Home Amongst Herring Gulls
This uninhabited island is not so uninhabited. Penikese Island sits at the edge of the chain of Elizabeth Islands scattered off the coast of Massachusetts. On clear nights you can see New Bedford twinkling in the north, the blinking red lights of offshore wind farms in the south, and the Tarpaulin Cove Lighthouse casting its white beam across the water every six seconds with the precision of a metronome. But on foggy days, the mist socks in the island with such totality that you can’t even see the other end of the island out the kitchen window. On these days, when the fog presses in, the only presence you feel is the sea all around you, as salt in the air and the sound of relentless crashing against the rocky shore. On these days, you feel like the island is a ship permanently moored alone in the ocean. On these days, you feel the past lives of Penikese.
This little island holds stories. Glacial erratics, towering and isolated boulders of granite, tell of the last ice age, when the Laurentide ice sheet melted away, leaving behind its stone cargo. Waves of grasses whisper to themselves about the herds of sheep brought to pasture here that turned forest into grassland. Stone cisterns tucked into the hillside, lined with rope and honeysuckle, echo with the teachings of the Anderson School of Natural History. The 1800s field school was run by scientific giant Louis Agassiz who taught his pupils to “study nature not books.” Penikese graduate Dr. Cornelia Clapp earned the first and second doctoral degrees in biology awarded to women in the States. The Natural History School closed but its spirit lives on through 150 years of active botanical surveys.
A harsher story is held in the stones marking ruins and graves. From 1905-1921, Penikese became a leprosarium, to treat and isolate people with leprosy (Hansen’s disease), cast out from the mainland by fear of contagion. As their bodies deteriorated, the patients, primarily immigrants, reckoned with their isolated fate on this windswept island. The rubble that remains outlines the living quarters, a makeshift library, and a laundry house. 14 gravestones mark 14 patients buried in the island’s cemetery. Every spring, daffodils push up from the ground beside the women’s quarters, yellow dots of hope that remember how the doctor’s wife Marion Parker strove to provide comfort and cheer to dying patients amidst the biting harshness of seaspray and desolation.
The island undertook a new role from 1973 to 2011 as a rehabilitation school for boys with a delinquent record, aiming to find reform in the harsh and honest life on Penikese. From a leprosarium to a reform school, Penikese was a place of exile and refuge for those who don’t have a space in mainland society. When the island came under the control of Massachusetts Fisheries & Wildlife, they designated it as a protected space for the endangered Roseate Tern. Penikese was protected for terns but seagulls carved a space for themselves, and more importantly, their nests. Black-backed and Herring Gulls, considered noisy and thieving pests just across the bay, found a refuge where they could be nurturing mothers, growing adolescents, and assertive ambassadors.
I came to Penikese to teach at the sleepaway Nature and Science Camp for Girls. As I told each week’s cohort of campers: this island is owned by the state of Massachusetts, but, really, it belongs to the birds.
Hatchlings
Every place you could put a bird, there was a gull. They sat on nests tucked against every stone, yelled from atop to the roof, confronted you on the paths, wings outstretched. Not ones for subtlety, they threw their heads back to squawk with their whole body.
Peeking out from behind these full-body squawkers were their hatchlings, chirping through tiny closed beaks. Their round bodies were balanced on toothpicks of legs and swaddled in dappled downy feathers. The stumbled over their own webbed feet into the long grasses where the mother had hidden their nests. The grasses became a labyrinth of gull-trodden paths.
Despite a fierce sense of protectiveness of their space, the gulls certainly had no problem getting into your space. They blurred the boundaries between kept and wild land, embedding their homes amongst ours, in the crevices of the rock wall and between flowers in the garden.
And so, I learned to enmesh my life into theirs. After several sleepless nights, I grew accustomed to the nocturnal cacophony outside my window. I carried a stick on my morning runs so that the birds would dive-bomb my staff rather than my head. I learned where their nests were and gave a wide berth.
Every week a new cohort of campers would arrive on the dock, sleeping bags at their side, eyes widening upon arrival to our home amongst herring gulls. I taught observation, respect, and co-existence. Girls whose primary interactions with animals beyond their own species consisted of pet dogs and housecats were eager to approach the tantalizingly soft chicks and were quickly rebuked by the indignant mothers. “They are wild birds.” I would say. “We can observe them but step back and see how the little ones are scared and how their moms are keeping them safe.”
