Iain Stenhouse

I am the Marine Bird Program Director for the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI), based in Portland, Maine, and have over 25 years of experience in avian ecology and conservation. My passion for seabirds and remote islands was forged on the rugged west coast of Scotland, where I grew up.

During graduate research at Memorial University of Newfoundland, I studied the habitat use, reproductive success, and predation risk of Leach's Storm-Petrels breeding in a large Newfoundland colony. As part of that work, I spent hundreds of hours crawling through dense brush (what they call 'tuckamore' in Newfoundland) looking for the cryptic burrows of storm-petrels. That intense experience left me with a special place in my heart for these gentle little birds.

With your help, we can get some critical data that, for the very first time, will establish the population trend in Leach's Storm-Petrels breeding in the Gulf of Maine.

For more about the Biodiversity Research Institute, see http://www.briloon.org/.

June 2016