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Terns of Great Gull Island - Interview with Helen Hays
Dedicating more than 40 summers to the birds she values
© Melinda Billings
Helen Hays has been observing and banding the Common and Roseate Terns that nest on Great Gull Island since 1969. She's there with colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History and a host of dedicated volunteers. These terns nearly disappeared when plume-hunters slaughtered them for feathers for ladies' hats. Numbers have improved, but Roseate Terns are still endangered.
BirdNote®
The Terns of Great Gull Island - Interview with Helen Hays
Interviewed and written by Chris Peterson
This is BirdNote!
[Calls of many Common Terns]
Imagine dedicating 43 summers to understanding the birds you value. That’s what Helen Hays has been doing on Long Island Sound, observing and banding Common and Roseate Terns. She’s out there right now on Great Gull Island, with colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History and a host of dedicated volunteers. So are the terns, back from wintering in Brazil and Argentina.
[Calls of many Common Terns]
Common and Roseate Terns nearly disappeared when plume-hunters slaughtered them for feathers for ladies’ hats. But today, the hat Helen wears protects her from the droppings of more than 20,000 terns that breed on the island.
Here’s Helen:
T100 :56 We’ve marked about 7,000 nests and we haven’t marked all of them and so I think by the end of the season we’ll have about 10,000 …pairs. T100 6:10 … I’m feeling very optimistic and quite enthusiastic!
Roseate Terns, however, are still endangered. [Calls of Roseate Terns] Although the island shelters the largest nesting concentration of Roseates in the western hemisphere, that’s only about 3,000.
Helen knows what they need to survive:
HH T100 1:16 Well, I think they need to have areas where they nest, protected…
In order to have… a noticeable increase… they need more habitat.
So Helen what fires your passion after all this time?!
T 100 6:25 It’s a long time, that’s right! I thought I’d be you know… finished…and knew everything after ten years but we keep having new things happen! … [T100 6:40 And so it gives you quite an incentive to go on!]
[Calls of many Common Terns + Roseate Terns]
You can see photos and learn more at birdnote.org.
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Sounds of terns provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Common Terns 98873 recorded by R.W. Grotke; Roseate Terns 141168 recorded M.G. Harvey.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2011 Tune In to Nature.org July 2011 Narrator: Mary McCann
ID# SotB-COTE-ROST-01-2011-07-18
Chris Peterson
Writer
Mary McCann
NarratorSights & Sounds