Kerosene lamps snuffed and campers off to bed, night became a battleground between sleep and the noisiest neighbors you could imagine stationed outside the windows. Morning found the campers groggy and frustrated with the discomfort of coexistence. “They’re so loud,” a camper choked between sleep-deprived sobs. “Why are they here?”
I gave them the best tool I know for making sense of the world: notebooks in hand, I would bring them outside. My instructions were simple: Pick a bird and pay attention to it. When you think you’ve seen everything, look a little longer. Tell me what you noticed.
We formed questions based on their curiosities and proposed experiments to find their answers. In their notebooks, they wondered why the gulls’ feathers changed, why they were so loud at night, why they had a red dot on their beaks, what their chirps and squawks meant, what they dreamed about. I wanted to teach the scientific method; I hoped I was teaching them to think like a scientist and see like themselves. I hadn’t realized that I was teaching how to notice their neighbors, to see the individual beyond the annoyance, to see the language beyond the noise.
Fledglings
Adolescence is always awkward, but never quite so visibly as for adolescent seabirds. They were wholly in transition. The downy feathers that kept them warm as hatchlings under their mothers protection and warmth didn’t stand up against the sea. They were growing new oily feathers to repel the saltwater as they sit on its surface and dive in its depths. But donning new down is neither sudden nor graceful. They remained in state of in-betweenness, not quite young but not quite grown. The juvenile gulls weren’t just trading their feathers, they’re trading their worlds. From being grounded on earth, they were just beginning to inhabit the sky.
But before they could soar, they had to stumble. The slope of the hill became runway and stage to an audience of me and a gaggle of adolescents, adjusting to their own new feathers. As the birds found the air underwing, we spectated and cheered like sports fans watching the game of nature.
As devoted fans, we learned the players’ names. Mother and chicks took on the name of their nesting place: the Porch Family, the Marigold Family, the Well Family. There’s also Old Man, the elderly male bird with frazzled feathers who perched outside the window when we sat down for meals. The Crow family weren’t crows at all but a collection of gulls who picked up sticks in their beak when they got defensive. The delight amongst us spectators was palpable when one of the Crow family chicks picked up a paintbrush left out to dry in the sun. “She wants to be an artist! Just like me!” exclaimed one of my students. While I found joy in the charm of the anthropomorphic avian painter, my joy ran deeper. A student who resented the nuisance of the gulls now related to them.
Leavings
Penikese became quieter, gradually and all at once. One day I woke up and there were more shingles than birds visible on the roof. It hadn’t happened overnight but in flurries of flight, swirls of birds aloft. The newest generation were relishing the air beneath their new adult feathers and their elders were following the flight paths of their memories. I bore witness to their leavings, to the ripples on the sea’s surface they left behind on takeoff.
On an early morning of my last week on Penikese, I was savoring a quiet cup of tea before the girls woke up. My co-worker told me I ought to go outside – our neighbor, the seagull who nested beside the well, was dying. I saw the bird who had squawked with fierce protectiveness every time we neared her nest, which was every time we stepped off the porch, uncharacteristically silent on the ground. Her wings outstretched beside her and her eyes weakly fighting to stay open, there was nothing I could do but sit with her. I wrote this poem beside her:
I’m learning that birds don’t just leave this island on wing,
in a migration flurry,
but that birds leave here
in a crumpled body on the ground,
as a pecked web of bones and sinews on the beach,
as a pile of white feathers so pure it gleams in the sun,
almost alive with the flutter of wind
but stained with garnet blood.
A mother can die by the well,
wing twitching but head unable to lift.
This gull who protected her young with all the force in her body and voice
every time we approached the door
lies silent on the ground.
Her young, not so young in his oiled new feathers, sits 10 paces away.
He can fly now.
She cannot.
His wings buzz with future soaring.
Hers can’t lift her dying weight from the earth.
With the explosion of new life,
nests and eggs and hatchlings and fledglings,
surely must come the reclamation of life lived.
Still, I knew her. I’ll miss her.
Rachel Carson National Environmental Leadership Fellow Ava Kocher
Ava Kocher is an undergraduate student at Duke University studying Biology and Marine Biology. From Massachusetts, Ava’s childhood spent exploring the woods and Charles River sparked her passion for environmental stewardship. She channels this through taking care of animals and ecosystems. At Duke, she works at the Duke Lemur Center and does research on sea urchins under climate stress. She also leads trips in the outdoors to foster connections between Duke students and the natural world.