Bunnies are ubiquitous, Puffins are threatened. Bixby & Co. has teamed up with the National Audubon Society to help Puffins and other Maine seabirds thrive on land and sea.
Puffins are amazing and everything about them usually comes as a surprise. They typically mate for life and nest on some of Maine’s most remote islands where they lay a single egg a year, deep underground, which even in the best circumstances limit their population growth.
Environment
Changes in the environment further challenges these birds as the warming water in this region has made finding food for chicks more difficult. Puffin parents commit three months of every year to raise their single chick before returning to the ocean where they float at sea most of the year.
Food
By mid-August, chicks head to sea alone where they catch their own food and remain for the first two or three years of their life. When they are about five years old, they return to the Gulf of Maine around Easter time, to nest for the first time on the same islands where their parents nest.
Chocolate Puffins Raise Awareness
In celebration of the start of the Puffin nesting cycle, Bixby & Co.is mounting a campaign to encourage putting chocolate Puffins in holiday baskets instead of the ever-present bunnies. Bixby’s hollow, non-GMO standing chocolate Puffin is 4-inches high with a solid head and base.
Proceeds of the sale of Puffin products help support Audubon’s Project Puffin, a world famous seabird conservation program located in mid-coast Maine.
Puffin Pops
In addition to the standing Puffins, Bixby & Co., makes an organic chocolate bar from ethically sourced beans from the Dominican Republic as well as "Puffin Pops”, dark and milk chocolate on a stick.
Store hours are 10:00am to 4:30pm, Monday through Saturday. Online is 24/7.