06/18/2000
By BEN RAINES
Register Staff Reporter

Birds only, no humans allowed Stepping out of a boat and onto the island, it's obvious Gaillard had a good idea. It's also obvious that the place belongs to the birds. Except for fish and wildlife officials, humans - even bird watchers - are not allowed on the island, subject to hefty fines if caught trespassing. Even without the protection of law, the swooping, diving, screaming birds make interlopers feel unwelcome.

They are everywhere, and not just the plus-size pelicans with their 8-foot wingspans. A couple thousand Royal terns nest there, with 500 or 600 Caspian terns thrown into the mix. A hodgepodge of other avian residents flap around the island too, including black-legged stilts, yellow-crowned night herons, cattle egrets, American Oyster Catchers, Sandwich terns, gull-billed terns, common terns and black skimmers.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 laughing gulls prowl around Gaillard's island as well, fishing in the Bay and making babies in the bushes. They make their nests on the ground next to bushes, tufts of grass, pieces of wood.

A ring of rock riprap protects the island's shoreline. About 50 feet inside of that rubble wall, at the water's edge, a dirt berm rises up and encloses the island's interior. The berm stands around 25 feet high and is the tallest thing on the island. Thousands of adult pelicans sun themselves on top of the berm, watching over their nests down below. Most of the nesting takes place between the berm and the riprap.

Everywhere you look, there are pelican nests: In the scrubby bushes on the side of the berm, in the scrubby bushes down near the water, in the grass below the scrubby bushes, even atop old signs tossed ashore by hurricanes.

Walking among the birds, several odors fight for control of your nose, and all of them are awful. There's the stink of sun-baked guano (a scatological euphemism for bird mess). There's the stink of marsh muck. Then there's the stink of death.

And oddly, in a place so absolutely teeming with brand new life, there is a lot of death.

There are dead fish all over - food that missed its mark in the transition from mama's mouth to baby's.

Little dead pelican babies are scattered around, too. Some fall out of the nests in the bushes and can't get back in. Some are pushed out by older siblings, greedy for all of mama's attention. And some babies, unlucky enough to hatch weeks after their siblings, simply can't compete with their older nestmates. They starve to death.

And a lot of dead full-grown pelicans, wings outstretched, heads akimbo, bodies disintegrating, litter the island. Pelicans are big, and a rotting one makes a powerful, and sad, impression.

"Some of them just don't make it. Accidents happen," said Roger Clay, a wildlife biologist with the state Conservation Department.

Clay visits the birds about once a week during rooking (mating) season, which begins as early as March and runs through August, peaking in May and June. He has been the bird man of Gaillard since 1986, dashing through the nesting sites counting the nests. He carries a click counter in each hand - one for nests with eggs, one for nests without eggs. Clay says most nests start with three eggs, but only two hatchlings will survive.

The blood on many of the pelican eggs is evidence of what Clay calls "a painful process."

It's hard to keep up as he skips through the birds, moving fast so he disturbs them as little as possible.

Noisy youngsters grow up quickly The first-born batch of fledglings, now downy and white with feathers and nearly as big as their parents, climb over each other, screaming as they run from Clay. They look ridiculous, gallumping through the brush on legs too wobbly to hold them up.

For these older babies, life is more of a freewheeling, brawling sort of affair. The birds are no longer tied to the nest, and they tend to gather together in scrums of 20 or 30 stumbling, screaming birds. They'll lose the ability to make noise soon. Adult pelicans are mute, Clay says, unable to muster even the screechy pterodactyl hiss the babies hurl at intruders.

At this point, though, they're plenty loud and growing so fast that the parents must work constantly at catching fish.

Soaring on powerful wings, the parents dive-bomb into the Bay, scooping up menhaden and mullet, their great throats swelling with water as they gobble up dinner for the babies.

Down in the scrub, one of the big but still flightless babies has several inches of the tail end of a large mullet sticking out of his mouth. It's obviously been in his mouth a long time because the tail is hard and dry, with flies buzzing around it.

When Clay approaches, the bird opens its mouth to scold him and the 14-inch mullet pops out. It lands on the ground. Clay moves on, and the bird turns its attention to the fish, trying to figure out how to get it back into its mouth. The head of the mullet is dissolved. It's been getting digested down in the bird's gullet, even while the tail of the fish rotted in the open air.

Life on the island is rough.

Most of the island's area is inside of the big dirt berm. It's a vast plain, with a few patches of short bushes. Pelicans nest in the patches. Mud flats extend toward the center of the island. The mud is crusty and cracked. Walking on it can be treacherous.

"That's one of the reasons we don't want people out here," Clay said. "You can be walking along on that mud and 'Bloop!' you sink in up to your neck. It just gives way. Nobody would ever know what happened to you."

Clay routinely picks his way along the edge of the mud to get to the tern-nesting site, a spot of unimaginable cacophony.

The terns nest on hard sand. They lay their eggs right on the sand, making do with barely perceptible depressions for nests. They lay their eggs close together, leaving just six inches between nests.

When threatened, 4,000 birds leap into the air at once, diving, feinting and making a powerful lot of noise. Conversation, even yelling, is impossible to hear over the din.

With 4,000 birds whirling overhead, you get the feeling it's raining all of a sudden, though there's not a cloud in the sky. But the dozens of drops splatting on your shoulders, your neck, your head, ain't rain.

A long lagoon stretches along one leg of the inner berm. Black-legged stilts hang out around the lagoon, where they like to nest. When approached, the stilts begin their broken-wing dance, designed to draw predators from their nests. A passing shadow can set 20 stilts flopping around in the mud, all dragging their wings as if somehow, they all spontaneously broke them.

A haven free from most predators Nutria, great big rat-like creatures, are flourishing in the lagoon, thanks to the absence of predators on the island. Because nutria are vegetarians, they don't bother the birds. In fact, it is that same dearth of predators such as raccoons, snakes, possums and cats that has made the island a great place for birds and their babies.

The winged residents and the nutria can grow unmolested, save for occasional visits by Clay and his counters.

"A raccoon could really have a field day out here," Clay said. "So far we don't have any. I've seen two snakes and an alligator though. Of course, a couple of gators aren't going to hurt the birds any. Probably just prowl along the berm at night snatching a few."

A bigger danger to the successful rookery, says Clay, would be too many human visitors. When the island was in the development stages, there was talk of organizing tours and building walkways. Luckily, those ill-conceived ideas never went anywhere.

Perhaps the inhospitable nature of the place had something to do with that. By 9 in the morning on a summer day, it's blisteringly hot, and there's not a shade tree in sight. The stink is so bad it seeps into your clothes and seems to stay inside your nose for weeks. And then there are the bugs. Mosquitoes, sand flies and a host of other biting and stinging critters make their presence known in a most unpleasant way.

But the pelicans aren't complaining.