birdsong summer

the sky and i

The sky has always seemed like an ethereal Otherworld to me, even in my glassily distorted, kaleidoscope eyes of childhood. There was something wholly magical in the intangibility of the clouds and the seeping watercolor strokes of the dusk and dawn. I just wanted to fly, more than anything. To know what it would feel like to have the wind beneath me, weightless, and be surrounded by light—it sounded like the most beautiful dream I could possibly imagine.

By twenty, I was handed a tether to my fantasies when a professor at my college, Tasha, hired me to edit an online ecology textbook and later asked me to consider joining her for her summer research on the pocket-sized coastal island in Maine, Petit Manan, to study seabirds. Despite my obsession with wanting to be a bird, my studies and hobbies had diverted me to just about every topic besides birds and a dozen words defining my insecurities were instantly etched into my stomach lining. But she showed me pictures of the island and the birds, and I felt that familiar hand of gravity reaching out to my heart. I quickly realized that I couldn’t pass this opportunity up—I was going to Maine.

DAY ONE

On the big day, thirteen hours of driving brought me from Pennsylvania to Maine with my peers, Logan and Jocie. I’d had classes with both of them before, but spending so much unsupervised and uninterrupted time with them had me beaming; I had never realized the full extent of how weird and wonderful they both were. In Milbridge, Maine, we packed all of our equipment onto a US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) boat that looked like something out of one of my father’s terrible—wonderful—1980s fantasy films: silver chrome and positively groaning with the aura of its attitude. Forty-five minutes on the water and my first seal sighting ever brought us to the shore of Petit Manan Island. The racing of my heart thudding away in my chest mirrored the chugging of the boat’s engine as we stepped onto the boat ramp and my home for the next two months. We were greeted by our other team members, Devin and Amanda, looking like they had lived on this island forever, welcoming me with an overwhelming amount of kindness and charisma (though it may just have been that they were thrilled to get the boxes of Cheez-Its and Oreos for them on the boat).

Walking the boardwalk to the house, a swarm of terns greeted me with celebratory, or possibly livid, calls back and forth above our heads. The terns on this island are both experts and deeply committed players of a game of “Invasion,” exerting endless amounts of energy to ensure that their territory is protected by their skillfully aimed pooping, head smashing, and ear-piercing screeches. Awe-inspiringly intimidating, their graceful and ceaseless forms dominate the presence of the island even more than the looming lighthouse. Not one much to keep my heart to myself, I fell in love at first sight. 

Though I had been warned heartily about the fear that would come with the newness of the experience—the stomach-dropping, throat-rising sensations I know well never seemed to come. I met the first night with a sigh of relief instead, feeling perfect and perfect and perfect.  

The vantage point from our lighthouse the next morning–one hundred thirty rusty, uneven, and intricately melded steps up–I could survey the entire island and surrounding ocean. Looking out over the water, Cadillac Mountain and Bois Bubert Island stare at each other like grief-stricken, star-crossed lovers kept apart by Milbridge. Hundreds of birds loaf in the waves, drifting leisurely in multispecies diasporas. From so high up in the air, the world stretched open like an endless accordion, as though nothing but the sun, the sky, and birds existed anymore when looking out from the vantage point of that tiny speck of earth. In the fog, too, the island feels like an oasis in the desert, isolated to the point of invisibility. Living here makes it seem like it is the rest of the world that has become invisible, or simply gone, while Petit Manan remains an immovable rock protruding from the surface of its tectonic plate. 

BEARINGS

THE ORder of us:

1. Active predator control—always be on the lookout for peregrine falcons and laughing gulls who nest on the outskirts of the island and who try to eat adult terns and tern eggs, respectively; when seen, attempt to scare them away by yelling and the utilization of loud noises 

2. Let the birds be—disturb the colonies the absolute least amount possible to let the birds incubate their eggs/chicks and forage as normal; energy use is always a trade-off decision, and we want the birds to put their energy towards successful reproduction rather than escaping and defending their nests from scary humans 

3. Research and data—  

a. What are the population status and demographic rates of the species? 

i. productivity (number of nests/burrows and number of eggs, success rates of hatching and fledging, sizes of chicks and adults); attaching and resighting lifetime bands with serial identification numbers; total species counts twice per day 

b. What are birds eating and where? 

i. provisioning (feeding rates, food choices, linear growth rates) and isotope analysis (eggshell membranes, fecal samples, feathers, blood samples); attaching GPS tags powered by solar panels (sent to US Fish & Wildlife to inform spatial management of offshore windfarm development) 

c. How are disturbances changing and impacting populations? 

