The island of terns
Learning how to kayak at sea and plant of the week
Last weekend, my friend Pete provided me and another birder with kayaks to paddle to a tiny island in Buzzards Bay. Just west of Cape Cod, the bay has suffered from numerous sources of pollution over the years, but it remains a critical habitat for many bird species. It’s also notorious for how its waves quickly become choppy in a stiff breeze—and I had never kayaked under waves of any size before.
Our goal was the tern colony on Ram Island, just 3/4 of a mile south-by-southeast from our put-in point on Mattapoiset Neck. While it’s forbidden to land on the island, people can see the colony from a safe distance by water. We would paddle a loop around the island, getting to see thousands of Common Terns and Roseate Terns—an endangered species with a significant part of its continental population breeding on this one island.
As soon as we set down our kayaks on the sand after carrying them for a half-mile, a Roseate Tern buzzed overhead, as if on cue. I had never seen one so close before. Compared to a Common Tern, its tail feathers were long and elegant—they become shorter over the course of the breeding season—and its bill was black, with just a little reddish-orange at the base. Their long tail feathers were once favored by hat-makers in the late 1800s and early 1900s before widespread hunting became illegal. Roseate Terns have never fully recovered their numbers they lost at that time. I regretted leaving my camera and phone in the car out of fear I’d lose them at sea.
We pushed off into the surprisingly warm water. The waves weren’t bad, perhaps a foot high, with occasional larger peaks. Even at that small size, though, it was best to keep our bows pointed mostly into the surf and not take them on our side. Ram Island lay at an angle to the direction of the waves and wind from the southwest, meaning that we had to balance making progress towards the island on our left, to the southeast, while also battling the waves on our right (I should really say starboard, arrr.) The water was shallow. At one point, I heard a thump. I first thought I had struck a large sea-creature, but realized there are many large rocks just under the surface—fine for a kayak but a disaster for any larger vessels.
Out of paddling practice, I tired quickly after several bouts pushing against the chop. I moved in bursts and took short breaks. I was also drifting off course because of the waves. I paddled quickly in the trough of two waves, risking a broadside hit, to course-correct towards the island. Roseate and Common Terns began passing close by overhead, looking for fish. Their flight was smooth and straight until they used their sharp wings to veer quickly or folded them against their bodies and dove underwater.
Finally, we reached the protective northern lee of the island, where the current was nearly still and the waves were small. We took a much-needed break. Though still a ways off, we could hear the raucous shrieks of the tern colony now, and an increasing number of the birds flew over us on foraging trips. They mainly feed on fish called sand lance. We tried glimpsing the birds sitting on nests through our binoculars, but even in the lee, it was hard to train binoculars on a target while bobbing around. I preferred to just watch with unaided eyes and wait for a bird to pass overhead. The sun sparkled on the waves to the southeast toward Cape Cod.
In the lee of the island.
Once we had rested, we began the most demanding part of the trip, which had to be done without stopping. Though the island is small, our vessels were small, too, making them dependent on the ways that the island shaped the wave action. We paddled around one long tip of the island and suddenly found ourselves out of the island’s lee, facing directly into the waves. The wind had strengthened and the waves rose to perhaps a foot and a half, sometimes a bit larger. Many had white caps or curled and broke unpredictably. This meant there were times I had to stop making progress and focus on carefully riding a wave as it passed under (and sometime over) the bow.
As I struggled, I looked to my left (port) and saw a family of oystercatchers staring serenely out to sea, a comfortable distance from the din of the terns. Oystercatchers are like a cartoonist’s idea of a shorebird, with bright red bills, all-black heads, and white breasts. The two young oystercatchers, scale models of the adults, rose to half their parents’ height.
Having passed the southernmost end of the island, we then had to move with strong waves on our righthand side until we passed another point offering protection. This was the trickiest part of navigation. We hadn’t discussed how we would do it beforehand, but we each ended up making the same move, probably because anything else would have put us upside down. We paddled further out to sea, nearly straight into the waves, because moving laterally would have meant getting broadsided, rolled and swamped. Then, having pushed unsettlingly far into the chop, we turned with the speed only kayaks allow and put our sterns to the waves, which then carried us briskly towards the island, as if surfing.
After our silent, individual struggles with the waves, we found ourselves close together again, sheltered by a small boulder seawall. The terns were everywhere, defecating with some force into the water around us, calling out, and bringing food back to their nests. It seemed to us that there were almost no young terns running around, and that at this early stage in the breeding season, almost all the birds were still sitting on eggs.
