The Art of Social Attraction

From coastal Maine to the South Pacific, the hand-painted bird decoys used in 鈥榮ocial attraction鈥� conservation projects draw flocks

By Jennifer Wehunt
Conservation
Jun 25, 2025

Sue Schubel (above) paints gannets for a Canadian colony beset by avian flu. Atlantic puffins’ return to Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock (below) marked the first successful restoration of an island seabird colony humans had extirpated.

A DUVET OF SNOW coats the coastal Maine landscape this subfreezing February morning. It’s toasty inside, however, where a flock of solid white gannets, murres and kittiwakes stares blankly out the window. These birds would be sufficiently camouflaged if they took wing right now. But they’re destined for brighter colors and, for some, warmer climes. They’re meant to stand out, not blend in, and each of them has a date with a paintbrush.

Welcome to the workshop of Sue Schubel, the “seabird celebrant” who runs production for , part of the National Audubon Society’s in Bremen, Maine. Here, Schubel and helpers use 19 molds to craft 48 different bird species, resulting in hundreds of decoys every year—mostly intended for conservation purposes, from efforts to restore populations in Oregon to enticing to locales in the South Pacific.

No decoys are used for hunting, but a number will meet a different fate. “Some of them are for mantelpiece decoration,” Schubel says. “For every bird there is a nerd.”

Birds abandon nesting sites for lots of reasons: oil spills, sea-level rise, volcanic eruptions, disease, conflict with fisheries and more. To lure them to safer or newly resecured sites, , the institute’s founder and now-retired executive director, pioneered what’s known as “social attraction” in the 1970s: using decoys, sometimes paired with mirrors to multiply the impression of a crowd and sometimes with recorded audio to simulate a raucous good time. Seeing other birds, even strangely immobile ones, can draw curious lookie-loos, from a single nesting pair in the first year to hundreds of birds as decades pass.

Kress calls social attraction “an idea that has traveled around the world by itself ... helping other people do this good work,” with applications extending from birds to fish. Notable successes include thriving island communities of in Maine and restoration on Devil’s Slide Rock after an oil spill devastated the San Francisco Bay area. “It’s rare people can do something in the environment and see this quick of a response, but that’s very much the case with this method,” Kress says.

That immediacy made a big impact on Schubel, who was introduced to the Seabird Institute as a college student in the 1980s and worked on the California decoy deployment in 1996. “Sometimes you get instant gratification, which is really pleasing, like when we put out the murres on Devil’s Slide Rock,” she says. “The very next day we had birds landing and coming together. They don’t set decoys out there anymore, because that colony is fully restored.”

An image of a puffin with a herring standing next to a puffin decoy.

In the first quarter-century of using decoys for social attraction, Audubon and its partner institutions—the , (TNC)—turned to the husband-and-wife-run company Mad River Decoy of Vermont. When Jim and Nancy Henry retired in 2016, they gifted the business to the Seabird Institute. A zoologist by training with a minor in art and stints in avian paleontology and spotted owl surveying, Schubel was a natural heir to the nest egg. Her recent projects include painting 420 northern gannets and 120 murres for a site in the North Atlantic impacted by avian flu and 50 for a TNC effort on , a U.S. incorporated territory in the Pacific Ocean.

Considered a by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the red-footed booby is key to the restoration of Palmyra’s habitat for TNC. The island, nearly 1,000 nautical miles south of Honolulu, has weathered a history of human-caused hardship: a 150-year-old abandoned copra, or coconut palm, plantation that choked out native flora; an invasive black rat infestation; coral reef damage when the U.S. government built a runway and dredged a channel in World War II.

TNC hopes the boobies will help restore Palmyra’s ecosystem, beginning with the birds’ preferred nesting trees: a native beach heliotrope and a bougainvillea relative known as grand devil’s-claws. , TNC lead scientist for island resilience, calls red-footed boobies “one of the most functionally important species, because they represent the largest component of our seabird biomass. And seabirds play this critical role of bringing nutrients from their ocean foraging grounds back to the islands.” The boobies deposit nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus as guano, which enriches the island and also nourishes surrounding fish populations and coral, boosting the reef’s tolerance for warming water.

“There are a lot of atolls that have the same copra plantation scenario and are missing seabirds,” Wegmann says. TNC could use what it learns from the boobies to restore other islands while giving Palmyra “the best opportunity to withstand whatever climate scenarios are in its future.”

Some critics caution that Audubon is introducing more plastic into marine environments. (The decoys are made of a rotomolded polymer and finished with Benjamin Moore house paint.) Schubel understands the concern but believes the decoys “definitely have a net positive impact,” citing their durability and conservation benefits. Plus, she says, they’re works of art: “Anybody who finds a decoy is not going to just leave it on the beach.”

In addition to the decoys, Schubel builds the mirror installations that can turn a few fake birds into a full-fledged flock and the sound systems that play looping recordings off solar-powered batteries. “You want an enticing, happy-sounding tern,” she says of choosing the right audio. “You want these terns to really get in the mood to come hither and stay there. Once you have some birds settled in, they provide the social attraction to the others.”

What you don’t want, she says, is for a sound system to fail and birds to decide the party’s over. Terns, for example, “may get up and find another place to move, if they need to: if the food moves, if there’s a predator that comes to an island. Back in the day, when they had a lot more options of places to go, that worked pretty well.”

She continues: “But we, as humans, have limited the landscape for other animals besides ourselves—well, really, including ourselves. It’s up to us to communicate to the birds where the safe places are they can nest.”

More signifiers couldn’t hurt. “You gotta have the sights and sounds, but we haven’t really started in on smells yet,” Schubel says with a chuckle. “It’ll be next.”

Jennifer Wehunt is the editorial director of National Wildlife.