i. photo points, boat log, and weather tracking to monitor vegetation, people, and environmental impacts 

 (Some) Bird Species on Petit Manan Island (PMI): Atlantic puffins, black guillemots, razorbills, Arctic terns, common terns, common murres, common eiders, Leach’s storm petrels, sparrows, spotted and least sandpipers, double-crested cormorants, great-black-backed and herring gulls, among other visitors.

birders on pmi:

1. AMANDA MCFARLAND, SUPERVISOR 

   a. Amanda left adolescence behind believing she would be an artist, until burnout forced her to pivot toward the University of Maine, Orono (UMO). A woman strongly guided by her gut, she followed her instincts to biology and an internship with the USFWS. Before she could begin, COVID knocked the crew of her summer down from four to two, leaving her and the other intern with only a single day of training. Still, they managed, and she came out of the other side of the summer with the feeling of her own capability beneath her feet and the knowledge that her dream of research was more than attainable. Her following second and third summer seasons were spent with Project Puffin, where she found community in the seabirding world and worked with some of the most dedicated birders of our time. By her fourth season, Amanda was ready to return to Petit Manan in the role of supervisor, extended into this year by a returning crew, plus myself.  

   b. Amanda’s been drawn back to these projects so repeatedly for the unique experience of island living and for how impactful the job feels for the birds. After so many years, she’s become one with the colony, discovering new news each year and feeling their ups and downs. Though the highs are high, she finds the lows to be particularly important and valuable because seeing the full results of bad human decisions on nonhumans conveys a different and heavy type of hardship.  

   c. At only 23, Amanda is one of the most capable people I have ever met. Her art is gorgeous and her energy is an impenetrable foundation for the island to depend on. She has an answer for every question I can ask, like the histories of the birds are engraved into the sky of her mind. I hope my hands will be as steady and sure as hers one day, my demeanor as dignified and unmovable, my heart as dedicated to a mission as she. 

2. TECHNICIAN, DEVIN LEAL 

   a. Devin, though likely not one to call themself a worldly person, is tough to pin to one place and one life. Living mostly in Portland, Oregon, they earned a degree from Oregon State and followed a number of different fieldwork jobs to various sights and species, from sharks in the Bahamas to murrelets in familiar Oregon. Finding Maine Coastal Islands by word of mouth and Oregon State, she joined Amanda on Petit Manan Island last season. Though the 2023 season was a rough one, it was enough to bring them back again this year for a second round.  

   b. Devin’s favorite part of this job is the living of it, becoming a creature in a land of animality, sky, and water. They love the smallness of the project and to feel so apart of the colony. Exempted from driving and spending time trapped indoors, this island is meant for Devin’s need to live outside of America’s cold, fast capitalist world, and Devin is meant for it, too. With a soft spot for Leach’s storm petrels, Devin positively melts to see, hold, and explain the birds here.  

   c. Devin exudes kindness in a very quiet and implicit way, making a perfect awareness of the world seem only natural. She makes our house a home, and I get the feeling that they tend to make a home out of every house they live in. She handles twists and tensions with grace and laces humility into everything they do. I’ve been incredibly grateful for Devin’s consistency, both professionally and personally. My fingers and toes are crossed that some of their ability to create interpersonal comfortability has rubbed off on me in our time on the island together.  

3. MARINE ECOLOGY PROFESSOR, DR. TASHA GOWNARIS 

   a. Tasha knew what she wanted by nine years old, the certainty of marine biology arising from nothing other than the gut guidance of passion and a love for the non-human. Despite working with a career-ruining advisor in her post-doctoral research, Tasha fell in love with seabirds after spending years handling and interacting with penguins. The seabird community, however, is small, close-knit, and difficult to enter into. In her early years as a professor, Tasha attended a conference with the hopes of meeting people who might be able to connect her with ways to begin her own research on seabirds. Despite the first few days of the conference turning out rough, she happened to ask USFWS lead biologist Linda Welch to share a meal by sheer luck. Their conversation led to a friendship which has since resulted in four years of collaborative research on PMI, hopefully with many more in store for the pair. 

   b. Though Tasha first visited the island expecting to favor the charismatic puffins, the majority of her research ended up revolving around the terns. In her repeated exposures to the skittish and plucky species, she came to appreciate their beauty and nature at a deeper level. Field work is difficult on the mind and body in many ways, but Tasha holds a devotion to serving and understanding these birds in an unbreakable and spirited way.  

   c. Tasha is unlike any other professor I have had, for her willingness to express herself as she is and as she means, for her unbounded excitement, and for her endless and obvious empathy. The island acts as an ignition for many of her greatest anxieties, most notably, for her fear of negatively impacting the birds. Still, her cautiousness leads her to carry her research with the utmost respect and to give her knowledge constantly to those around her. Her mentorship is a gift I stumbled upon, but one I shall never take for granted. 

