How 'Seabird Sue' Blends Art and Science to Attract Birds Back to Lost Habitat

Jean Hall/National Audubon Society Seabird Institute Some of the decoys are more intricate than others. To make a convincing brown noddy, you need to carefully blend the transitions between the bird’s dark body and its light throat. Terns, though, can pick up on symbolism: To replicate one, you need only to stick a smaller gray block atop a larger gray block and draw a red slash for a beak.

Figuring out how to make wild birds think decoys are real is the work of Sue Schubel, also known as “Seabird Sue.” For the past decade, she’s made the decoys at the core of a global seabird restoration program, one predicated on the idea of social attraction—that seabirds will nest in places where they see other birds doing the same. Some 95 percent of seabird species nest in groups, and decoys can encourage them to return to habitat from which they’ve been extirpated, or encourage them to take up new, safe habitat.

“These techniques have benefited a third of the seabird species around the world, including some of the most endangered,” says Don Lyons, director of conservation science at Audubon’s Seabird Institute, which runs the program. “The use of decoys really takes advantage of their behavior and breeding biology to preserve them.”