Monday, June 27

This is a bit out of order, I know, but I'll try and rectify it later. Last Monday and Tuesday were some interesting days. Monday, we awoke at 4:00 am, drove over to Oregon Inlet fishing boat launch station, and set off with the coast guard in a small skiff over to a small sandbank island off the outer banks unoccupied by humans (they're not allowed, it's part of a refuge) but instead by thousands upon thousands of terns, gulls, and pelicans. The island was a major nesting spot for several species of birds, including royal terns and sandwich terns, at this time their fledgling chicks are just under their ability to fly, they nest in the sandy banks in the middle of the island and the "teenage" fledglings congregate in the tens of thousands waiting around for their parents to deliver fish and for themselves to grow into their own comically awkward, floppy wings.

We arrived on the skiff a few feet from the shore and waded over to the shoreline carrying large rolls of chicken wire and other supplies, and climbed up a steep bank (with some of it almost collapsing on us) over to the island. The first thing we noticed was that there is nothing on this island but a cusston of birds, coming in thousands took to the sky to greet us with a deafening cacophany of squawking and honking and beeping and shrieking, and that was the background ambience we heard for the rest of the day. John the biologist leading us came prepared with earplugs, that might have come in handy had we any idea. They were loud and constant. Trudging our way up to the main nesting areas, we watched our step for eggs and noticed the outlay, and looked for a place to set up our capture pen. John picked up and let us hold our first baby terns of the day, and that was a very novel, moving experience and photo opportunity at first. Little did we know we were about to pick up and hold thousands of terns in the next few hours. We set up the stakes and chicken wire and made a nice large round pen in an open flat sandy area, with an opening at one end with walls that tapered into the enclosure. Now it was time to herd the birds. We flanked them from the right and left and like tiny soldiers they all very cooperatively marched in one mass straight where we led them over to the opening of the pen, and they all went inside it. We closed in the pen and there they waited. A seperate smaller walled in section was made at one end of the inside of the pen and we coralled parts of the "herd" into it, then were given bands and special pliers designed for bird banding, and went to work. We picked up tern after tern after tern after tern and banded them, tolerating their pinching beaks and squawking and scratching, (none of it was bad enough to break the skin) and let them go. But sadly, at first after just letting them go, they wandered around alone and seagulls waited right on the outskirts of our operation and began to attack them. One was killed. I was very saddened by this. We stopped doing that and instead put them together in a temporary holding pen after banding them and released them together in larger groups once were done with them, and these groups stuck together pretty well and didn't get attacked. The terns were very cute as far as baby birds go, their leg color varied from bright orange to dark grey and some were mottled, as did their beaks, and they didn't yet have the trademark black feathers atop the white head as the adults, but were more a sandy greyish white with dark grey streaks here and there. We were also taught how to distinguish the royal terns from the sandwich terns, the two species were mixed together as fledgelings and their differences were very subtle. Sandwich terns were just slightly smaller and lighter colored in the beaks and feathers than the royal, their legs slimmer and daintier. We separated them to be banded with smaller fitting bands by another intern sitting in an adjacent pen. It was a very enriching and captivating experience getting to know terns on such a personal and interactive level, but I did sort of dislike the stress it appeared to cause them. I hate to think that perhaps all banded birds have some traumatic memory from their fledgeling days of being trapped and manhandled by humans, with a shackle around their leg to forever remind them of us. After finishing banding them and watching their groups all join back together, back to their mothers, who had been waiting around nearby squawking angrily at us for the past five hours, I reflected on the fact that we do so many wierd things in our quest to both save, understand and control every aspect of life on earth, and how wierd it is that we mark and tag a large percentage of earth's wild avian organisms after birth, almost as if they're just more farm animals. The first experience of holding a tern was magical, by the 300th tern I had banded, I started to feel like I was working on a poultry farm. But by the end of the day the terns were all (save for one) allright, resettling back in their vast herd in the sands where we first found them, now all of them bearing free complimentary bling on their right ankles, and we picked up our stuff and skittered back to shore in our storage bin-sized skiff, having had an amazing and unique experience. And we smelled like shit, because we were covered in it.