Helen Hays, an intrepid ornithologist who for practically 50 years led scores of volunteers to Nice Gull Island, a postage-stamp islet in Lengthy Island Sound, the place they endured dive-bombing birds and fierce ocean storms to assist revitalize it as one of many world’s largest nesting websites for frequent and roseate terns, died on Feb. 5 in Scarsdale, N.Y. She was 94.
Her brother, James Hays, mentioned the demise, at a care facility, was from dementia.
Terns, each the frequent and roseate selection, are compact seabirds generally confused with gulls. They’re additionally Olympic-level migrators: After nesting in secluded locations like Nice Gull Island, they journey so far as Argentina for the winter.
Ms. Hays was fairly the migrator herself. Each spring she would go away her Manhattan house for Nice Gull, a slim, 17-acre slip of land that had been a U.S. Military fort till the tip of World Conflict II, when the navy gave it to the American Museum of Pure Historical past for $1. It lies simply east of the tip of Lengthy Island’s North Fork.
As chairwoman of the museum’s Nice Gull Island Challenge, she would arrange camp among the many concrete bunkers left over from the fort, welcoming the primary of a number of dozen volunteers, principally highschool and faculty college students, who would arrive for stints on the island over the approaching months.
There isn’t a operating water or dependable electrical energy on Nice Gull Island; provides arrive on a weekly mail boat. Ought to storms hit — they usually typically do — the researchers merely rode out the climate.
The birds themselves might be a hazard. Except for their ubiquitous droppings — on the bottom, on handrails, falling like rain from overhead — terns are terribly territorial, continuously pecking on the human interlopers. Ms. Hays took the occasional nip in stride; others wore straw hats with faux flowers caught within the brims, to offer the terns one thing aside from a head to assault.
Ms. Hays ran the Nice Gull Island Challenge with precision. Each morning at 6, she would rouse her volunteers over a loudspeaker, shouting issues like: “No extra napping. Time for trapping!”
They might work sunup to sunset, daily, generally braving the birds to gather samples or tag newborns, different occasions crouching for hours in one of many island’s 31 blinds, picket constructions designed to allow them to observe the birds up shut.
Not surprisingly, most volunteers lasted just some weeks. Ms. Hays, who started her annual journeys in 1969, spent a full 5 months there, each single yr, solely stopping when Covid stopped every little thing in 2020.
Terns had lengthy made Nice Gull Island a brief dwelling. However after hatmakers and style professionals of the early twentieth century killed them by the thousands and thousands for his or her feathers nationwide, the frequent tern was thought-about a threatened species and the roseate tern endangered by the point Ms. Hays first started her work.
Thanks largely to her diligence in making the island as soon as once more a welcome web site for nesting, the variety of mating pairs rebounded, going from about 3,000 in 1969 to greater than 11,000 within the 2010s.
Ms. Hays’s work was not only for the nice of the birds. Early on, her fixed, shut statement allowed her to trace start defects in tern chicks; additional analysis led her to conclude that PCBs, a then-unsuspected class of chemical substances, was the trigger — making her among the many first scientists to warn of their hazard to animals and people.
“She was tireless,” Joseph DiCostanzo, an ornithologist on the Museum of Pure Historical past and a frequent volunteer on Nice Gull, mentioned in a cellphone interview. “I can bear in mind being on the island and watching her run circles round college students who had been a 3rd her age.”
Helen Hays was born on Jan. 22, 1931, in Johnstown, N.Y., an industrial city northwest of Albany. Johnstown specialised in leather-based items, and her father, David, ran a glove manufacturing facility; her mom, Helen (Stewart) Hays, wrote books concerning the area’s tradition and historical past.
Helen discovered herself drawn to the thought of organic area work from an early age, and constructed her tutorial profession round it. She studied biology at Wellesley School, and after graduating in 1953, she solid about for graduate packages that may get her immediately into area work.
Quickly she was in Manitoba, learning the ruddy duck at a area station run by Cornell College. She was working towards a grasp’s diploma, however left earlier than graduating.
Ms. Hays had been working in an workplace on the Museum of Pure Historical past for a number of years when she discovered of discussions about what to do with Nice Gull Island. When she heard that at the very least one museum donor was concerned with supporting area analysis on terns, she jumped on the probability.
Ms. Hays by no means married and had no youngsters. Her brother is her solely speedy survivor.
Ms. Hays was herself a volunteer on the museum; although it gave her workplace house, she raised all her funding herself. Maybe her best talent was persuading so many individuals to work for her with out pay on a near-barren island in the course of the summer season.
Underneath her command, the Nice Gull Island Challenge grew to become a tight-knit neighborhood; marriages got here out of relationships born among the many terns, and at the very least one guardian who volunteered as a pupil later despatched her personal son to volunteer with Ms. Hays many years later.
“She impressed folks,” mentioned Joel L. Cracraft, an ornithologist on the museum. “Helen did all of it.”
