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Taking a Census That Means Facing Ten Thousand Angry Birds

What do 10 thousand angry birds sound like? I recently learned the answer in Chatham. On Friday I helped the biologists at Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge conduct the annual census of their huge Common Tern colony on the south island.

A dozen of us swept through the colony over the course of many hours, carefully counting nests as we went. Nesters included mainly Common Terns, but also a handful of federally Endangered Roseate Terns, elegant in their long white tails and slender black bills. A couple of thousand nesting Laughing Gulls rounded out the welcome committee.

The gulls may have sounded like they were laughing, but they were not amused. The terns and gulls express their displeasure in a few ways – screaming at you, trying to kill you with their dagger sharp bills, and also pooping on you with smart-bomb accuracy. To say we felt unwelcome would be like saying that someone who’d been hit by a tidal wave felt “damp.” Bad puns helped us get through the grueling day, such when I asked a guano covered colleague if they needed a rest, because they looked “pooped.” Maybe you had to be there.

Refuge biologist Kate Iaquinto has been there and done that. Amidst this incredible cacophony, the Hitchcockian chaos of thousands of birds who wanted us dead, Kate coolly recorded the nests as we shuffled along and shouted out counts of eggs and chicks, many of which were hatching at our feet. Birds sometimes landed on her backpack looking for some exposed skin to peck between her hard hat and her jacket, but she barely seemed to notice. The census is intense and nerve-wracking, but absolutely necessary to evaluate the health of this colony, which is of international importance.

In 2015, Monomoy supported more than 9000 pairs of Common Terns, making it by far the largest colony in New England and the second largest in the western hemisphere. Add the 1400 pairs of Laughing Gulls, 600 pairs of Least Terns, 45 pairs of Piping Plovers, and 17 pairs of American Oystercatchers, and you can see how ridiculously important the refuge is for nesting seabirds and shorebirds. The refuge also supports the only significant wading bird colony left on Cape Cod, with 145 Black-crowned Night-Heron, 75 Snowy Egret and 11 Great Egret nests tallied in 2015.

But it’s about more than big numbers – for a colony to be successful, the birds need to be fledging chicks. And this colony is very successful. Biologists carefully monitor the productivity of subsets of the pairs using observation blinds, and on average they are fledging 1.5 chicks per pair, which is excellent for a species that can breed for 25 years. This high productivity is fueled by the abundance of bait fish, mainly sand lance, in the surrounding waters. Given that this huge, successful colony is on the very same beach hosting the tens of thousands of breeding, resting, and feeding gray seals, seals that eat the same bait fish as the terns, all the loose talk about the seals “eating all the fish” does not seem to hold up. In fact, the waters around Chatham are chock full of other wildlife that depend on this same baitfish resource, like the humpback whales, trophy striped bass, and swarms of shearwaters and other seabirds you can see there all summer long.

But someone still needs to count all of those nesting terns. So if you crave chaos, and don’t mind being pecked and pooped on, Monomoy has a volunteer gig you just might be interested in.

Mark Faherty writes the Weekly Bird Report.