There’s a common trope in TV and movies referred to as the Clipboard of Authority, in which a character looking to bamboozle access to someplace they don’t belong grabs a clipboard and a pen, acts in charge, and scams their way in. It’s a nice trope, but it doesn’t always work in the real world, even if your clipboard usage is legit.
For instance, there was this time I was doing a Christmas Bird Count up on Big Pine, dutifully writing down all my sightings on a clipboard full of data sheets. I was getting back into my car after surveying one of the neighborhoods, about to drive away, when someone in a truck came in, blocked my exit, and started demanding to know which agency of the government I was spying for. I suppose I could have just told him what I was doing, but I was annoyed and ornery enough that I just gave him a lot of vague and inconclusive answers, because it’s pretty much impossible to convince the conspiratorially minded of anything (see: recent history) and, also, bite me if you think your paranoia gives you the right to control other people’s access to public space.
My friend Ellen Westbrook, who in the summers roams around Key West at least once a week with a clipboard, says people generally leave her alone. Though there was that time she was sitting in her car at a shopping center, occasionally lifting her binoculars, and someone came out of a bar with a hammer in their hand demanding to know if she was a private investigator, and after she said no, she was just counting the least terns nesting on the roof of the building, demanded to know why she didn’t have a badge to do that. (She said, pfft, they don’t even give us T-shirts.)
Ellen and I were talking about this, her eyes aiming upward the whole time, while we were standing on the sidewalk across from the Federal Building on Simonton Street. She did, in fact, have a clipboard in hand. She also had a silver clicker, a pen, a pair of binoculars, and a big, floppy hat to survive the heat.
Ellen has been volunteering to do surveys of least terns nesting on rooftops for the last seven years, even last summer, when her beloved maroon PT Cruiser died and she spent months waiting for it to be resurrected. (It ultimately was not.)
“I was doing all this stuff on my bicycle. I just about melted. It takes about two hours to do the rounds. And I’d get home after those two hours baked, well, broiled,” she said. (She has a sporty new Toyota with some damn fine air-conditioning now.)
There was a lot of activity above, a lot of avian chaos, but she didn’t hit the clicker every time a least tern flew over, or every time one took off. She was methodical, patient, only clicking when one landed on the roof. Consistency is key.
As their name suggests, least terns are small birds, about 9 inches from tip to tail, with an enthusiastic, oft-given call that sounds like they swallowed a small squeaky toy. They move with such lightness that every time I see one I have to fight off the delusion that their insides are filled not with muscles, bones and organs but with styrofoam.
In theory, least terns are beach nesters. But in Florida, as development has made beaches less and less suitable for them over the last century, they changed their ways, adapting instead to nest on manmade tar and gravel roofs. There are a number of such colonies in Key West, though not as many as there used to be.
All the data Ellen collects goes into a statewide database run by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in order to monitor the health of the species’ population.
“Tar and gravel roofs are pretty old. And they’re not gonna make another tar and gravel roof when it fails. They’re going to do something else. But I think this is going to be the last roof standing, because it’s so solid,” Ellen said.
Ellen said that once, when she was standing on the sidewalk, one of the security staff came over. She said she was about to explain what she was doing when they invited her inside to look at the colony through their array of rooftop cameras – rows of birds, just outside of pecking range of each other, sitting on eggs. She said they’d taken a real sense of ownership of the colony.
Least tern chicks are precocial, which means they can walk around almost as soon as they’re born. Which means they occasionally walk off the side of a roof. (They are evolved to be hatched on beaches, not cliffs.) The folks at the Key West Wildlife Center, where Ellen also volunteers, have a thing called a “chickaboom” which is basically a small basket on a long pole that they can use to put chicks back when they fall off the roof.
She said that at the Federal Building, “They don’t call us when birds fall off, they just bring them back up themselves.”
After 15 minutes of standing there, the alarm on Ellen’s phone went off. She totaled things up and said she’d counted 39 birds.
“Last week I got 119 at this site. Before that, 145. Two hundred before that,” Ellen said.
There hadn’t been any major storms, so it looked like a lot of birds had fledged. The season was winding down.
We were starting to walk away when a car pulled up. It was Mike, who was in charge of security across the street.
He and Ellen talked for a bit. Ellen said she’d just counted 39 birds.
“That’s about what’s up there sitting,” Mike said. But then he added that there were about 20 birds up there sitting on eggs.
“That might be a second brood,” Ellen said.
The roof was probably going to be active for another six or seven weeks.
“A second group is gonna come,” Mike said, then waved and headed off.
We went on to Ellen’s next rooftop.
