QUIET SERENITY (Original Painting) Oil on Linen 36 x 48 Unframed by Susan Andreasen

Focuses on puffins along the Maine coast, noting their population decline and ongoing conservation challenges.

Puffins had nested along the Maine coast on at least six islands: Eastern Egg Rock, Western Egg Rock, Large Green Island, Mantinicus Rock, Seal Island and Machias Seal Island. By the early 1900’s, there was only one pair of puffins left south of the Canadian border. That pair lived on Mantinicus Rock, a lonely pile of rocks twenty-two miles off the coast in Penobscot Bay. After Manitous Rock’s lighthouse keepers began protecting the puffins from hunters, the puffins began to come back and there are now about 150 pairs that nest there. Puffins had always remained on Machias Seal Island on Canadian border which today supports a breeding colony of over 110 pairs of puffins. 

The Atlantic Puffin, one of the world’s most photographed birds, may be in danger of extinction than scientists had estimated. It has already been considered a species in grave danger of extinction, but new data from Iceland indicates a 70% fall in its population since 1975.