Cape Cod History

1988: Port of Call for a million birds (and a few seals)

  This photo by Paul Rifkin illustrates the "crowded conditions" on Monomoy Island which is now a wading distance from Morris Island in Chatham. The inset is a blow-up of the portion of the larger photo showing thousands of seals a dozen deep along the shoreline. Seals eat up to three-times their own weight in fish every day.

On this week twenty years ago, the New York Times was telling readers about the millions of birds which land here on their way south for the winter;

Port of Call for Birds Off Cape Cod's Elbow
Monomoy is crowded with mitrating birds this month

As an open launch approached the northern beach of Monomoy's north island, the passengers crowded into the cockpit raised a dozen pairs of binoculars to a dozen pairs of eyes. It was low tide. To the south and west on the tidal flats of Nantucket Sound, an immense congregation of shore and sea birds probed the shallows with bills of every contour and size.

Through August and September, at the height of the southward migration, as many as 10,000 birds may touch down on the landing strips around the island until a predator like a peregrine falcon or a hawk sends them flapping.

For each of us this trip, sponsored by the Massachusetts Audubon Society and led by Verdie Abel, ranger-naturalist from the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, had been eagerly anticipated. Monomoy was named a wildlife refuge in 1944, and most of it was designated a wilderness area by the Federal Government in 1970, one of the few on the East Coast.

Monomoy Island, a total of eight miles long and in parts as skinny as one-quarter of a mile, dangles from the ''elbow'' of Cape Cod at Chatham like a tail detached and broken in two. ''Monomoy never stays the same two days in a row,'' said Wallace Bailey, former director of the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Just as it has been built and molded by waves, it has simultaneously been pounded, nibbled away and broken by them. Over the years it has been sometimes a peninsula, sometimes an island or two; since a blizzard in 1978, it has been two islands.

During two centuries, a fishing village, hunting and fishing camps, a lighthouse, lifesaving stations and a World War II bombing range have flourished and vanished. Except for the 1828 lighthouse decommissioned in 1923, little trace of these endeavors has survived sea, salt and sand.

The island has become a major port of call for tens of thousands of migrating birds along the Atlantic Coast. In late May and early June shore and sea birds in resplendent mating plumage pass in a brief rush to the northern breeding grounds. By July 4 early nesters have already returned to Monomoy. Through August and September, at the height of the southward migration, as many as 10,000 birds may touch down on the landing strips around the island until a predator like a peregrine falcon or a hawk sends them flapping. By November dense throngs of ducks and geese raft on the water.

Our six-hour north island trips in late August provided an exceptionally concentrated spectacle of massed bird life. Far fewer trips, each lasting seven hours, are scheduled to the more remote south island. There, behind the barrier of low dunes, a surprising variety of terrain and life has developed -freshwater marshes and ponds, over 175 species of plants, land and water birds, a few mammals and traces of human settlement.

We had been warned that the trips involved slow slogging through wet and dry sand, wading in marshes, no shelter and no sanitary facilities. ''You have to experience Monomoy at close hand to understand it,'' explained Mr. Abel as he led us through the low-lying dunes ceaselessly pushed west by winds and waves toward the tidal flats of Nantucket Sound. In some places a papery mat colored from brown to rust to rose underlay the austere landscape of bent beach grass, the straggly false heather that Thoreau called ''poverty grass,'' and the tendrils of beach pea. Our guide peeled off a layer of this underpad; it had the look of cardboard - a remnant of an ancient salt marsh.

Across the modern salt marsh of green and golden grasses, we reached our quarry and were soon wading through the intertidal pools. Our guide set up his viewing scope and soon the game of ''What's that bird?'' began in earnest, often won by an Englishwoman whose knowledge of our shore birds was daunting. With many birds losing their brilliant plumage and appearing in the dun shades of winter, recognition was tricky.

Nearest us in the shallows, small birds called semipalmated plovers with their distinctive necklaces picked their way along the grassy margin. Intermingled with them were the smallest sandpipers - semipalmated, least or spotted variety - with their almost indistinguishable streaky brown backs, and the fleet sanderlings that played hide-and-seek with the waves. Beyond them the sharp-eyed among us picked out the ruddy turnstone with its orange wings and black-masked face and breast with black markings; the short-billed dowitchers air-hammering the flats; the Hudsonian godwit with its stilt legs and long, straight bill slightly turned up at the end; the beautiful black-bellied plovers with their black and white fish-scale backs, and the stocky red knots. ''In the days when shore birds were shot in the millions, the knot was known as the robin snipe or robin-breasted sandpiper,'' said Mr. Abel.

His words were a reminder of how close we came to losing this great migration spectacle forever. When the early explorers reached the east coast of North America, the shore birds wheeled over the beaches and salt marshes in great moving clouds that seemed inexhaustible. But by the 19th century, sportsmen bringing down the birds in thousands for ''fun'' and hunters gathering them for food and feathers had turned the flyways into a shooting gallery. As a sample of the level of destruction, 8,000 golden plovers and Eskimo curlews were shot on Monomoy in a single day.