4. LOGAN BECKER 

   a. From rural Pennsylvania, Logan has lived closely with nature all his life. He has owned a myriad of fish, plants, birds, dogs, and horses in his childhood and young adulthood, navigating early on how to care for other living things. The aesthetic and responsibility of professorship, combined with the enticement of research appealed to the image he wanted for a future. Even without knowing this end goal, Logan’s natural state is to excel with precision, personally, academically, and extra-curricularly. Tasha hired him in his first year to care for the department’s aquarium tanks, which garnered him access to her lab and later to the opportunity to come to PMI. He is still working on finding his upcoming PhD program, but hopes to continue working in marine environments like those he has spent his undergraduate years working with Tasha on. 

   b. Logan is obsessed with the puffins on the island, left arm tattooed with their likeness to greet the birds each time his long arm reaches into the burrows. The crew considered him to be the grubbing (reaching into long, narrow burrows to gain access to adult puffins and their chicks) master for his height and more importantly, for his willingness to be bitten, scratched, scraped, contorted, and generally abused by the struggle to get access to the birds. 

   c. I have never met anyone more responsible and consistent than Logan, his focus and drive unmatched by nearly everyone except Tasha. He has a seemingly easy time of establishing the boundaries he needs to succeed and is a never-ending vat of hilarious and odd stories about crazy family members. I know that I’ll see his name on some weird and exciting discoveries in twenty years, and that he will provide his future students with the calmness, consistency, and wisdom to find themselves. 

5. JOCIE LITTLE 

   a. Jocie fell into the project in a manner similar to me, applying to her advisor’s (Tasha) XSIG opening for the summer after her first year at Gettysburg College due to an interest in the project description.

   b. Her senior Honors thesis is focused on phenology changes of black guillemots, her favorite of the birds on the island. She is supremely in love with the species and took time out of our schedule to add additional pieces of data to all that we collect in order to establish a more complete understanding of the colony for her own research and for the USFWS. 

   c. Jocie is unsure of her next steps as she has been prioritizing her family through medical issues for the past few years and will be continuing to do so. Her tenacious spirit and joy are seemingly unconquerable, despite the difficulties she’s been helping her parents carry and her capabilities are always unwavering. Jocie exudes kindness and her support helped bring me through the stumbles of the summer. I admire her endlessly for the incomparable light that her personality shares with everyone around her, for her gorgeous singing voice, and for her genuineness. 

6. AND yours, truly 

   a. Razorbills became my favorite on the island, for their striking dignity, beak stripe and neon yellow mouth coloring, and general beauty. I owe this crew and island a huge debt of gratitude for the person that they have made me, post-PMI. 

The living

Arctic terns are considered threatened in Maine and only make up 35% of the total tern population on our island, while common terns, much bigger and meaner, own the rest of the colony. Both species, though usually weighing between 95-140 grams, somehow manage to travel thousands of miles every year to the Arctic and Brazil for the winter seasons. While the other species do not stray as far from the island during the off-season, all leave by the time autumn blows in to escape the winter storms. The vegetation on the island gets a complete reset each year in planned burns to maintain the consistency of the habitat for the species.  

Birds are particularly loyal creatures, maintaining breeding and natal fidelity by returning to their birthplace to nest, despite the extensive journeys that such devotion requires of them. Unfortunately for our birds, the Gulf of Maine is warming more than three times faster than nearly anywhere else on the planet because the Atlantic continually dumps warm water here in the endless and apathetic movement of the ocean’s circulation pattern. This warming means that (1) more dangerous and intensive storms hit the region more often and for a longer period of the year, and (2) the most nutritious fish in the area (hake and herring, for the terns and puffins) move farther offshore, seeking the comfort of colder temperatures that inland waters no longer provide. In order to have increased access to the fish, some of the birds have begun returning to PMI sooner, breeding sooner, and hatching their eggs sooner. Although their adaptation is a promising sign of their ability to continue their natural reproduction cycle despite external pressures, not all of the birds are adjusting their behavior at the same rate or even at all. For the ones who are, their early arrival to the island puts them at risk of higher exposure to storms, which destroyed nearly all of the puffin and black guillemot burrows on the island this past winter. For the ones who aren’t, their slower reaction time requires them to forage as far as 105 kilometers farther than is comfortable to find fish, or chance feeding their chicks and selves far less nutritional diets of invertebrates.  