While seeing wildlife isn’t difficult for someone who lives in a city in the Northeast (I mean, just yesterday I realized there are wild blackberries growing next to the dumpster out back) seeing the kind of abundance of wildlife found at a place like Ram Island usually requires a trip. About half of the North American population of Roseate Terns breeds on two islands in Buzzards Bay, and 40% of the Massachusetts population (about 2,500 birds) are on Ram Island. They nest alongside 20% of the state population of Common Terns. The two acres of sand and gravel are continentally significant to both species—and particularly to the Roseate Tern, which have just several thousand individuals remaining in North America.
The terns face many threats. There was an oil spill in 2003 that killed many birds. State biologists had to keep other terns from landing on the soiled island using sound cannons while they cleaned it up.
To our left, the terns had sequestered two Great Black-backed Gulls, as big as hawks, on the edge of the island. Gulls love to eat tern eggs, but at least that day the terns were dive-bombing the predators into submission.
Most troublingly, sea level rise and increasing storm frequency with climate change mean that the three northeastern islands with 92% of the North American Roseate Tern population are eroding every year. MA state zoologist Carolyn Mostello has led efforts to monitor and conserve Ram Island’s terns.
Just a few years ago, the state added to the seawall—the structure that protects both our kayaks and the birds’ nests from the waves—and brought more sand and gravel to raise the island’s center. Seaside goldenrod and beachgrass added shelter for the birds and hopefully will aid in erosion control.
I could see the signs of the recent restoration as we bobbed a little way off the island. The soil rose in low terraces, clearly artificial, but on them nested hundreds of terns, each with a nest just a few inches from the next pair.
“These aren’t populations that are self-sustaining,” Mostello told writer Micah Fink in 2018, explaining that the terns need intensive management every summer, or else they would begin to dwindle. Terns are quick to abandon nests if predation pressure is too high, so the state controls numbers of gulls in the area and volunteers place nest protector boards to defend the eggs.
The tiny scale of the island means that the perspective kids use to name the features of a neighborhood park—calling a small hill a mountain and a little wetland a great swamp—has relevance here. Each subtle characteristic of the land means something to potentially hundreds or thousands of terns. It’s that level of attention to detail from conservationists that’s keeping them alive.
Ram Island challenges conventional ideas of wildness. On the one hand, it hosts a density of diving, shrieking terns that would satisfy a producer from the BBC or National Geographic. On the other hand, the terns remain only due to targeted management and careful attention to their needs as conditions change. Not to mention that we weren’t far from the city of New Bedford and some rich people’s houses on an adjacent island. Several fishing boats and small yachts passed near the island while we kayaked. To me, it’s a good illustration of the relationship between wildlife and people in this region: large numbers of humans and large numbers of wild animals in close proximity, sustained by careful monitoring and the conservation actions against threats that could wipe out whole populations in a short amount of time.
With the wind always strengthening, we decided to head back. In a burst, we made another sharp hook out to sea, out of the seawall’s protection, swinging around the eastern edge of the island. We took a short break in its northern lee for our last looks at the tern colony. We got a final whiff of the intense fishy smell of thousands of seabirds huddled together. It wasn’t enticing, but there’s many an urban marsh that stinks worse than those birds.
As we watched, something visible only to the birds spooked them from their nests. While we could see many before, now their true numbers became clear. The sky over the western tip of the island became white with flying, crying terns.
We paddled back to shore. Riding the increasingly larger waves under my stern, I reflected on the intensity of the trip due to my lack of a camera or phone—which I was glad I hadn’t brought, as I had become pretty damp. Those tools offer insurance against missing something interesting. I can always look through my photos later and try to pull out the meaning of what I experienced. But without a device to document what I saw, I felt more of a pull to process what I observed in real time. I began noticing how I was writing the story of the day in my head—not in the sense of overanalyzing, but as a way to remember detail rather than vague impressions.
For practical reasons (documentation of rare wildlife, plant photos, nice pictures to look at!) I can’t forego the camera all the time, but if there was any trip to leave the lens at home, this was it.
Plant of the week: St. John’s Wort
Looking to me like a goldenrod with supersized flowers, St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) is actually not in the sunflower family at all, but in a family of its own called Hypericaceae. They thrive in full sun and thin soil. The plant above was part of a dense colony on the sidewalk. Introduced to North America from Europe, the plant has long had uses in herbal remedies and folk traditions, leading settlers to bring it along for the trip. In the midsummer German festival of St. Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht), people would traditionally place St. John’s Wort over an image of the house to ward off demons.
The species can outcompete many native plants in open habitats, and unlike other invasive species, it’s fairly resilient to fire. Conservation agencies began experimenting with insects that could eat St. John’s Wort, such as the klamathweed beetle, in the 1940s. The approach has had some success, and there are now five approved insect species used for biological control—the so-called “natural enemy” approach. However, the insects haven’t vanquished the species completely, and it continues to spread. If you have a yard affected by St. John’s Wort, your control method can be as simple as giving the flowers one last appreciative look and then pulling the roots out of the ground.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Wampanoag and Narragansett land.