With the passenger pigeon gone forever, the Eskimo curlew reduced to a phantom and the masses of waterfowl to a scattering, conservationists finally persuaded the Government to act. By the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds in the United States and Canada in 1916, shooting of most shore birds was prohibited and hunting for ducks and geese for personal use, rather than for sale, was limited to the fall.

While the shore birds have staged an astonishing recovery in the last 70 years, competition for scarce beach space has created new stresses. ''Birds and people both like beaches,'' said Mr. Abel. ''Because terns and piping plovers like to nest at the high-water line, they are vulnerable to the human crush in summer.''

After eating the lunches we had packed, we crossed a tidal stream called Broad Channel. Our shoes sank into a rich black mud that coated us to the hems of our jeans.

We had heard that the glossy ibis, a secretive southern species, had been sighted near some marshes. ''That's the great thing about birding here,'' said Mr. Abel. ''We are at the northern limits for southern birds like the ibis and the southern limits for northern birds.'' The ibis eluded us, however.

Later, heading north on the Atlantic side, our guide turned toward the sandy area of the back dunes, ignoring a series of signs warning, ''Nesting birds. Keep off.'' The terns had long gone. ''No need to worry about the gulls,'' he said as they screamed over our heads. ''Before 1963 there were no gulls' nests on Monomoy - now there are 3,000, one of the largest colonies on the continent, conveniently close to people and their garbage.'' We identified laughing and great black-backed varieties, as well as the ubiquitous herring gulls.

A few dark, fuzzy gull chicks dived into the beach grass but most of them had left the nests. ''The manager of the sanctuary breaks up the gulls' nests three times a year and every time they come back,'' Mr. Abel said. ''No wonder they are so successful - they are very good parents, very persistent and very intelligent. The terns are too finicky. They built 1,200 nests this year but for some reason raised no chicks here.''

He scooped up what is called a gull pellet, in this case a mass of compacted paper towel, crinkled aluminum foil and peach and plum pits. ''You see how they get rid of whatever is not nourishing,'' he said. ''They can ingest peanut butter from a broken jar at the dump and then regurgitate the broken glass.''

As we returned to the northern beach, we were surprised at how the day had passed and how many forms of life we have seen on our windswept sandbar.

Ten days later on a Sunday morning, six adventurers led by Henning Stabins, a biology student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, landed on the south island. ''I'd better explain about the poison ivy,'' he told us. ''You can't get away from it on the south island. At the end of the day, I just wash it off in salt water. Some people say it doesn't work, but so far it has for me.'' As we landed, the top of the lighthouse appeared above the dunes. The lighthouse is more than a mile inland from the end of the island. When its oil-fired 23,000-candlepower beacon was first lighted in 1828, the lighthouse apparently did stand at the end of the island. But the ocean kept sweeping sand down drom Nauset Beach, widening and curling the tip inward, sometimes adding 150 feet of land a year. By the 1860's the harbor that had supported the fishing village on the west side had silted up, driving the inhabitants back to Chatham.

We planned a roundabout route past the freshwater ponds that were originally inlets at the edge of the harbor; as the land built up around them they filled with rainwater. Within minutes we had passed through the first ring of beach grass into a new and positively lush environment, a marsh, slip-sloppy underfoot. All about us between the clumps of sedge were splashes of pinkish-purple flowers called salt-marsh fleabane, which emits a camphory fragrance.

We left the marsh for a drier zone of the dunes set in from the shore, and noted poison ivy underfoot, coiled, shiny triple-leaved vines brushed with the first fire-alarm red of autumn. We were surrounded by low unbroken hedges and bayberry, one of the first shrubs to colonize the dunes. Here the perilously attractive poison ivy had climbed up and completely interlaced the branches.

''We'll just have to cut through; I'll pick the best spot,'' said our guide. The sight that greeted us on the other side was worth the price. Fringed by a green border of reeds and rushes was a pond about one-third of a mile long with a convention of ducks sitting in the far corner. Hovering over the grassy edges a couple of marsh hawks (now called northern harriers) conducted their unceasing search for the mouselike meadow voles, one of the few resident mammals.

As we started around the pond, Mr. Stabins pointed to a line of four glossy ibses, brown-black birds with necks outstretched and bills curved down like sickles.

Now the impressions were arriving almost too fast; binoculars shifted and eyes tried to adjust to each new call of ''Over there, quick!'' Someone picked out the sooty body of a black tern - a bird visiting from the Midwest; another distinguished the beak and eye mask identify a Forster's tern that had wandered up from the south.

Then a glorious white presence was afloat among the ducks. This was the native whistling swan with its long straight neck - the one immortalized by E. B. White's ''Trumpet of the Swan,'' not the curved-necked escapee from a stately home that has lately become a beautiful pest in coastal bays.

A very tall bird with an egret's improbable S-curved neck stood among the reeds. ''The great egret,'' explained Mr. Stabins. ''After breeding in the Carolinas, they often wander around up here before heading back south.''