The first time I held an adult tern, I was astonished at the fragility of their forms. Beneath my fingers, I could feel every rib, every bone in their wings, their racing heartbeat. For the resilience and substantial energy these creatures have to exert to survive, they are remarkably delicate. While I didn’t handle any puffins or guillemots until later into the season, the terns had severely undercut my expectations of the other species’ strength. Terns are definitely the quickest and most responsive in their aggressions, but puffins and guillemots are larger and hardier, requiring a great deal more confidence and surety in one’s hands to keep the bird secure and safe. Adult puffins, with large hooked bills and sharp claws, have a mean bite when handled incorrectly. Sticking our hands blindly into the puffin and guillemot burrows to find the birds was one of the most nerve-wracking tasks on the island.  

Sprinting slower than any short-distance sprinter I picked my way through the vegetation to the first bird, a tern, I trapped. Placing a hand over its eyes, the darkness called the bird to a state of semi-sanity, allowing me to place the bird in a bander’s grip: index and middle finger around its neck to protect its head and grip its chest, holding its wings and legs relaxed against its body. Hurdle number three of a trapped bird is the ticking timer, as every second spent in my hands is a second this bird feels like it has been abducted by aliens, terrified of the experiments to come and the unknown outcome of their fate. Trying to run-walk as quickly as possible without jostling the heartbeat held securely on my sleeve, I made it to the rain shed.  

Dim and quiet, the adrenaline coursing through my body had yet to catch up with my new setting. Holding the bird on my lap, I attached lifetime serial identification bands the size of my littlest fingernail to the tern’s left tarsus using pliers that have the strength to break this baby’s legs, then measured its wing-chord with the ruler and maneuvered him into a Pringles can, tared on the scale for the mass measurement.  

Finished with processing and data collection, I rearranged the feisty little creature into a stable grip and stepped back into the honey-amber warmth of sunlight. Tossing my arms up to the sky, I became an extension of the bird, its wings extending out from its measured 275 millimeters to include my chipped, periwinkle-painted fingernails, my ink-stained forearms, and tern-shit-covered shoulder. My heart leaped with the adrenaline of our momentum and the wings slipped out from beneath my fingers, smooth and invisible like disappearing water. It shook itself off in the air and circled back above my head, screeching to let the world know that it had not allowed itself to evaporate so soon. 

We repeat this process dozens more times for the terns and, later the puffins, through the season, though with the added step of attaching solar-powered GPS tags for eighteen of the terns. Tasha attached each of the tags to the terns heavy enough to bear the extra three grams of technology on their backs, appearing calm as she worked but checking multiple times with each bird for confirmation of placement, tightness, solar panel visibility, and processing time. If the tagging took too long, or the bird was too light, or the tag was too loose, or the solar panel was covered with feathers, or if we just picked a bird slightly too skittish, we risked chick abandonment, decreased foraging abilities, or data loss.  

Because only eighteen out of more than two thousand terns were tagged, the burden that the small sample bears to provide data about the behavior of the rest of the colony is overwhelming. Similarly, only five puffins were tagged due to the limited amount of time adults spend in their burrows, the size of their colony, and the noticeably slow growth of their chicks this year. Though the sample sizes may make the data seem pointless to the non-bird-researcher, this project has been in development for years across multiple islands, with the potential to protect the rest of untagged populations from harmful placement of offshore wind farms, and edify research and conservation efforts on the success of prey switching versus preferred prey in the face of climate change for other species experiencing similar condition changes.  

American conservation has had a rocky history speckled with moments and advocates of racism and speciesism, defined and informed by its origins in colonialist thinking. Still, the future of conservation has been expanding at massive heights and speeds. Human beings have known since the beginning of free thinking that our existence in the larger universe is miniscule, irrelevant, and often a fruitlessly meaningless question to ponder in the first place. Our creations of stories, in the form of mythology and religion, science fiction, and conspiracy, are comforts to our fragile egos; but still, those with the intense commitment to our “perfection” as a divination by God are often those same individuals who refuse to see the power of our free will on Earth. With our planet as a closed system, people feel our size in comparison to the magnitude of stars to be nonsensical, but our actions are amplified through our system with every alteration to our finite resources echoing and rippling out though all the interconnected and interdependent species and systems around us. We are barely babies in the face of the age of the Earth, but a lot can change in the span of an eighty-year lifetime, particularly with the exponential effects of each individual’s trillions of choices throughout that lifetime expounded by the wide-reaching scale of corporate industrialization. What I mean to say is that (1) the scientific concept and study discipline of climate change conclude it to be an entirely anthropogenically-caused crisis, with the top culprits of environmental degradation and feedback loop meddling being (worldwide, in order) fossil fuel burning for energy, heat, and material consumption; water, land, and air pollution from commercial agriculture; and air pollution from mining and transportation combustion; (2) humans cannot make or break the Earth, as it has been here long before us and will be here long after us; (3) as a species differentiated from others and praised for our skill of empathy, we have a civic duty and obligation to care for our home and the biotic and abiotic entities we share it with, especially when their struggles are direct results of our own actions; (4) as a species who has survived by adapting ruthlessly, selfishly, and ingeniously, we owe our ancestors, our future generations, and ourselves the opportunity to make the best world possible out of the mistakes that have already been made.  

