Tactical Terrorism Response Team, a little-known unit of Customs and Border Protection trained in counterterrorism, not immigration issues. The existence of the inspector general’s report was first disclosed by Politico.
Tarek Ismail of the City University of New York, who’s been investigating the role of the counterterrorism units and is part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking documents on them, told ProPublica that he’d never seen the unit’s work detailed in a government report before. “There’s so little information out there about the TTRT that it’s astounding that the report talks about them in such a matter-of-fact way, as if it’s nothing to be concerned about,” he told ProPublica.
In the fall of 2018, thousands of Central Americans migrating together for safety had become a fixation of President Donald Trump and his administration. The federal government sent a surge of intelligence and security forces to the southern border in what it dubbed Operation Secure Line, which ultimately led to the dragnet interrogations.
The government initially maintained that it was investigating confrontations between migrants and agents. But the Trump administration then said it was looking into whether activists were abetting smuggling by “encouraging” migrants to enter the U.S.
Taylor Levy, one of the citizens targeted by CBP’s effort (and who was involved in the FOIA case that first disclosed the counterterrorism agents’ involvement this spring), told ProPublica the new report validated her suspicions. “I’m not paranoid, my friends aren’t paranoid. This really did happen. It was a targeted campaign of surveillance,” she said.
In one case, the inspector general’s report says, two lawyers were flagged for interrogation because they had previously crossed the border with someone suspected of running a WhatsApp group associated with the caravan. In another case, a U.S. citizen was flagged for crossing into the U.S. with someone who was, months later, identified as a potential caravan organizer.
The report notes that citizens are only supposed to be flagged for border interrogations when they are suspected of criminal activity themselves. But officials were either unaware of the decades-old policy or ignored it. At least two senior officials told investigators that people could be stopped for questioning for “virtually any reason,” according to the report.
In a response included with the report, CBP agreed to update its training to clarify that flags “should only be created for law enforcement purposes.” It did not say it would limit future interrogations to people suspected of criminal activity themselves.
CBP referred ProPublica to its published response to the inspector general’s report, and it did not comment on whether any agents had been or would be disciplined in response to the report’s findings.
An Amazon warehouse worker. (photo: Getty Images)
The law would require Amazon raise wages and offer more safety training and sick days.
The law, known as the Working Families Ordinance, would require that employers that operate on San Diego-county owned land pay the prevailing wage—which is based on union wages—and mandate 56 hours of annual sick leave for workers.
In a statement, Maria Boschetti, a spokesperson for Amazon confirmed that Amazon had backed out of the deal, but did not specify the reason why Amazon backed out of the project. "While we have decided not to pursue the site in El Cajón, we continue to assess opportunities to invest and grow across the region," she said. "We appreciate the time and attention committed by the City of San Diego, as well as local community leaders and officials.”
"Amazon is a dynamic business and we are constantly exploring new locations," Boschetti continued. "We weigh a variety of factors when deciding where to develop future sites to best serve our customers. It is common for us to explore multiple locations simultaneously and adjust based on our operational needs."
But in a recent letter to the community obtained by Motherboard, Chesnut Properties, the developer of the Amazon warehouse in El Cajón, wrote that the Working Families Ordinance was the reason for Amazon's withdrawal from the project.
"Just the threat (mention) of this ordinance has already cost over 400 great jobs for the Weld Property that I have been working on for over five years," the letter from Chesnut Properties said. The Weld Property refers to the site of the Amazon warehouse.
"The proposed ordinance is, in my opinion, irresponsible in that the county leadership has put all business and ground lessees 'on notice' that a huge change is coming that will impose new wage costs on all of us," the letter continued.
In March, San Diego approved a proposal for the project. Chesnut Properties did not return a request for comment.
Amazon's decision to pull out of the warehouse project is yet another example of the tech giant's opposition to working with unions and raising wages for employees. It also falls within a pattern of the company ignoring communities' requests for a say in how Amazon operates. This year, Amazon has campaigned against union drives at its Bessemer, Alabama and Staten Island, New York City warehouses. The company has also withdrawn from warehouse deals when it didn't get the tax breaks it wanted.
