Tern, tern, tern: since 1969 Helen Hays, the tern lady of Great Gull Island, has helped conserve thousands of seabirds

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr.

On May 22 I joined a small group from the American Museum of Natural History in a motor launch at Niantic, Connecticut. We chugged across Long Island Sound to Great Gull Island, a bird sanctuary jointly operated by the Museum and the Linnaean Society of New York (an ornithological group dedicated to natural history and conservation). Great Gull is a low rockpile of an islet and the most successful breeding ground for common and roseate terns in North America. About 17,000 pairs of commons and more than 1,800 pairs of roseates breed there every summer, arriving in early May and departing with their young in August. This colony is the only one with a growing population (especially of roseates), partly because breeding grounds on Long Island and farther south have been eliminated by relentless human development.

Terns are about two-thirds the size of gulls; a roseate tern is a little longer than a common tern and a little more elegant, with a whiter body (contrasting more sharply with its black head), a longer tail (extending beyond its folded wings), sometimes a blacker bill, and a faint, rosy blush on its breast. Listed as an endangered species by the federal government since 1987, roseates breed in large numbers in only two other places, Bird and Ram Islands, off the coast of Massachusetts. The terns feed on the abundant fish (sand eels and butterfish, for example) that are chased by such sport fish as bluefish and striped bass to the water's surface, where the terns, which can't dive more than a few feet underwater, can catch them. The three islands are also relatively free of predators, except for the great black-backed gulls near Great Gull, which have learned to capture the terns in the air and swallow them whole.

But things can go wrong, and these tern colonies might easily disappear, as they once did on Great Gull. In the nineteenth century, plume hunters slaughtered the birds for their feathers, then popular for ladies' hats; 40,000 skins were taken in one year. But the coup de grace occurred in 1897, just before the start of the Spanish-American War, when the army began building Fort Michie to guard the eastern approaches to Long Island Sound. Eventually, 500 men moved onto the seventeen-acre island; granite riprap and concrete fortifications invaded the sandy beaches and meadows where terns scraped out their nests. In 1949, when the government ceded the island to the Museum, most of the fortifications were destroyed, and the terns slowly began coming back.

By 1966 the colony was large enough and stable enough to study, and Helen Hays (self-described as "the ornithologist, not the actress") has spent every summer on the island since then. Soon after taking over in 1969, Hays made a name for the project by documenting the effects of PCBs and other toxins on the bird population (thin-shelled eggs and deformed chicks) and by lobbying successfully for the reduction of environmental contaminants.

At a slender wooden jetty with an off-putting sign reading Research Station--Do Not Land, the short, cheerful, energetic-looking Hays caught our rope and guided our group's boat in. As she led us through the ruined fortifications of Fort Michie, with hundreds of crying terns soaring and swooping overhead, Hays explained that she had gotten into ornithology because of her wish, when she was at Wellesley College in the 1950s, to do fieldwork, and the only job available was studying ruddy ducks in Manitoba. After getting a master's in ornithology from Cornell University, she came to the Museum in 1956. When a friend took her to Great Gull to see the terns, Hays knew she did not want to be among solitary ruddy ducks anymore; she wanted to be in the social swirl of this colony.

Hays arrives on the island during the last week in April to watch the terns come in. This year, a group of about forty flew over the island on May 5 and the birds began landing on May 7, a little later than usual. By the time of our May 22 visit, about half of the expected 24,000 or so terns had arrived, bright and chipper and ready for courtship displays despite their long trip. Most of the roseates come from the coast of Brazil; the commons come from there as well and also from the coast of Argentina--wintering grounds discovered by Hays and her associates during several expeditions undertaken in the past decade.

What was once the fort's mine-placement and detection center now serves as office, bird-banding laboratory, bird-processing room, kitchen, dining room, and sitting room. The detritus of more than thirty years of ongoing bird-watching is impressive: shelves of canned food, lots of battered pots and pans, maps, notebooks, bookcases crammed with paperbacks, a gull skeleton, a wall clock with birds marking the hours and bird songs for chimes, and straw hats speckled white with tern droppings and topped with long-stemmed cloth flowers--worn to deflect dive-bombing terns, which always attack the highest point. (Hays recounted how she and her helpers had originally worn pith helmets until they realized that the birds were bending their beaks on the hard hats.)