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Bye, Bye, Birdies

The elegant herons, egrets and other shorebirds of Narragansett Bay are declining in numbers... are they in trouble?

Photography by Ron Cowie

(page 1 of 3)

Swarms of agitated birds — 
egrets and herons, gulls and cormorants, flapping and soaring, circling and squawking — fill the gray summer sky above the stunted trees of Little Gould Island as we tramp through a ragged forest to their nesting colony. It’s clear they are not happy to see us — three scientists, me, and a photographer — intruding into space they prize for its isolation from pre-
dators. To them, we are big clumsy mammals looking for an easy meal of tender baby birds.

The adult egrets spread their wide white wings and leap from the treetops, abandoning their nests. Half-grown hatchlings, damp and panicky, stare at us with round 
yellow eyes. Some try to climb out into 
the branches, seeking safety, stepping 
on each other with their big awkward feet, beaks gaping.

Beneath our damp rubber boots, the ground is spongy, rotten and spattered with guano. Rough nests the size of buckets, built of broken sticks jammed together at harsh angles, clutter the treetops; as many as five, six, seven, in a single stunted tree. Tangled in rampant vines beneath the canopy, we find the abandoned corpse of a baby egret, hanging by its long skinny neck, its frail skin bluish in the gray light, its delicate white feathers rumpled and smudged. Chances are a stronger 
sibling, or a luckier one, pushed it from the nest, competing 
for food. This is a cruel, wanton, primitive place, where beautiful birds are born.

We went to a lot of trouble to reach this nasty little bump of an island, one of Narragansett Bay’s protected nesting colonies for maritime birds. We boarded a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler in Quonset early on an overcast morning and motored for an hour to reach the Sakonnet River. We anchored, off-loaded a dinghy and rowed through the cold, choppy waves 
to a tiny beach. We climbed across wet rocks and slogged through onslaughts of gleaming, absurdly gigantic, head-
high tangles of poison ivy and green briar. We worried about ticks and parasites and who-knows-what that might be 
lurking in the brush.

When we finally reached the colony, we were shat upon and squawked at; and then the baby birds, huddled in their nests, puked on us, saturating the damp air with the aroma 
of half-rotten fish. And that was exactly what we were hoping would happen.

Elizabeth DeCelles, the University of Rhode Island graduate 
student whose research brought us to Little Gould Island, is working to document what the birds eat. “When the young birds are scared, their reflex is to regurgitate,” she says. They can’t fly away, so their options for escape are few 
when confronted by a hungry predator. “The idea is that 
the predator might eat the regurge instead and then get 
distracted,” she adds.

By shouting a bit at the nestlings, shaking a few branches if necessary, she can trigger the reflex. Since the birds swallow their meals whole, generally a few aromatic fish turn up, in various degrees of decay. DeCelles dodges the parents’ guano missiles — not always successfully — and with gloved hands, slips the slimy regurge into carefully tagged plastic bags for analysis in the lab. The results may help wildlife scientists to better understand why these bird populations are in decline. The numbers of several maritime bird species that breed in Narragansett Bay have dropped significantly in the last five to ten years, according to annual surveys conducted by the state Department of Environmental Management. Great egrets, for example, the tall, elegant white birds often seen foraging in shallow coves fringing the Bay, peaked at 251 nesting pairs in 2003, and in 2008 were down to 148 pairs. Their smaller relatives, the snowy egrets, showed an even steeper drop, from 330 pairs in 1979 to just fifty-three pairs in 2008.

Cattle egrets and little blue herons have practically disappeared from the state, and black-crowned night herons are also in steep decline. DeCelles’ regurgitation study aims to figure out what the birds are eating and to determine if it’s getting harder for them to find food. She augments the regurge work with sampling in the salt marshes that fringe the Bay, to see if there’s a difference in food abundance and distribution  between marshes that are relatively pristine and those that are disturbed, their tidal flow impeded by roads, culverts and other structures.

Christopher Raithel, a biologist with the DEM who has been collecting data on the birds’ nesting habits for more than a decade, says he is mystified by the drop in numbers. “It seems odd to me that so many seabirds are declining at the same time,” he says. But he is not sure what the cause might 
be. “It’s frustrating, because I just don’t have a clue what to 
do about it,” he says. 
There could be a pollutant in the food chain that is weakening the birds. Another variable could be the relative growth of the double-crested cormorant population. The cormorants have been on an upswing and could be crowding out the egrets at their nesting sites. “Or that may be nothing more than a 
coincidence,” says Raithel.

Richard Ferren, described by Raithel as “the most authoritative figure in Rhode Island ornithology for this generation,” has his own ideas about what is going on with our local birds. Ferren, now seventy, lives in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he’s professor emeritus at Berkshire Community College. He grew up in Rhode Island and still returns to Narragansett Bay every spring to census the bird colonies, as he’s done since the mid-1960s. He started studying birds several years before that, so that’s more than fifty years of field observations.

He wrote about much of his experience in a 1998 report, with co-author James Myers, published by the DEM. The 222-page manuscript, “Rhode Island’s Maritime Nesting Birds,” is hard to find, but it’s a fascinating look into the hidden world of our avian neighbors. Since then, Ferren has written a 700-page manuscript about the birds of Rhode Island that is not yet published — and it may never be published, unless he can convince various editors to stop trying to edit it.