The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  And it is never crazier on Connecticut’s beaches than on the Fourth of July. Before starting my conservation program, I hadn’t thought much about what it means to watch fireworks from the beach on the Fourth. Now, it became the low point of my season. I prayed for a week of rain but rarely got my wish. The nighttime fireworks shows coincided with the time when young least terns and piping plovers are running everywhere in the colonies (and often outside the string fencing). There are still plenty of eggs and young chicks in the nests as well. And there are thousands of people setting up lawn chairs right among them, and deafening explosions overhead for good measure. Tanning, fireworks displays, nude sunbathing: these mindless pleasures are forever tainted with anxiety for a tern and plover warden.

  I checked with each municipality to see when their displays were planned, and I marshaled as many volunteers as I could to come out and help enforce the colony boundaries on the evenings of the fireworks shows. Unaffiliated with any state or federal law enforcement agency, I had not a shred of authority with which to do this. All I had was a fierce desire to protect the birds and the faith that we could do it. I found thirty like-minded souls and called each one to coordinate patrol shifts. I asked them to wear khaki, to attempt to look as official as possible, then bought and distributed toy tin sheriffs’ badges to my volunteers. Each was to bring a flashlight and keep it shining toward the revelers’ faces to distract them from our decidedly unofficial badges, rather small stature, and predominantly feminine gender. We used chairs and string to cordon off access to the nesting areas. “Sir, this section of the beach is closed. Endangered species nesting area. We’re asking people to set up their lawn chairs over there.” It was crazy and occasionally scary, but against all odds it worked.

  After the first year of posting and patrolling, the education push eased up a bit, as people got used to the concept of respecting nesting areas. My volunteer phalanx grew, and one Bridgeport man stood out as a jewel among them. He’d always liked birds but had never had the opportunity to learn much about them or been around bird watchers. After one walk on the beach with me, one cradling of a plover chick in his palm, Tom Damiani latched on to birding and conservation with ferocious focus and endless energy, and within a couple of weeks he was not only patrolling area beaches but censusing the nests for me. I felt as if I had split like a hydra and gained another half, a huge benefit with a job that, day in and day out, pulled me in eight directions at once. Tom went on to be a preserve manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, New York, to become an expert in bird vocalizations, and to make his living in natural history pursuits. Not bad for a wedding singer from Bridgeport who had always loved birds. I smile whenever I think of Tom, all aglow, a piping plover chick in his palm.

  While patrolling, I censused individual colonies, trying to determine the various causes of nest failure and the birds’ rate of success. I’d mark each nest with a numbered tongue depressor and note its contents with every visit. Because I knew when eggs were laid, I knew when to expect young chicks, which remain in the scrape for two days in the case of the semi-altricial least terns, and only a matter of hours for the precocial piping plovers. I learned to watch closely for tracks of mammalian and avian predators, to discern whether an eggshell fragment came from a naturally hatched egg or one that had been broken and eaten. I conducted regular counts of the mobile chicks, trying to determine how many made it to fledging. There was always an element of suspense in a colony visit, for there are few more vulnerable species than ground-nesting terns and plovers.

  A single high tide, reaching a few feet above the wrack line, could devastate an entire colony with overwash. I became alert to the phases of the moon and the timing of the tides. A full-moon tide with an onshore wind could spell disaster. On several occasions, I rolled an old tire to a low-lying tern nest, removed the eggs and seashells lining the scrape and set them aside, filled the tire with sand, smoothed the surface, and made a new nest on the same spot, eight inches higher than the old one.