"[Amazon's] rhetoric is we’re creating good jobs for the people of San Diego, and they have come into many communities with promises around creating economic opportunity," Terra Lawson-Remer, the San Diego County supervisor who brought forward the ordinance, told Motherboard. "But once there were real expectations to pay enough so people don't live in poverty, Amazon walked away."
The ordinance also requires that bidders on projects on public-owned land are held to certain safety, training, and living wage standards for warehouse workers.
"Amazon backed out because they don’t want to have to pay a living wage," Carol Kim, the political director of the San Diego Building Trades, which represents construction workers in the area, told Motherboard. The union has played a role in pushing for the passage of the legislation.
"Amazon often brag[s] about paying workers $15 an hour," Kim said. "That’s essentially the minimum wage more or less in California—or will be very soon. Their entire business model is about paying as little as possible and creating a fractured economy that allows them to circumvent countervailing measures that offset corporations."
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters pushed for the passage of the Working Families Ordinance, which is expected to appear before the San Diego Board of Supervisors on February 22 for a vote. The Teamsters, which represents 1.4 million workers in the United States, launched a coordinated national effort to unionize Amazon in June, and in recent months has claimed victory in Colorado, California, and Indiana—pushing local governments in these states to reject proposals for Amazon warehouse projects and deny the company tax abatements.
Since 2000, Amazon and its subsidiaries have collected at least $4 billion in tax breaks for warehouse projects in the United States, according to the policy group, Good Jobs First. Critics of Amazon, such as the Teamsters, say local governments should not be rewarding giant corporations this way. Amazon is expected to become the largest employer in the United states in the next year or two, surpassing Walmart.
"It's an unfortunate act [that Amazon backed out]," Sal Abrica, a Teamsters Local 542 union organizer in San Diego, told Motherboard. "Instead of saying 'hey we’re willing to participate and find a solution and adhere to standards,' they leave. No one was asking for anything unreasonable."
In El Cajón, the Teamsters canvassed 700 homes to engage and educate community members about Amazon's labor practices. Amazon pays its warehouse workers and delivery drivers significantly less than unionized workers in the same industries, and experts have noted that the company's presence often drives down wages.
A volunteer prepares gallons of water to be distributed to residents at the Harbor Harvest Urban Ministries in Benton Harbor, Michigan. (photo: Jim Vondruska/Guardian UK)
Benton Harbor residents have had lead-contaminated water for at least three years as activists call on state to do more
For at least three years, residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, have been suffering from lead-contaminated water with what experts describe as insufficient intervention from state and local officials.
This month, the state promised to expand free water distribution in the city and reaffirmed its commitment to comply with federal lead regulations. Activists, who say Benton Harbor’s poor water quality is a sign of environmental injustice and have been calling on the state to take action for years, say these are steps in the right direction, but more remains to be done.
In 2018, Benton Harbor was found to have lead contamination of 22 parts per billion (ppb) in its tap water – far higher than the federal action level of 15 ppb and higher, even, than nearby Flint at the height of its water crisis. No level of lead exposure is considered safe; the federal action level is a national standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine which water systems must take action to lower its lead levels.
Local activists welcome these steps after three years of questioning whether the city’s water was safe, and organizing bottled water drives for the community themselves.
“I believe the action … shows they’re ready to do something,” said the Rev Edward Pinkney, head of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, a significant step in the right direction. “That’s a good thing.”
But Pinkney said far more was needed to address the crisis in full, and called on Governor Gretchen Whitmer to declare a state of emergency – both as a means to accelerate the timeline to replace the city’s water lines and to make clearer to those residents unaware of the emergency that the water is unsafe to use.
