A Revival, One Tern at a Time from the New York Times

Helen Hays revives Great Gull Island's tern population. COREY KILGANNON made this article and it was published on July 20th, 2012. Here is the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/nyregion/helen-hays-revives-great-gull-islands-tern-population.html?_r=1

Over all the chicks in the colony are doing very well! Today an exciting moment when a 25 day old bird flew about eight feet at a height of about two feet off the ground! We call this hop flying and it often precedes real flying by a few days, expect this bird to in the air circling us in a couple of days! As of today we have banded 9,876 chicks nd expect to reach 10,000 banded in the next two to three weeks. The evening of the fourth after watching fireworks on the mainland a large dark cloud approached from the west, the heavens opened and Joe DiCostanzo documented what we found in the morning.

We had a very severe thunderstorm at about 10:30 pm on July 4th! When it hit one of the windows in Dick Young’s room in the North Building blew out. The next morning we found that the old M-13 blind had been blown down and torn to pieces. By the Carpenter Shop the Roseate Tern banding table was blown down and was blocking the path back to the pine trees. Another table next to it was also knocked down and blown over against the Roseate banding table. All sorts of things were blown around in front of the Carpenter Shop. The window over Joe’s desk was broken. We later found when we were cleaning up that it had been hit by a piece of shingle blown off one of the dormitory buildings. The laptop computer and the printer on the desk were both wet, but worked fine when they dried out. The banding room door was blown open and half the banding room floor was flooded. The plywood sheet with a small plexiglass window in the pantry room was blown off and some surprisingly heavy objects (a bicycle pump, a small folding hand cart and a large measuring tape) had been blown out of the opening. The strangest thing was in Helen’s tower room. A thunderstorm on July 1 had nearly blown some of her windows out. They were moved out of their seating in the concrete by five inches. Helen had tried to move them back into place with a crowbar and hammer but they wouldn’t budge. The July 4^th thunderstorm blew them back into place!

Broken window