As we rounded a corner, we found that our pond had an even larger twin and that we were standing on a narrow beach between. They are Little Station and Big Station, the largest freshwater ponds on the island. Lots of snowy egrets and a couple of towering great blue herons scooped up fish and mollusks. Behind the pond the red and white tower of the lighthouse seemed closer.

We toiled over dunes; as if in a mirage the lighthouse - and lunch -seemed to come no closer. Along the way new islands of life kept emerging. In one bayberry clump a telltale rustling and shifting suggested warblers; sure enough we caught sight of the prairie warbler and the American redstart executing their acrobatic round dance from branch to branch in search of insects.

Once through a daunting head-high bayberry-poison ivy hedge, we found the hulk of an old sailing ship, caught in the pond since the harbor silted up over 100 years ago. With our binoculars we closed in on another green-fringed pond where the glossy ibis were intently feeding. Almost as if they could sense our gaze, they took off for a more private place. Immediately a streak of brown, a muffled thud of bounding hoofs and a deer, airborne, swished by us. Above us a wedge of assorted ducks was heading from one pond to another. Our guide pointed out his favorite ducks, the gray gadwalls. These speedy ducks, starting near the rear of the pack, took off like thoroughbreds and streaked through to finish first.

Then over another of Monomoy's small ponds a large streaky brown bird hovered, its flight irregular and punctuated by erratic and noiseless darts - a short-eared owl. In our glasses we could make out the flattened face with the smudgy dark eye rings, which give an appropriately sinister look to this scourge of meadow voles.

At last no dunes separated the lighthouse from us. Built of brick sheathed in steel, it stands next to the boarded-up gray clapboard house of the keeper. Vandals had left their mark - all glass long gone. Pieces of the sheathing have rusted or broken away. But the lighthouse is now scheduled for restoration. Meanwhile the adventurous can find their way in to climb the iron circular staircase for a splendid view as far as Nantucket, 30 miles out to sea.

Feeling like explorers who have arrived at a hotel bar after months in the bush, we sat down to lunch on the sunny steps leading to the lighthouse. We blinked at the approach of a party with an aura of the city about them. Considering the terrain we had survived, we were astonished to see them barefoot and in shorts. One young woman looked reproachful when told there was poison ivy everywhere.

After lunch we made our way back to the shore via the Powderhole, remnant of of a harbor isolated from the sound by an arm of sand. On the beach more people had arrived by boat to do their own clam digging or just to court suntans. At three o'clock our boat was to meet us here.

''What happens,'' I asked, ''if the weather is so bad the captain feels he can't risk the trip?'' We had been warned of this possibility.

''You have to walk five miles to the northern end to be picked up as we did a couple of weeks ago. Takes about two and a half hours.''

Later I discussed Monomoy with Jeff Russell, a guide who runs a year-round ferry service from Chatham for birdwatchers. He spoke of the off-season pleasures of Monomoy. ''Late in the fall the shoals are alive with ducks, hundreds of thousands of them. In winter about 1,000 harbor seals come down from Maine, along with a few gray seals: they haul out on the shoals off the north island at low tide. When you land, they are very curious and come right up to you.''

He paused, ''You know what one of the great things about the south island is?'' he said, ''Poison ivy. Serves as a kind of protection.'' ARRANGING A TRIP TO THE WILDLIFE SANCTUARY Getting There Follow U.S. 6 east from the Sagamore Bridge to exit 11, State Route 137 south to the intersection with State Route 28. Continue east on Route 28 to Chatham, then straight ahead on Chatham Main Street bearing right on Shore Road and right again on Morris Island Road. As soon as you cross the bridge to Morris Island, turn left and look for the headquarters of the Wildlife Sanctuary. Tours Suggested attire and equipment for a tripshould include long pants, old shoes and a hat, binoculars, sun screen, sweater or sweat shirt and possibly rain gear. Children who go along should be interested in studying wildlife and willing to spend time walking.

Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge (Morris Island, Chatham, Mass. 02633; 508-945-0594) has a ranger on duty from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. from Memorial Day to Labor Day. You may get a flier with map and sanctuary regulations here, as well as walk around the small part of the refuge on Morris Island. Off season, write or call for information from Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, Northern Boulevard, Plum Island, Newburyport, Mass. 01950; 508-465-5753.

The office of the Massachusetts Audubon Society at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary (Post Office Box 236, South Wellfleet, Mass. 02663; 508-349-2615) arranges tours of Monomoy from mid-April to early December. Schedules are available each spring for the three- and six-hour tours of the north part of Monomoy Island, $30 ($30 for members of the society); seven-hour South Island tour, $45 ($40 for members). Generally, each type of trip is run once a week. Charters may be arranged for 6 to 12 people. Equipment The Bird Watcher's General Store (37 Route 6A, Orleans, Mass. 02653; 508-255-6974) is a stop for bird enthusiasts in the area. Spotting scopes and binoculars are in stock, and the latter may be rented for a Monomoy trip for $2 a day. A full assortment of bird guides, as well as feeders, bird seed, bird baths and gifts with a bird motif line the wall and spill onto the floor. The owner, Mike O'Connor, enjoys sharing his knowledge of the local birding scene and provides a community bulletin board full of birding news.