“You need to call for a state of emergency right now,” Pinkney said. “That will get the attention of the people in Benton Harbor.” He also believed the phrasing of the state’s latest measures failed to capture the scale of the crisis. “Tell the people that the water is unsafe,” Pinkney said. “Just tell them.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council, along with Pinkney’s group and several other organizations, filed an emergency appeal to the EPA on 9 September demanding federal action. In a 5 October response, the EPA told the petitioners that it was now working with the state, county, and city to “ensure there is prompt action to address the community’s public health needs”.
The federal involvement has triggered a more assertive response from the state, according to Cyndi Roper, Michigan senior policy advocate for the NRDC.
“It is clear that EPA’s involvement is driving this forward,” Roper said. “The state has not responded to this for three years in a way that protected residents. It wasn’t until EPA headquarters got involved that we have begun to see an urgent response.”
Following the petition in September, the Michigan department of environment, Great Lakes and energy (EGLE) said it would work with other agencies at the state, county and municipal level to bring water filters to every home in Benton Harbor and to provide bottled water to residents – measures that were previously spearheaded by Pinkney’s group and volunteers. Whitmer, meanwhile, signed a budget allotting $10m to replace lead lines in the city.
Last week, EGLE and the Michigan department of health and human services (HHS) announced an expanded water distribution program and a filter effectiveness study, and discouraged residents from using their tap water. “Protecting the health and safety of Benton Harbor residents is a top priority,” Elizabeth Hertel, director of the Michigan HHS, said in a statement. “We’ve listened to the community’s concerns and out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending that residents use bottled water for cooking, drinking and brushing teeth.”
Lynn Sutfin, public relations officer at the state HHS, said in a statement that “many efforts have been taking place since 2018” from the state and Berrien county, and that the recent actions have been “part of an accelerated, across-the-board effort” to reduce the risk to residents while lead service lines are replaced by the city.
Roper, of the NRDC, said that the recent moves were encouraging, but that officials should follow residents’ lead and speed up the timetable for replacing the city’s 6,000 service lines.
“We definitely think it’s a step in the right direction,” Roper told the Guardian. “But we still have a long way to go.”
Replacing the lead lines will be a challenge.
Under a proposal from Whitmer, the pipes would be removed over the course of five years. But it’s unclear how the project will be funded: the Republican-controlled Michigan legislature agreed to only half of the $20m she said it would cost, and Joe Biden’s infrastructure bills that put $45bn in federal dollars toward replacing the nation’s aging lead lines are currently stuck in a legislative impasse on Capitol Hill. Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health at the NRDC, expressed concern in a previous interview with the Guardian that any cuts to pipe removal funding in the final bills could come at the expense of disadvantaged communities like Benton Harbor.
Meanwhile, residents and their advocates say that the five-year timetable proposed by Whitmer is too long, and have been pushing for an accelerated pace, citing the speed with which the far-larger city of Newark, New Jersey, has moved to replace its lead pipes; since early 2019, it has removed more than 20,000 service lines. Pinkney has called for the Benton Harbor lines to be replaced in one to two years. “We can’t wait no longer,” Pinkney said.
But only about 100 are slated to be removed by next spring. That means residents will probably have to rely on stopgap measures for the foreseeable future, unless something changes.
“Just think about if your children were living in Benton Harbor – would you allow this?” Pinkney said. “Look at Benton Harbor, and do the right thing.”
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. (photo: AP)
Syria criticizes Israel's announcement about increasing its illegal settlements in the Golan Heights and stresses that this area will belong to Syria forever.
"The Golan has been and will remain for Syria and sooner or later, it will return to the embrace of its homeland," reads the Syrian government statement, as reported by the Lebanese Al-Mayadeen channel.
On the other hand, residents of the plateau have organized this same day a demonstration against the policies of the usurper regime, emphasizing that they will not allow any settlement project to be implemented in the region.
"We deny these plans that Israel intends to establish on lands that have belonged to us for hundreds of years and that our ancestors gave their lives to preserve," denounced a group of protesters.
The anger of the Syrians has come in reaction to a meeting of Israeli officials held earlier Monday on the plan to expand illegal Israeli settlements in the highlands mentioned above. According to local reports, the Tel Aviv regime plans to build 7000 new housing units for its settlers. In this framework, if these settlements are built, the number of Israeli settlers will increase from 40,000 to 100,000.
