By Allison Steele,Concord Monitor
Project restores the tern population along New Hampshire’s seacoast.

ISLES OF SHOALS, N.H. – On a day when the terns are feeling mellow, they swarm around those who enter their island colony. Making an angry chattering sound like a high-pitched machine gun, they swoop down and dive toward the head of anyone who wanders close to a nest. Anyone who’s not used to it spends a lot of time ducking.

When they’re really riled up, they move in close and jab with their beaks, sometimes drawing blood. Their cries turn nastier, more aggressive, less like warnings and more like cackling taunts.

“They laugh at you,” said Dan Hayward, 36, who has spent eight summers watching over the tern colony on the Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire’s Seacoast. “Right before they peck you.”

But Hayward and the other tern monitors who spend their summers on White Island adjust pretty quickly. Like the isolation, the lack of electricity and the incessant sound of the lighthouse’s foghorn, which tolls mournfully every 30 seconds, the attacks from the terns become a familiar and almost cherished aspect of the job.

Fifty years ago, common terns had all but disappeared from the Isles of Shoals. Though they had nested there for centuries, the seabirds were driven away by hunters and the growing seagull population. Terns became endangered in New Hampshire.

But thanks to the colony, a restoration project run by the Audubon Society of New Hampshire and the state Fish and Game Department, the birds are thriving on White and Seavey Islands. Eight years after those agencies began building a safe place for the terns, more than 2,500 pairs have nested there this summer. It was a faster and more successful rebound than anyone expected – making the project something of a miracle to those who watched it happen. With the tern colony thriving, the work of attracting birds to the island is done. All that the colony needs is a few dedicated tern monitors to live on the island each summer while the terns are there, mark the babies with identification bands and chase the gulls away.

The pay is modest, the work is temporary and the accommodations are stark. But to Hayward, who has been with the project almost from the start, moving to the island each summer has become a strangely addictive routine. His fiancee, Melissa Barney, makes fun of him for it. But Barney, 31, who met Hayward the first summer she worked on the island, is now on her third year. Both work at Mount Sunapee in the winter. After they get married this fall, they acknowledged they might have to consider moving on. Neither of them has had health insurance for a long time.

This year, they are joined by Miles Waniga, a 22-year-old college graduate from Hopkinton who studied biology. Waniga admits that he doubted his own sanity for taking the island job. But he also never imagined he’d find birds so interesting.

“It gets in your blood, for sure,” Hayward said. “By the end of the summer you want to leave so bad. But by the time the frost starts to thaw, you miss it.”

Last week, the three monitors attached metal bands to the twig-like legs of more than 100 baby terns. When the babies see someone coming they hunker down, muttering and squealing. Some flap their insubstantial wings, and older birds sometimes forget they can fly. The monitors record the weight of each bird before banding it. The birds don’t like this; they protest loudly, while their parents dive-bomb Hayward, Barney and Waniga.

The bands, which stay on the birds for life, bear distinct numbers that will allow the birds to be tracked. They enable the Audubon Society to collect data on where the terns end up, and on how many birds survive. In recent years, several birds raised on Seavey have returned to build their own families. It’s one of the surest signs yet that the colony is a success, said DeLuca, one of the biologists who started the project.

Occasionally, someone asks DeLuca why the Audubon Society should go to so much trouble to protect the terns, or what point there is to staving off their extinction. There are a number of answers, DeLuca said. Some scientists believe that removing one species has an unalterable ripple effect on the ecosystem and all other creatures. Then again, people who don’t believe that human intervention is appropriate make the argument that the more adaptable gulls should be allowed to nest there if they’re the ones that survive.

To DeLuca, it’s simply a matter of putting things back to the way they were before humans transformed the seacoast.

“The reason that the seabird composition changed so substantially was because of us,” she said. “Many tern biologists figure, we made the difference to begin with. It’s natural to now do what we can to bring things back to how they were.”