Wildlife / Animals nominee

The Atlantic Puffin was nearly hunted into extinction on nearly every island in Maine in the 1880s. Only one pair was left on one island by 1902. Conservationists nursed the population on that island back to a few dozen pairs, but no puffins came back to any other island where it was eliminated.

In 1973, a young Audubon camp bird instructor named Steve Kress began bringing puffin chicks down 800 miles from Newfoundland and hand raised them until they fledged. Kress hoped the birds would remember Maine as home and not Canada.

He guessed right.

Today, there are more than 1,400 pairs of puffins across several islands off the coast of Maine, in the world’s first successful restoration of a seabird to an island where humans killed it off. The techniques he used, including chick translocation, decoys, mirrors and taped calls, have been used in more than 850 seabird restoration projects in 36 countries.

These images are of puffins with fish for their chicks.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary, and a multiple winner of writing awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Newspaper Columnists, Derrick Z. Jackson often keep a camera at his side to illustrate his pieces. His work documenting the restoration of puffins on islands off the coast of Maine or loon conservation in New England was the 2024 winner for Feature Photo the National Headliner Awards and the 2024 winner for Photo Essay and Action Photography from the Outdoor Writers Association of America (OWAA). He was also the 2023 winner for both Action and Fauna from the OWAA and for Feature Photo from the Maine Press Association.

His photography of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns were exhibited at Boston’s Museum of African American History and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Jackson is co-author and photographer of “The Puffin Plan," published by Tumblehome Books in 2020. It was the 2021 winner in teen nonfiction in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Jackson is also co-author of “Project Puffin," published by Yale University Press in 2015.