Summer with the seabirds

One last photo in front of the Ship Shack (photo by Samantha Bryn)

And just like that, the season has come to an end! We will be coming off of Ship today and heading on to our next adventures. During breaks in the inevitable final scramble that has been the past few days, we’ve been taking quiet moments to reflect on and remember the beautiful season that we’ve had. Today we’ll keep the description of season close-out specifics brief to highlight our impressions from those moments and the thoughts that have been brewing in our heads as we prepare to say goodbye.

A Final Note from Samantha:

Wow oh wow, how the time has come and gone. I’m still in disbelief at where these past 13 weeks went. The last few days have gone by in a blur as we are wrapping everything up, packing, and saying our final goodbyes to everything here on the island. I am extremely grateful for my time spent working on the water with the lovely common terns. Thank you to Ship Island, the common terns, and of course to Taylor. We had a sweet time spent on the Atlantic, with the birds, in the lovely little Ship Shack.

two common terns on the water (image 1); common tern at sunset (image 2); black guillemot (image 3); view from the bluff area on Ship (image 4); Samantha taking photos (image 5) (images 1-4 by Samantha Bryn; image 5 by Taylor Peltier)

This summer has provided me with a tangible example of just how interconnected the environment is to the birds. From the variability in the weather, to predation, to fish prey quality and availability – they all play a major role in the survival and success of the colony. Having the opportunity to quite literally watch the chicks hatch and grow up has made me realize just how strong and resilient birds are. It makes me proud to know that I have played a role in allowing this colony to become as successful as it could have been this season. I am in awe of these beautiful little seabirds. This summer has only helped to solidify my confidence that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m grateful that I get to work with wildlife; it’s something I do not take for granted. As someone who isn’t from the coast and hasn’t spent much time near the sea, I’ve gained a love and a respect for the marine environment. I sure am going to miss this ocean landscape; I will miss the sounds of the terns all around me, too. I can only hope to see them again someday. Here’s to a summer with the seabirds!

– Samantha 

A Final Note from Taylor:

The complete gratitude and awe that I have for these birds is inexpressible. I couldn’t have hoped to spend my summer with a better colony, on a better island, or with a better crewmate. I am so proud of how hard we worked this season and of all the things we accomplished. But most of all I am proud of our common terns. And even more so knowing that what I’ve witnessed is nothing special – in the sense that this is their life, this is every year for them. They haven’t worked extra hard they’ve just worked hard, like they do every single day to survive. I just feel so lucky to have been able to witness it. I ate, slept, and breathed common tern colony this summer (probably more literally than I’d like to think), they were my life, and I loved it. This was my first season in any sort of supervisory position, and I am very grateful for the opportunity, the experience, and the lessons learned along the way. This was an important job for me, one that I’ll remember always, and particularly fondly.  

A chick who’s just seen its parent fly in with a fish (top left); Five-way tussle for a fish (top right); Marked chicks from Nest 8 snuggling, they did this all season even after fledging (middle left); A tern making a water landing at sunset (middle right); A tern parent looking after its chick who is just waking up (bottom) (photos by Taylor Peltier)

I’m beginning to realize in full, what a special thing a summer with the seabirds is. If the season was a mountain, there were certain gaps in the trees that gave me a glimpse of the view, and I had a sense of what a monumental thing we were climbing. Moments like when the birds flew in at dusk for the first time, and when the ground was littered with eggs and then small fuzzy chicks; picking up an egg that had been pipping for days and feeling the taps from the still living chick inside, and watching chicks start to walk, then run, then fly. The last few days have been like breaking through the tree line –your legs are burning but you put your head down and keep putting one foot in front of the other, because you’re almost there and you can almost see it all. And now I find myself at the summit. It is splendid. I look around and I see everything we’ve worked towards, I hear the terns and the surf and the wind and I feel it all. I wish the terns safety and wellness on their impending journey South, and I hope that in two years there’s a Ship Island crew that gets to see a bunch of our chicks return for the first time. And now it’s time for goodbyes. Thank you, Ship Island common terns, thank you, Ship Island.  

– TNP 

As a final token of our time here this summer:

You may remember, we found a message in a bottle at the very beginning of the season back in May. We wrote a letter to the young boy, who had sent his bottle and message out to sea 9 months earlier, letting him know his bottle was found and that two wildlife biologist were thrilled to have found it. We had been wondering all summer if he got our letter or if it got lost in the post, like his bottle in the open ocean. We are happy to report that this morning when Refuge staff arrived to take us off the island, a letter arrived addressed to us from the boy!! Our message was received and he is doing well, now one year older and still finding fun ways to explore the world. Neither of us could have written a better ending to our time here on Ship Island – the perfect culmination to the summer.

End of season photo by the Ship Island sign in the colony (photo by Samantha Bryn)

Good luck to the next crew, we hope that you find your season as fulfilling as we did ours and that the colony prospers during your time. Taylor and Samantha signing off!

-The Ship Island Crew 2025

Taylor and Samantha enjoying their seafood boil

While I’m sure our loyal general audience will enjoy this post, we have also written this for the future interns and crews that will inevitably come stalking the blog to see what they’re in for! 