Thus, conservation, rather than as a method to keep pockets of space as time capsules of the world before our degradation, should and is becoming a method for us to repent, absolve, and innovate for the better of the world. Tasha's personal philosophy when working with these birds is “the least harm for the most good,” a utilitarian thought process written extensively on by environmental writer Gifford Pinchot, who famously said, “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” While Pinchot’s statement is sometimes taken as a “means to justify the ends” sentiment, Tasha’s ideological view of conservation and research attempts to balance the impact people are having in the immediate present with the impacts humans may have on these bird species in the future. At every step of every process, her mind is wholly consumed with the constant struggle between minimizing the stress our data collection places on the birds’ shoulders and maximizing the amount and quality of data collected to guide conservation knowledge and energies towards more effective efforts. 

When preparing me for the trip, Tasha had made the vitality of careful data collection and processing explicitly clear. Our small lab at Gettysburg is not capable of performing the stable isotope analysis she needs on the blood, plasma, egg membrane, fish, and invertebrate samples we bring back from the field, requiring her to outsource the processing to another lab. The one she had previously been working with lost nearly two field seasons worth of data by refrigerating rather than freezing, and from running hundreds of samples through a faulty machine. Such hasty handling resulted in setting any long-term trend analysis back by years and causing her to take on a heavy anchor of guilt. Without any data to show for her work, she felt as though all the birds she had bled and handled had been bothered for no reason, making the sacrifice of their time, blood, and perceived safety seem worthless. While I feel that Tasha's attempts to research these creatures could never be worthless, the data loss marks an overwhelmingly critical reminder that conservation and research have to be preserving the interests and wellbeing of the current world along with the future ones. 

As the least experienced member on the team, I felt particularly desperate to not decrease the quality of our data. This apprehension proved especially mountainous for our provisioning stints, where we watched a few nests for three-hour time slots each morning to observe the feeding rates and feeding options that adults were bringing back to their chicks. Trying to maintain a high level of focus and reactivity for three hours where the adults were feeding intermittently and within the space of a few seconds made the task seem impossible at first, but, as with all things, one learns. By my last stint, I could breathe in the joy of the job: enveloped by the fog to become part of the clouds with dew drops collecting in my hair, millions of grass stems rippling like feelers of a giant singular organism–Petit Manan, herself. 

Provisioning stints and productivity checks became our most consistent tasks on the island by the middle of the season, quickly feeling like routine but never quite the same. In our first week on the island, we built eleven productivity plots, jokingly compared to baby playpens (making us “glorified bird babysitters”) built out of gardening mesh and metal stakes. Each of the plots were endearingly named after songs or musical artists, and between the productivity and provisioning plots, we closely monitored the linear growth, hatching and fledging rates, and banding of chicks in nearly seventy nests. By the end of the first week, we had a full count of the terns on the island, finding a total of 1,072 tern pairs (2,144 breeding terns); I had held and banded my first adult common and Arctic terns; and seen my first pipping (hatching) eggs. The terns never ceased their swarming and covered my scalp with scabs before long, but we liked to tell them how proud we were of their committed parenting style this season.  

Once chicks began to hatch, our daily tern productivity checks and weekly puffin and guillemot productivity checks became longer (and more exciting) than simply counting eggs. Inside the greenery, the tern yellowish-blonde and brown speckled tufts sat docile, and I recall placing the first chick in the palm of my hand. Its down was so soft that my fingertips could barely register the sensation and he blinked up at me, annoyed that I’d stolen him from his warm bed of grass without rewarding him with food. The smallest chirp was audible beneath the screams of their parents above us when we were banding, and I looked into this miniscule creature’s eyes, solid obsidian and gazing unblinkingly back. In the air and the stare that we shared, I knew and was known.