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 in Maine nuzzling each other in affection.

A 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary, a 2021 Scripps Howard winner in Opinion and winner of multiple writing awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Newspaper Columnists (including 2025), and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Derrick Z. Jackson often keeps a camera at his side to illustrate his pieces.

His images of puffins in Maine were the 2024 winner for Feature Photo in the National Headliner Awards and the Headliner's 2025 second place winner for Individual Photo portfolio. They were a 2025 finalist in three categories from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, OWAA’s 2024 winner for Photo Essay and Action Photography and 2023 winner for both Action and Fauna.

He was also the 2023 Feature Photo winner from the Maine Press Association and one of 12 winners in the 2025 International Photography Competition of ViewPoint Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Jackson is co-author and photographer of “The Puffin Plan," published by Tumblehome Books (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 (2015).