  While I was working with terns and plovers, a Massachusetts graduate student named Eric Strauss hit upon the idea of erecting small enclosures around each of Cape Cod’s piping plover nests. Stock fencing enclosures with openings large enough for piping plovers to slip through, but too small to admit mammalian predators, proved very effective. A “roof” of monofilament lines barred entry by avian predators as well. Because plovers invariably walk up to their nests, the adults could come and go freely, but gulls and grackles were deterred. At the time, it was an audacious idea, to expend that kind of money and effort on each plover nest, but the species’s plight warranted a drastic approach. In 1986, after three years of steadily climbing plover numbers under my program, Connecticut’s State Department of Environmental Protection began fencing individual plover nests. With a low of fifteen plover pairs in 1983, it was well worth the effort, and fencing individual nests had become common practice along the East Coast by the late 1980s. By the time I gave my program over to state management, in 1987, there were twenty-four nesting pairs in the state. In the summer of 2009, a record forty-one pairs of piping plovers fledged seventy-four young in Connecticut. I can’t imagine where they all fit, but I’m delighted that persistent conservation efforts are paying off, and proud to have started them in Connecticut.

  Walking in the colonies is not for the faint of heart. The fear of stepping on an egg or chick is ever-present. I learned to look carefully at each spot where I intended to plant my foot before moving. I found that amber sunglasses seemed to make the cryptic, speckled eggs jump out at me. Overhead, there was a constant din of screaming least terns, punctuated by spatters of warm fish emulsion. My broad-brimmed hat and faded, paper-thin denim shirt took the brunt of it. A gull feather tucked in the hat brim gave the terns a target for their strafing runs; they try to hit the tallest part of an intruder.

  I often wondered if the piping plovers and least terns knew that I was working for their safety; that, but for my signs and string, they’d be driven over and stomped on. They recognized me, all right, but I’m afraid they recognized me as a major threat. After all, I was the one who breached the colony boundaries, marking nests, counting eggs and chicks, and checking for signs of predation. The birds didn’t know I was working for their good; they knew only that, with my inordinate interest in their eggs and chicks, I was far more obtrusive than the average sun worshiper. Piping plovers would hurry out to escort me the moment they spotted me, leading me safely past their nests with distraction displays, dragging wings and spreading their tails as if suddenly crippled.

  Often, a plover would settle into a depression in the sand just as if it were covering eggs, a distraction behavior called “false brooding.” There was no question in my mind that the plovers and terns focused such defensive measures more on me than on an ordinary passerby. Least terns went out of their way to anoint me with fish emulsion. There was one bird at Griswold Point who learned to hover low under my hat brim and shoot its droppings right into my face. That was the thanks I got. I have to admit I didn’t much like least terns by the end of the third season of being bathed in their excrement.

  Whatever happened in the colony, the sand told the story. I found the double, shuffling lines of striped skunks; the wobbly finger-stars of Virginia opossums; the neat single lines of red foxes and housecats; the bunched foursomes of long-tailed weasel feet. But the track I dreaded most was the large trident of the black-crowned night-heron.

  Menunketesuck Island was a tiny spit of rock, sand, and cast-up bird bones that stretched straight out into Long Island Sound from Madison, Connecticut. I could wade out at low tide but had to work quickly or the water would be thigh-deep or deeper on the return wade. Least terns liked the island for its relative safety from land-based predators; I liked it because, thanks to the intimidating tidal channel between it and the mainland, I could be alone there, which is saying something on the summertime shore.

  I’ll never forget the f
irst nest count on Menunketesuck after a black-crowned night-heron found the thriving colony. The sinister trident tracks wove from nest to nest, and nest after nest simply turned up empty. The herons liked chicks better than eggs, and they struck at peak hatch, taking each chick on the first night of its life. I stayed on the shore one evening, watching, to confirm what I knew was happening. Three black-crowned night-herons came winging in, giving their comical QUOK! call, ready to fill their gullets with tern chicks. The tern colony erupted in pandemonium, the adult birds helpless against the big nocturnal predators, reduced to circling and screaming, leaving eggs and chicks unattended and vulnerable to chilling and predation.