The Ship Shack (as we’ve heard it called) and mini fridge are nothing to be scared of! The cabin is surprisingly spacious once you’re inside, and if you get good at fridge-Tetris you can fit a feast in there. Before we got to the island we were both curious and slightly worried about how we would be eating for the summer. We envisioned a lot of canned meals, and while that is sometimes exactly what you want at the end of a long day, we wanted to provide some inspiration for meals to keep scurvy at bay (and also to show off our beautiful meals).  

So, feast your eyes on the various meals that the Ship Island crew has enjoyed this summer! 

Many meals made it into our stomachs before our camera roll, but this is a decent representation of our best meals. We loved dressed up oatmeal for breakfast, often customizing with freshly candied nuts, fruits, maple syrup, or hot cocoa powder and cinnamon. We found meals that could be burrito-fied were perfect for breakfast, lunch, or dinner and could be modified to fit many a flavor scheme. We had some fun with dinners, often leaning towards a larger portion of protein plus carbs, so many stir-fries, pastas, or seafood dishes. And for dessert we highly recommend the Party of Two Chocolate Overload Cake Slice from Hannaford – it is a chocolate lovers dream!!

We also wanted to include some of our favorite photos of our summer home, so you don’t have to come in so sight unseen! 

View from the bottom bunk (left); Home sweet home (center); View of the colony from the back window (right) (Photos by Taylor Peltier)

And lastly, we’d like to introduce you to someone very important. This is Toucan Tam (short for Tambourine)! Toucan Tam flew to Ship this summer, decided to stay, and has been a pillar of our cabin community. We hope you can rely on Toucan Tam to light your way on Ship just as we have!

Toucan (Toucan Tam, Tam, Tammy, Toucan Tambourino) Tamborine

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for our final post in just a few days!

Two (2) common terns flying in the air (photo by Samantha Bryn)

Long time no see! It’s been a little while since you heard from us over here on Ship. It has been a very busy (and slightly chaotic) few weeks, but we are back in the flow of things – ready to close out the season in just a few days! 

Two weeks ago we had quite the fright – we found pretty jarring evidence of a mink on the island. Early morning on the 19^th, we found about 2 dozen common terns that were freshly killed by a mink. We were able to differentiate this from another predator like a peregrine falcon or a gull because the predated terns all had puncture wounds from the sharp teeth of a mammal. Mink are excellent swimmers and likely swam to Ship from an adjacent island or even the mainland.

Part of the mustelid family, mink are opportunistic generalists, meaning they will eat pretty much anything they can hunt. They often take prey much larger than themselves and are known to stash kills for later, meaning they often kill way more than they will consume – and in a seabird colony this can mean mass casualty. Unfortunately, our tern colony was its next meal. After finding the predated terns, Refuge staff rushed to the island a few hours later to check out the colony and helped us set mink traps. Mink prefer the path of least resistance, so we set traps along our commonly used / mowed paths around the island. About a week and a half later we have two things to report concerning the mink: a) no mink have been trapped and b) we have not found any more evidence of mink predation in the colony. While we have still been dealing with other predators like the peregrine and the ever-so-bold herring and great black backed gulls, it is looking like this will be a one-day event for the mink; hopefully it is gone for good. 

Fledgling common tern on the beach (photo by Samantha Bryn)

In other end-of season news – things are starting to wrap up with more and more chicks fledging and taking to the skies every single day! We had 10 productivity plots set up this season, and we have begun taking them down because all the surviving chicks have fledged! It is such a bittersweet moment. We feel like proud parents who have carefully watched these chicks grow up and are now sending them off into the world. It is a joyous moment when they take to the air and leave the plots, but also a bit sad knowing that we are almost done with our time here.

Samantha walking the beach after prod plot checks (left); Samantha amongst the fledglings (center); Taylor checking the last of the eggs in a prod plot (right)

Nest 16 A1 chick (left); fledgling from tern blind (middle); nest 8 A chick (right) (photos by Samantha Bryn)

Similarly, we have stopped doing provisioning stints in our two blinds because our marked nests have fledged, along with most of their neighbors. Our stints ended at Eider blind a week before Tern blind, but as of yesterday stints at both blinds have been retired. With only a few marked chicks left that we make occasional sightings of, it makes us wonder how long the color will last on their feathers. Will other people see them in the coming weeks as they begin their migration south? It can only be assumed that birders will be a bit surprised to potentially see a hatch year common tern with a bright blue chest. We saw a red one at the edge of the colony down near the water and had a good chuckle.  

Three (3) chicks of target age banded during a sweep, still mostly downy (left), down remains only on head (center), and a fully feathered fledgling (right) (photos by Taylor)

We have done a few more banding sweeps throughout the colony – banding as many chicks as we can before the season is up. As of now we have banded over 400 chicks throughout the season! While a number have died for various reasons (the first few weeks of life are a fraught time for most birds), we are hopeful that a decent amount might just make it off the island and into the real world of adulthood! The data that can be collected by banding seabirds is useful for research and informing conservation, allowing us to continue to protect and monitor these wonderful common terns and other birds around the world. 