For his part, the Israeli Prime Minister confirmed in a speech on Monday that his regime intends to "double again and again double" the number of its settler occupants in the highlands above.
Israel occupied part of the Golan plateau (in southern Syria) after the Six-Day war in 1967. The area was incorporated into its legal system in 1981, which implies a de facto annexation, which has been rejected by many countries and organizations globally, such as the United Nations Security Council.
A puffin on Eastern Egg Rock. (photo: Brian Bechard/Maine Public)
The state's coastal bays and the Gulf of Maine is among the fastest-warming large water bodies on the planet, making the puffins' fate a test-case for how climate change could disrupt marine ecosystems worldwide.
The little clown-colored birds are abundant in Canada, but in the U.S. they were hunted to near extirpation by the early 1900s. Scientists and volunteers later helped them to re-establish several island colonies off Maine, where they now number around 3,000.
Over the last decade, though, a series of "marine heatwaves" and intense storms upended their living conditions. This year was one of the worst yet, and the number of puffin chicks to live through the season plunged.
"In some cases it was significantly worse than we've seen in the past," said Linda Welch, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
On one offshore island she watched closely, Petit Manan, Welch said 90% of the nesting puffins failed to raise a chick.
"Many of the chicks that we classified as fledging, reaching the age where they leave their burrow and go to sea, the birds were kind of 40% to 50% smaller than we normally see," she said. "We were calling them 'micro-puffins.' "
The birds faced a complex of challenges; nests were flooded by some of the heaviest rains in a hundred years, exposing chicks to cold and predators. That was especially hard on another rare bird that nests in the open, Artic tern. But it was tough for young puffins, too, who were being reared in burrows within the jumbled boulders that line the island's shores.
And their parents had a hard time finding herring and other North Atlantic prey they usually dive for, which scientists think may have retreated to cooler waters too deep or far-off for the birds.
The adult puffins ranged farther than usual in a foraging commute that scientists say limited their time to keep chicks warm in their nests.
They did find and bring to the nests a lot of butterfish, a more southerly species that's been showing up in force in the Gulf of Maine in heatwave years. The thing is, butterfish are too big for young puffins to swallow.
On Petit Manan, Welch saw some heartbreaking things that repeated similarly tragic outcomes several years ago.
"There was a puffin chick that had reached the age where it should have been able to leave its burrow," she said. "It was fully feathered. It was dead in the burrow and there were probably ten or 12 carcasses of butterfish surrounding it."
Other ecosystem dislocations are emerging in the Gulf of Maine. New research suggests, for instance, that a big incursion of voracious squid during an extended heatwave was decisive in the collapse of a prized shrimp fishery.
Endangered North Atlantic right whales are ranging far from their traditional haunts in search of their favorite food, a tiny crustacean whose abundance in the Gulf is varying in response to changing temperatures and currents.
Formerly itinerant black sea-bass are starting to stick around all year, and spawning; they fetch a good price at market, and could present a new opportunity for Maine fishermen. And juvenile sea bass might even become a new food source for other species, such as, puffin chicks.
The director of the National Audubon Society's Seabird Institute, Don Lyons, says puffins provide a unique window on global-warming, on how even small shifts in the range or timing of any one species' occurrence can influence the fate of many others.
"Working with puffins in Maine, we're seeing the harbingers of climate change every day," he said. "I tend to think of puffins as a bunch of researchers. They're going out and sampling our marine ecosystem all summer, many times a day. And the way we learn from them is watching what fish they bring back and how well they are able to raise chicks. ... They're really telling us to be concerned, you know, to pay attention."
Lyons says that with good management of herring and other fisheries that the puffins depend on, the birds should be able to hang on.
Puffins can live up to 30 years, he notes, providing some resilience against a bad year. He adds, though, that their future in Maine may depend on just how often those bad years keep rolling in.
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