History
The Penikese Wildlife Sanctuary
After the state closed its leper colony, the island was put to out to public bid but had no takers. Sometime soon after, recognizing the island's strategic importance as a site for migratory ground-nesting sea birds, the state designated Penikese Island a wildlife sanctuary and hired a caretaker for the island.
During the next decade or so the caretaker and his family oversaw Penikese while attempting various endeavors to put the island to use, rabbit farming for one example. With the US's growing involvement in WWII and concern for national security, the caretakers were removed from the island in the mid-1940s.
After WWII, Penikese remained unoccupied for the next three decades while Herring and Greater Blackback gulls took the island over from the terns and other of Penikese's original nesting populations. By the early 70s and the establishment of the school, there were no terns left nesting on Penikese, quite a reversal from 50 years hence when Penikese was home to Massachusetts' largest colony of nesting terms.
Penikese was, however, utterly carpeted with gulls, especially so during their nesting season that lasts from April through July. When nesting, gulls are notoriously aggressive and territorial and in all seasons are rapacious predators that will eat anything they can carry, including their own kind. Understanding that gulls are uncomfortable around humans, the state reasoned that no harm could be done to Penikese by allowing the school to set up camp, and in fact some good might result due to the island's unmanaged state.
Today, the state has undertaken a strategic, concerted effort to reclaim ground nesting and other sensitive marine habitat by cleaning up marine and coastal pollution, capping open landfills, and in places like Penikese, evicting gulls so that terns can reestablish a nesting beachhead. Each year beginning in April, ornithologists (called the bird ladies by the students, male or female) take up residence in a canvas army barracks tent on Tubbs Point and begin their work managing the Tern Restoration Project.
They discourage gulls from nesting on the island's eastern shores, census the terns and other nesting and migratory seabirds, and in general keep a watchful eye during the avian nesting season before leaving in early August. Since this project began in earnest in the mid-1990s, the number of gulls on Penikese has decreased and the terns population has remarkably increased, a success by any measure that many hope to be a continuing trend.
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