During the midst of all these events, Ship got a new set of hands for a week! A big thank you to Liz Brennan for jumping in and helping out right when things on Ship were busiest! Liz worked out on Metinic last year, so the work was familiar even though life on our two islands is a little different. Liz stood in for Taylor for the week, and Samantha did a wonderful job of keeping Ship afloat through some rough seas.  

Finally, with tasks wrapping up in the colony, we’ve been turning up the heat on our data entry efforts. While we’ve kept up throughout the season with getting things entered and proofed, we still collected a lot of data this summer and there are a few things that couldn’t be done right until the end. So, while the weather has chosen to be beautiful and perfect, we have many hours ahead of us to spend behind the computer screen.  

Double-crested cormorants, herring gulls, and great black-backed gulls on East Barge (photo by Samantha Bryn)

Those are all the major and overdue updates from Ship! If you made it this far, thank you as always for the read! You’ll be hearing from us soon in our upcoming final post, so until then! 

A thick bank of fog rolling in just after sunset

Another week on Ship Island has come and gone! While we’ve certainly been very busy, we haven’t had many new developments. The gloomy weather that began at the end of last week has stuck around, and while we’ve been making do, we want our sunshine back! We’ve avoided most of the rain promised by the forecast but in its place, we’ve had lots and lots of fog. And because we haven’t been seeing much of the sun, the moisture on the grass lingers into the early afternoon (meaning all our time in the colony is crammed into the few dry hours before evening). While the weather has thrown a small wrench into our schedule, we’ve still managed to stay in our groove. With our days centered around a provisioning stint and productivity plot checks, some consistency has been nice. This was also the perfect week to catch up on some data entry, so that was a big task for the week as well.

This week a lot more of our chicks are starting to look more like terns! The plots are full of speedy teenager terns that have begun swapping the downy fluff on their heads and bodies for smoother contour feathers. Some of our oldest chicks have only small patches of down left and have flight feathers almost long enough to be functional! Pretty soon we’re going to have to start calling them fledglings! Chicks of all ages can frequently be seen practicing their take-offs (which entails jumping as high as they can and flapping their wings, sometimes quite haphazardly) and some are starting to look really very coordinated. We’ve got our eyes on a couple that could have their first lift-off probably any day now. Reaching the fledging stage is a big milestone for the colony –for the adult terns, the chicks, and for us. It’s the culmination of all of the work that the terns put into flying here, laying and incubating eggs, guarding and feeding their chicks, the efforts that we’ve made to keep their island predator-free and maintain suitable habitat for them, and the fight displayed by the chicks in the face of numerous dangers. There are still many obstacles to overcome before adulthood, but for those that will make it, taking flight is the real start to the rest of their lives.

A foggy scene from the colony overlooking the ocean (left); Samantha holding an older common tern chick during produuctiy plot checks (right)

A Note from Samantha

Another week another blog! This week consisted of fog, fog, and more fog. The wet and foggy mornings have forced us inside when we normally would be in the colony. Instead, we opted for data entry and relaxation! I have done a ton of reading this week and last week mainly due to the weather. I have read 4 books and started my fifth yesterday in the month of July alone. I have always loved reading, even as a kid, so I’m excited that I have time to curl up with a good book. My “to be read” list is ever so slowly dwindling (however it is very long so it doesn’t feel like much). This summer has opened my reading-sphere to audiobooks! I never listened to an audiobook before, so this was a fun switch for me. Instead of listening to music when we would do big weeding periods in the beginning of the season, I would listen to an audiobook – specifically memoirs or autobiographies. I like the addition of listening to the author read their book. I feel like I get an extra inside scoop into their life. But mainly this summer I have been reading on my Kindle. Man, do I love that little tablet. I enjoy a physical book more than anything, but having a small Kindle for a small island seems fitting (plus it means less items to transport since I don’t need the physical book anymore).

A Note from Taylor

The weather has certainly put a damper on our work-flow this week, but it has been nice to have a break from all the action. I like when we get the chance to slow back down on a dreary day, especially when the end of the season is really starting to loom over us. Plus, I was able to capture a thick bank of evening fog rolling in the other day in a timelapse video! So that was cool. I’m really enjoying seeing the chicks. They’re all at different stages now. I remember when seeing an older chick used to be so exciting because we mostly had tiny downy chicks, but now when I see the rare fresh chick I am shocked by how small they are! It’s nuts to think that they all used to be that size! I can’t quite wrap my mind around how fast they have grown. I cannot wait to start seeing chicks (or I guess I should say fledglings) doing their first little flights. Before they’re all flying around, I love watching the chicks between feedings during provisioning stints. It’s impossible not to make up little narratives for them when I’m cooped up in the blind doing nothing but watch them for 3 straight hours. Looking ahead to next week, where hopefully we’ll see fledglings and more sun… extra emphasis on hopefully more sun.  

Thanks for following along for another week. Here’s to hoping our next report will be more full of sunshine and rainbows than this one!