NEW HARBOR — The July sun was already bright when my husband and I arrived at the dock with our youngest daughter, one of our middle sons and our oldest daughter, whose belated birthday gift had brought us to the coast.

For her, a nature lover, the destination made perfect sense: a Hardy Boat Cruises trip aboard the Hardy III to Eastern Egg Rock, where puffins circle the island and one of Maine’s best-known seabird restoration stories is still unfolding each summer.

The puffins were still ahead, but the harbor had already given us something to watch.

It was blazing hot. The sky was blue. The harbor was busy. And from the top deck of the boat, the first show was not a puffin, a tern or any of the other birds we had come to see.

It was a lobsterman working nearby.

Passengers watched as he moved through his day with the practiced rhythm of someone doing ordinary work in an extraordinary setting. To him, it may have been another hot day on the harbor. To those of us waiting on a tour boat, it was hard not to watch.

I wondered if he knew he had an audience.

The breeze moved across the top deck as the boat crossed Muscongus Bay toward Eastern Egg Rock, a small, treeless island with a conservation story much larger than its size.

It was my youngest daughter’s first trip on a boat in the ocean. Before that, boating had meant kayaks and canoes on local ponds. This was different: salt air, working harbor, open water, seabirds and the feeling that Maine had widened all at once.

An Audubon guide helped turn the ride from sightseeing into fieldwork. Before we reached the island, she held up pictures of birds we might see and talked about how to identify them. There were puffins, terns, sea ducks, cormorants, gulls and other birds moving through the air and over the water fast enough to make the advance lesson useful.

The guide’s preview helped once we reached the island, where birds moved quickly and were not always close enough for an easy look.

Eastern Egg Rock is about 7 acres, set near the mouth of Muscongus Bay. From a boat, it can look like a low pile of rock with birds moving above it. In conservation history, it is something more.

Atlantic puffins once nested on Maine islands, including Eastern Egg Rock, but humans hunting for meat, eggs and feathers helped wipe them out. By the late 1800s, puffins were gone from Eastern Egg Rock.

In 1973, Audubon biologist Stephen Kress began what became Project Puffin, an effort to restore puffins to the island. Young puffins from Newfoundland were brought to Eastern Egg Rock and raised in artificial burrows so they would imprint on the island and, years later, return to nest.

It was a bold plan, but not a simple one. Even after puffins were raised there, researchers still had to convince returning birds that the island was a safe place to gather.

So they tried something that sounds almost comical, except that it worked.

They placed wooden puffin decoys on the rocks. They played recorded puffin calls. They made the island look and sound like a puffin colony before it truly was one.

In other words, they used fake puffins to help bring back real ones.

The first transplanted puffins began returning in the late 1970s, and the first nesting pairs followed in the early 1980s. Today, Maine Audubon describes Eastern Egg Rock as the site of the world’s first restored seabird colony, and researchers continue to live and work there during the summer months, monitoring puffins, terns and other nesting birds.

Some of that work is patient and unglamorous, with researchers reading bands from blinds, tracking chicks and recording what adult birds bring back from the Gulf of Maine to feed their young.

That human presence matters, supplying critical information. Puffins do not simply need an island. They need burrows, food for their chicks and protection from predators. Gulls are among the threats to eggs and young birds, and the island that looks peaceful from a tour boat is, for nesting seabirds, crowded, noisy and full of risk.

From the Hardy III, the puffins were not waiting around to be admired. They circled the island, skimmed low over the water, and appeared and disappeared against the rocks. Some were close enough to show their bright bills and compact bodies. Others were quick shapes in the air, pointed out by the guide or spotted by passengers with binoculars ready.

The terns were easier to hear and harder to sort. Common, Arctic and roseate terns are part of the Eastern Egg Rock story, too, and they moved with sharp wings and sharper voices. They looked delicate only until they turned in the air. Then they looked like they owned the place.

We also saw sea ducks, cormorants and other birds working the water and sky around the island. The guide’s pictures helped, but so did the simple act of slowing down and looking. The longer we circled, the more the island changed from a small rock with birds on it into a living neighborhood with routes, alarms, rivals and rules.

We stayed on the top deck the whole time. We could have gone below for snacks or a break from the sun, but the breeze, the view and the birds kept us there.

The trip was short enough to feel easy and long enough to feel like we had stepped out of ordinary land-based life for a while.

Living in western Maine, it is easy to think of the coast as somewhere else, even though it is one of the things that defines the state. We have our mountains, rivers, ponds and woods, but the ocean is of course part of our Maine inheritance, too. A trip like this is a reminder to make time for it, not just as scenery, but as a living place with working harbors, seabirds, research stations and stories still unfolding offshore.

That may be the best part of a boat trip from a Maine harbor. It does not take a long voyage to make the coast feel new. One minute, you are watching a lobsterman at work and wondering whether he knows a boatload of people has turned him into the harbor’s opening act. The next, you are learning that one of Maine’s most beloved seabirds returned because researchers were patient enough to move chicks, guard nests and put wooden puffins on rocks until real puffins believed the island was home.

On a hot day, the ocean breeze would have been enough.

But the puffins gave us the better story.