Pennsylvania officials recently embarked on a risky — but ultimately successful — plan to bring a highly endangered bird back to the state, NorthcentralPA reported.
In spite of its name, the common tern was considered "extirpated," or completely lost, from Pennsylvania between 1985 and 1999, at which point a single pair returned. However, terns have not been able to successfully reproduce in the state ever since.
Earlier this year, several groups including state agencies came together to determine how best to help the terns lay eggs, hatch those eggs, and protect their young until they were old enough to protect themselves.
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The solution they came up with was to build a sort of open-roofed fort around a tern nest in order to keep predators at bay. In previous years, young terns had hatched but had quickly been eaten by predators.
The plan had no guarantee of success. "It was a dicey plan," said endangered bird specialist Patti Barber of the Game Commission Wildlife Recovery Division. "With only a single nesting pair on the beach, these birds do not tolerate disturbance and are very likely to abandon the nest."
Ultimately, however, the eggs hatched and the birds fledged — an event that had not been recorded in Pennsylvania since the 1960s.
The successful efforts to help a native species that was once completely absent from the state highlight several things, including that humans — which are largely responsible for a great many plant and animal species being driven from their homes — also have the capacity to help those species return and recover provided they have not already been driven to extinction.
It also highlights the outside-the-box thinking that has been necessary in many of these cases. In order to bring common terns back to the state, officials were not able to simply dump some eggs on the beach and wait. They instead had to get creative, and their efforts were rewarded with Pennsylvania's first native-born young common terns in a half century.
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