You think you know a place, and then you don’t visit for eight or nine years, and things start to feel a little foreign.
I’m talking about the Dry Tortugas.
I’ve probably been there 30 or 40 times. Back in the day I used to guide birdwatchers out there on multiday trips. And I used to help with the Christmas Bird Count when they had one. And I’ve made a lot of day trips. But I couldn’t tell you exactly the last time I had made the trip.
It’s not totally my fault. In olden times you could buy a ferry ticket the day before and head out there. You could be practically spontaneous. But in recent years, you have to get your tickets months in advance, especially for the peak songbird migration time in late April and early May. Planning that far ahead is not one of my core strengths.
So when someone offered me a last-minute ticket recently, I did not hesitate.
Seeing the fort materialize as a faint visage on the horizon, then solidify as we got closer warmed my heart a bit, though the day was pretty hot already. The first birds of the trip, if you don’t count the magnificent frigatebirds we’d been seeing periodically on the way out, were the masked boobies, distant pale dots flying over East Key, the first of the sandy islands north of Fort Jefferson.
The first birds we had good looks at were the sooty terns, dozens and dozens of them, two-toned denizens of the open ocean, their markings sharply demarcated, black on top, white below. They flew bouncy little flight lines, mostly over the foredeck of the ferry, but occasionally skirting the bow just above the water. Mixed in, about every 15th or 20th bird, were brown noddies, generally the same size and shape, but a more uniform chocolate brown with a white crown on their round head.
The Dry Tortugas are the only place in North America where sooty terns and brown noddies have significant breeding colonies. It’s also the only place in North America where masked boobies and magnificent frigatebirds breed. There are probably 100 masked boobies, 4,500 brown noddies, and 100,000 sooty terns.
The magnificent frigatebird colony there had never been huge – maybe 100 breeding pairs and a lot of non-breeders – but I’d heard from multiple people that Hurricane Irma, and the storms that followed, did a lot of damage to the small cluster of buttonwoods and other foliage that they relied on for nesting. But I didn’t realize the extent of it until we approached and all that was left were a handful of limbless, leafless trunks, though a small number of frigatebirds were still making use of them.
I looked for brown boobies on the channel markers, but only saw more brown noddies and a lone osprey, who was shredding bits of flesh off the fish he held in his talons, throwing his head back to gulp them down.
As we pulled up to the dock we could see a small group of men and boys posing with a 6-foot hammerhead shark they’d caught and pulled up onto the sargassum where they were taking photos. By the time the boat had tied up they’d dragged it back into the water and we watched as it swam slowly away below the shimmering surface of the water.
I had been out there in early June a few times, and one of the things I remember was seeing all the young sooty terns – more grayish than black, with rows of white polka dots across their wings and backs – clustered together on the shoreline, or under a sea lavender bush, as if they were in daycare. But this was late June and the difference was the young birds could fly. They didn’t seem to be heading out over the water much, but they were zipping around over Garden Key on their newly functional wings.
One of the old-school names for sooty terns was the wide-awake bird, because their call sounds kinda sorta like someone with a speech impediment and vocal chord damage yelling “wide awake” over and over again.
As I set foot on land, I looked up to see a juvenile sooty tern flying around with an adult. The adult made the wide-awake call, and a second later the juvenile made the same call, but at a much higher pitch. I watched until they disappeared into a small kettle of frigatebirds and other sooties.
Garden Key, the island where the three-story brick fort is, and Bush Key, the island where the sooties and noddies breed, have had a tumultuous relationship, the space between them slowly silting in, then getting blown out by a hurricane every decade or two. But the connection between them has been filling in for close to 20 years in this latest part of the cycle, and it is broader than I have ever seen.
Both the sooty and noddy colonies have spilled over onto Garden Key, and the park staff have had to rope off parts of the island where you used to be able to walk. Not that the birds were paying the rope any mind. There were a dozen juveniles huddled together under the nearest picnic table. And a nearby boat trailer was loaded with 40 or 50 adults sitting on it, and another 30 juveniles underneath.
Many of the birds that weren’t in the shade were standing with their bills open (birds, like dogs, dissipate heat through their open mouths) and their wings slightly drooped (a way to allow more airflow over the body) to try and stay cool.
When the sooty terns are present – from February through August in recent years – there tends to be a corona of avian chaos over Bush Key, hundreds if not thousands of birds all on their own missions. It was hard to make out the demographics of all that. But the kettle that had been swirling over Garden Key had grown in the last 10 or 15 minutes, growing from about 40 birds to about 200. In it were five or 10 frigatebirds, with the rest being a seemingly even mix of juvenile and adult sooties.
Sooty terns are precocial and can walk the day they hatch. It takes eight to 10 weeks until they are ready to fly. Once they can, they will start out over land, then make longer and longer forays out over the water. After about 18 days they will set out and not come back, spending the next three or four years in the air, not setting down on the land again until they are adults and ready, or at least near ready, to breed themselves.
The oldest sooty tern ever known lived to be 34. The oldest known bird at the Tortugas was 32. While they tend to return to the colony when they are 3 or 4, most don’t breed until they are 6, and their peak breeding years are thought to be between the ages of 12 and 20.
Seeing all those sooties again made me feel slightly reconnected to the place. Despite not having been out there for so long, there was a good chance I was seeing birds I may have seen in years past. Though it would be pretty hard to say exactly which ones.
