How many, many times I have watched people walk right past protective barriers, right past the most beautiful interpretive signage we can create, straight into the tiny spaces we have managed to set aside for the wild birds to nest. Not everyone can be told what to do and then simply left to their own devices.  A commitment to kindness and respect has to come from some deeper cultural training. Perhaps you have to be raised up in it.   Somehow we must make this happen, because, as Kathleen Dean Moore has written, “This is the wonder-filled world that we are destroying, the lyric voices that we are silencing, the sanctity that we are defiling, at a rate and with a violence that cannot be measured.”

Until people change their minds, deeply, deeply change, and understand and respect the equivalent needs of all species for life, all we can rely on is law enforcement. The enforcers–wildlife officers and volunteer stewards (and there are never enough of them) –are all we have to keep people out of the sacred nesting places. Otherwise, ignorance and the desire to do whatever one pleases, rules, and wild things suffer.

“My heart sinks when the least terns arrive in April and begin breeding—or trying to,” a shorebird biologist told me.  I understand his trepidation:  the little birds’ pugnacity is no match for beach driving trucks, dogs, fireworks, and every manner of human intrusion into their nesting beaches.  Shorebirds and seabirds are declining everywhere they exist, and some are already gone.

Like so many wild birds, least tern populations were destroyed by hunters who shot them, to use their feathers to adorn women’s hats.  When the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed in 1916, and people began to change their attitudes toward conservation, least tern bounced back.  But now, they are again so diminished by recreational, industrial, and residential development in their coastal breeding areas, they are specially classified for protection in much of its North American range. No other wide-ranging North American tern has that unfortunate distinction.

Our task is to watch over the world with such care.

What is the single most important thing that every one of us should do right now, given all that confronts us?

It is this: Don’t turn away.  Face what threatens the unborn of all species with all of your strength and all of your heart.

We live in a time when the rights of humans and corporations supersede the rights of nature. This is what must change.

On a hot summer day, I searched out the last snowy plover chick hatched on the island Refuge that season.  In its small roving body rested the last chance this year for our landscape to contribute to continuity of plovers, a single bird begun as an egg laid on this very sand.

I’d seen that chick and her parent on an earlier survey one week before, near the outfall of Oyster Creek.  Just now, though, the beach seemed empty of everything but trash, and more trash.  I picked up two enormous loads of plastic bottles and balloons. I saw no chick.  I assumed it had been snatched by gull or ghost crab, vanished like all the others this season into the belly of a predator.

I circled back toward the east, and Little St. George Island, to continue the search.  And there she was, flashing across the strand, her tiny body skittering, zigging and zagging, as she snapped at small flies.  I followed her path with my binoculars, and she led me to a glorious surprise: 150 black terns, paused on their southbound journey to winter on the coast of South America.  To my eye, they resembled small ebony sails temporarily furled.  Sleek and gray and unexpected on the white of our sand.  I’d never seen so many before.

It was a good place for that plover chick, threading through those black terns and a handful of others—least, Caspian, royal, gull-billed—all paused on the outer edge, between their summer and winter lands.  I saw many fewer ghost crabs on the evanescent edge. The absence of their swift claws would give the chick a better shot at survival.  Still: the last of the chicks, the last of the black terns. 

In the 1920s, Arthur Bent described the black tern as the “most widely distributed, the most universally common, and most characteristic summer resident of the sloughs, marshes and wet meadows of the [Dakota] plains.”  Since the 1960s, black terns have been declining at the rate of two or three percent each year.  I have seen them only here, and on the leading edge of Little Saint George, their wings beating while the tips of their toes still touched the Refuge, itself disappearing, as well. 

And yet, would I turn away from them?  Never.  We must linger longer, watching the beautiful things, watch them with exquisite attention, praying that their spirits will inform our actions on their behalf, and our own.

As the sun began to angle into the sea, I thought about how our planet and our sun had created this palette uncounted nightfalls, long before the plovers or I were born. Earth has turned in far lonelier eons, without bird or human. I staggered under a gratitude so weighty, I had to sink to my heels, for I had the privilege to share this time with the birds.

The flaming sun lit up the whole of my face.  The wind lifted my hair.  I closed my eyes and became simply another breathing presence on the sand.  No boundaries.

In our saltwater and bones bodies, each one of us loves the birds this much. They companion us at this time on the planet, weavers of air current and nest cup. Their songs were our first music as a species, their call notes the first living patterns on our collective human eardrum.  We learned percussion from the woodpecker, and to scream from the eagle, and to sing complicated melody from the warbler and the thrush.

Just as our bodies are constructed of the dust of stars, they also carry the memory of a time when our lives were always with the birds, out under the spread of the sky, when we lived without separation.

Earth must not be impeded by our destructive greed—whole populations, whole species, whole ecosystems, those we must and can protect.  We live in a time when the rights of humans and corporations supersede the rights of nature.  This is what must change.  Transforming our culture, our assumptions, our worldview, our cosmology of separation, our economies–that is the single bird we must heal.