Helen Hayes, The brave ornithologist is a brave ornithologist who has led numerous volunteers to Great Gull Island, a mail-running island in Long Island Sound for nearly 50 years. Common and Roseate Terns were 94 years old on February 5th in Scarsdale, New York.
Her brother, James Hayes, said the death at the care facility came from dementia.
Both a common variety and rose diversity, terns are compact seabirds that are confused with seagulls. They are also Olympic level immigrants. After nests in remote areas like Great Seagull Island, they travel to Argentina for winter.
Hayes was his own migrant. Every spring she set out from her Manhattan apartment for the Great Seagull. This was a narrow 17 acres of land that was a US military fort until the end of World War II, and the military gave it to the American Museum of Natural History for $1. . It is located just east of the tip of the North Shore on Long Island.
As chairman of the museum's Great Guild Island Project, she set up camps inside concrete bunkers left from the fort, welcoming the first first volunteers of dozens of volunteers, mainly high school and university students. The next few months.
Great Seagull Island does not have running water or reliable electricity. Supplies arrive on the mail ship every week. A storm should be hit – and if they often do so, researchers simply got on the weather.
The bird itself can be dangerous. Aside from their ubiquitous dung, falling like rain from above, on the railings, on the ground, on the railings, terns are terrible territory, constantly carrying human intruders. Hayes listened at times. Others put on straw hats filled with fake flowers and gave the tern something other than their heads but their attacks.
Hayes carried out the Great Gallery Island Project with precision. Every morning, at 6am she cried out the volunteers on the speakers and said, “What do you mean?” “No more naps. Time for trapping!”
They get sunburned every day until sunset, sometimes collecting samples on birds, tagging newborns, one of the island's 31 blinds, with a wooden structure designed to allow birds to be observed close by. I've been squatting down for hours.
Naturally, most volunteers lasted only a few weeks. Hayes, who began his annual trip in 1969, spent five months there every year.
Terns have long made Greatgal Island a temporary home. However, after the misery of hat makers and fashion in the early 20th century killed them by millions of people for feathers across the country, the common tern was considered a threatened species, and Hayes first I was in danger when I first started work.
Thank you for most of her hard work that made the island a welcome site for nesting again. The number of mating pairs has been rebounded, from about 3,000 in 1969 to over 11,000 in the 2010s.
Hayes's job wasn't just for the good of the birds. Early on, her constant close observation allowed her to follow the birth defects of the tern chick. Further research has concluded that the cause is PCB, a class of chemicals that was not postponed at the time.
“She was tireless,” Joseph Dicostanzo, an ornithologist at the Museum of Natural History and a frequent volunteer at Great Gall, said in a telephone interview. “I remember being on the island and seeing her run circling around a third student of her age.”
Helen Hayes was born on January 22, 1931 in Johnstown, New York, an industrial city northwest of Albany. Johnstown specializes in leather goods, and her father, David, ran a glove factory. Her mother, Helen (Stewart) Hayes, wrote a book on the culture and history of the area.
Helen found herself drawn to ideas for working in the biological field from an early age, and built her studies around that. She studied biology at Wellesley College and, after graduating in 1953, she cast for a graduate program where she participated in fieldwork in person.
Soon she was in Manitoba and studied rough ducks at an outdoor station run by Cornell University. She was working towards a master's degree, but left before graduating.
Hayes had been working in the Natural History Museum office for several years when he learned about the discussions with Great Gull Island about what to do. When she heard that at least one museum donor was interested in supporting field research on terns, she jumped at the chance.
Hayes was not married and had no children. Her brother is her only immediate survivor.
Hayes was a volunteer at the museum. It gave her office space, but she raised all her own funds. Perhaps her biggest skill was to persuade so many people to work for her without spending any money on an island near Baren in the middle of summer.
Under her command, the Great Gallery Island Project became a close-knit community. Marriage came from the burdened relationship between terns. And at least one parent who volunteered as a student sent his own son to volunteer with Hayes decades later.
“She inspired people,” said Joel L. Clacraft, a museum ornithologist. “Helen did it all.”
