Spring on Penikese, Part II: They're Back!

Of the many birds on Penikese, my favorites are the guinea fowl and the Leech's storm petrel. The guinea hen were introduced by the school for entertainment and tick control decades ago and live on the island year round. They climb down from their nighttime roost above the chicken coop each morning to squawk and scurry around pecking the ground for grain and small insects. In keeping with the season the guinea hen are now chasing each other around in amorous prelude to making adorable baby guinea hens that will be immediately devoured by the gulls once they hatch. Fortunately, they also mate and lay in the fall, too, a better time to raise their chicks with fewer gulls around.

The Leech's storm petrels couldn't be any different than the guinea fowl: migratory, nocturnal and elusive, they slip down the coast to Penikese from northern climes in late April and early May and then into their burrows between the cracks of the ancient rock wall near the leper gateposts. They mate and lay an egg or two before one of the mated pair will slip out at night to feed and fish while the other bird stays behind in the burrow, awaiting its chance to swap places. Only on moonless nights when the darkness provides perfect cover for these sooty, bat-like birds do we find out they have arrived this way: those awaiting their mates in the wall will emit their burrow call, a ghostly flutter and coo to attract each mate back to its proper nest, a sound that that has spooked more than a few students wandering around unawares in the dark of night. 

The petrels used to be much more numerous on Penikese but gull predation almost eradicated them back in the 1970's. The presence of the school, built in 1973, helped shoo away the human-averse gulls from the petrel's vicinity and, along with other efforts, preserved the scant remaining petrels, the ancestral thread of which somehow manages to make it back to the island every year, barely. Over my tenure, the petrels have become representative of renewal and affirmation, for the island and, especially, the school itself, also small and always working so hard to survive. Every year about this time I start worrying whether they make it back, whether this will be the year we don't hear them, and if so what that will mean. Each week I ask the staff returning from the island whether anybody has heard the petrels, and when I spend nights on the island I always make sure to get up in the wee hours to walk outside, to strain and listen for them as if by doing so I can will them back.

Last week one of our students, Anthony, got up and left the house to take a pee outside. It was pitch black, a new moon whose fingernail crescent had gone down hours ago, and as he walked outside and into the darkness to do his business he heard a strange noise coming from almost under his feet. "What the heck is that?" he asked himself. Then he thought, "The petrels! I've heard about those." 

They are back, and we are good for another year.