  I knew it is natural for night-herons to eat tern chicks, but something about it just didn’t seem right. Black-crowned night-heron populations were exploding at the time, their colonies radiating northward from a stronghold on Chimon Island off the southwest coast of the state. A single night-heron could eat thirty tern chicks in one walk through the colony and could easily eliminate the entire colony’s reproduction in a season. How could the terns possibly survive such pressure from a long-lived, highly intelligent predator? Would the night-herons simply wipe the terns out? Could I do anything to stop it?

  Thinking about it, I reasoned that eating least tern chicks was something not all night-herons did; it was a habit in a few individuals that lived near colonies. If I could eliminate those birds, the terns might have a fighting chance, at least until the next night-heron keyed in to the rich food resource. I’ve never been comfortable with guns, but I knew an ornithologist who was, and he offered to collect a night-heron under his permit. Staking Menunketesuck out, he managed to shoot one as night was falling. The predation continued unabated, and I knew the other two herons would keep decimating the colony unless I came up with something more effective.

  That something was a poison called Avitrol. As with the “coyote getter” in a collar on a sheep’s neck that shoots poison into the predator’s mouth when bitten, I could target the predator in the act of taking tern chicks. But how to deliver the dose? I emptied and cut a tea bag into tiny sachets, with a pinch of Avitrol in each one. Using thin strips of adhesive tape, I made tiny poison backpacks for a handful of newly hatched least tern chicks who lay at the start of the night route of the marauding herons.

  I felt terrible about it, but I knew the chicks were destined for death in any event. If by chance they didn’t get eaten, I could remove the poison backpacks. The next morning, I found the two night-herons, stiff and cold, lying right in the colony, each just a few steps beyond the place where it had swallowed its first sachet-wearing tern chick. Well, that worked better than expected. The predation stopped, colony life went on. I couldn’t rejoice at causing the death of these two beautiful, ruby-eyed night-herons, though I will admit a grim enjoyment in arriving at the complex strategy by which it was achieved. Seeing the terns settle back on their nests to fledge a few more chicks made my little war seem like a just one.

  Weighing the survival of the vanishing terns against the death of three night-herons with a taste for threatened species, I’d probably do the same thing again, deaf to any charges of “playing God.” These difficult choices face wildlife managers and conservationists wherever endangered seabirds nest. Unless wildlife managers controlled gulls, there would be no Atlantic puffins nesting in the Gulf of Maine. The same goes for the federally endangered roseate terns that nest on Bird Island in Buzzards Bay. Without vigilant gull control, the scarce and delicate terns wouldn’t have a prayer. The estimated ten thousand pairs of common terns and one thousand pairs of roseate terns nesting on Great Gull Island owe their continued success to researchers, ever-vigilant against incursions by nesting gulls and a variety of predators eager to exploit this rich resource.

  And why are there so many gulls? Because our fishing boats, lobster boats, shoreline shopping centers, Dumpsters, landfills, and fast-food joints feed them, encouraging a never-ending population explosion in the voracious predators. There are many who will be appalled at what they view as “playing God,” but the truth is that we humans play God with every burger bun thrown out a car window and every new landfill or strip mall that creates fresh feeding fields for gulls.

  The secondary, and vital, truth is that not all bird species are created equal. A • gull is not a night-heron, is not a tern, is not a puffin. All are birds, but some will simply head for extinction without our help. There are some species—common, roseate, and least terns; black skimmers; piping plovers; American oystercatchers; and Atlantic puffins, to name a few—for which we must fight tooth and claw, and we will always have to fight to count them present on this altered earth. We fight the heedless, the ignorant, the hungry, the nasty. We carve out a place for them on our precious beaches. If you want terns and plovers, you do what you must.

  I miss them so, the little strikers and pale plovers. Every so often as I travel I’ll encounter them, and stop to watch the flashing white wings of a least tern as it streaks over, exulting with shrill calls about the sand lance in its bill. Or I’ll see a pair of piping plovers with a brood of young, blowing like dust bunnies across the hot sand. And it all comes flooding back, the work and the worry of trying to ensure that they had a place to nest.

