As the summer breeding season winds down for Maine’s seabirds, baby Atlantic Puffins are getting ready to hit the high seas. But on Machias Seal Island, near the border of New Brunswick and Maine, the burrows have been strangely quiet this month. Home to the largest puffin colony in the region, the island hosts anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000 breeding pairs each summer. Typically, 60 percent of the colony’s newborns make it to the end of the season, but this year, only 12 percent were left after hundreds of chicks starved to death. It’s the lowest survival rate on record since scientists began monitoring the colony in 1995, the Portland Press Herald reports. Experts are tying this mass starvation event to warmer ocean surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, which may have pushed the puffins’ preferred food items farther north in search of deeper, cooler waters this summer. In the absence of Atlantic herring, white hake, and other large fish, the birds on Machias were...