  I think about the people I knew, the ingenious ways they came up with to protect these birds. I think about having nothing else to worry about but the nesting success of “my” precious terns and plovers, how they would fare in the next full-moon tide. They were my only dependents then. I remember walking the flesh off my bones, 118 pounds of sheer determination, my hip joints loose and aching from trudging in deep sand. And I am thankful for those young women—and they are almost all women—who have come after me, who care enough to make sure I will always be able to see a least tern, wings flashing in the bright, bright sky, to hear the mellow note of a piping plover as it settles on porcelain eggs in the sand.

  AUTUMNAL REFLECTIONS

  Pondering the Imponderable

  The Strange Case of the Companionable Grouse

  I NEVER TOOK THEM for granted, even when they were here, and I encountered at least one on every hike. The sudden kerfuffle, the heavy-bodied bird crashing through the underbrush like a barely guided missile. Grouse was one of my daughter, Phoebe’s first words, coming soon after da and ma. Still small enough to be stuffed into a backpack carrier, she rode along on my afternoon hikes on the days when she wouldn’t nap. I carried a pocket mirror to look at her, sneaking peeks at her pink cheeks, checking to see that her hat and pacifier were still in place. I could tell the moment she fell asleep; I could feel her body suddenly relax into the sweet heaviness of a dream. Thinking back, I was happiest when I could hike and bring her along. It was as if I were stealing an hour for myself and sharing it at the same time. It was a sad day when the backpack started to pinch her chunky thighs, and she squirmed and braced her feet on my spine in her discomfort. I’d have carried her forever.

  On this January day, Phoebe was still awake as we picked our careful way down the muddy slope I call the Chute. Falling flat on my back, as I’ve done so many times here, would be contraindicated with my sweet backpack cargo to consider. There was usually a grouse on this slope in the late 1990s, sometimes two. I’m sure he heard us coming for quite a while, but in grouse style, he waited to take wing until we were right on top of him. BBBBRRRRRRRRRPPPPPTTH!!

  Phoebe jumped in surprise and whipped her head around to look.

  “A grouse! That was a grouse, honey!”

  Brief pause.

  “Gouse!”

  A huge, wet, not very toothy smile in the pocket mirror. My baby girl said “grouse!”

  She’s a lanky fifteen as I write, this limber, redheaded elf, and she loves to be told about her first encounter with a ruffed grouse. In the time it has taken to stretch my chubby baby into a graceful filly, ruffed grouse have vanished from our eighty-acre sanctuary. I don’t know what happened, if the cause is any one thing or a combination. Perhaps the
young brush has grown up too tall for their liking. The sumac, which made a vibrant, thick, fruit-heavy border on every path and meadow, is old, tall, and spindly now, fruiting sparsely. The flocks of hermit thrushes that used to winter here are gone, too, gone someplace with younger sumac and more smilax. Wild turkeys have moved in, aided by Ohio Division of Wildlife transplants and their own awe-inducing fecundity. The woods are laced with their meandering clearances, foot-wide traces scratched clean of litter. Other grouse limiters: coyotes have moved in, jiggling me awake with their high Martian chorus of weird yips and trills. The red and gray foxes I so loved to watch when we first moved here have vanished, most likely thanks to the depredations of their big, mean cousins. Great horned owls have come in this time, too, thinning our screech- and barred owls. Raccoons and opossums are as numerous as ever; perhaps more so thanks to our bird-feeding efforts. There are many reasons the grouse might be gone.

  We no longer thrill to the low whump-whump-whump—brrrrrrrrrrrrrrp of drumming males in spring. The males’ whirring wings no longer beat out a love tattoo; the fallen logs they used for song perches have gone to moss and mushroom now. This low-frequency sound rolled through our spring woods, setting up a thrumming in my breastbone, thrilling me to alertness before I even heard it.