In spring 2026, Quinn Burkhart, LIS Partnership’s science communicator, spent a day on Great Gull Island in Long Island Sound following a group of dedicated volunteers engaged in helping to protect the island’s roseate and common tern populations.
It’s a bright, early morning at the boat launch in New London, CT, but the atmosphere is anything but quiet. Twenty-five student volunteers, mostly undergraduates, wait for their ride to Great Gull Island, an impressive roster for a late April weekend just before finals. By 8 a.m., the Aubrey Joy, a commercial fishing boat owned by Captain Seth’s Sportfishing and sometimes used for transport to the island, is cruising across Long Island Sound. A box of donuts makes its way around. Every so often, someone calls out when birds come into view, and binoculars rise. Some students close their eyes and tilt their heads back, grateful for the early spring sun.
The ride feels light, but the mission is urgent. This boat ride is more than just fun; these volunteers are going to help prepare a fragile island refuge for common and roseate terns, the latter one of the most endangered seabirds in the United States. Despite exams looming, even the University of Connecticut’s birding club, a crew of more than 12, has come to help. Volunteers wear clothes that have not had contact with livestock, an effort to minimize the chance of transmitting bird flu.
The ghostly Great Gull Island comes into view under a moody sky. The boat eases toward a dock extending more than 30 feet out to sea, a landing that requires calm water to avoid a hard crash against the structure. Between weather conditions and scheduling constraints, many of these graduate student volunteers have waited years for the chance to get here.
Humans have heavily influenced Great Gull Island’s natural habitat. Throughout the 19th century, Great Gull was a thriving roseate tern colony of more than 7,000 breeding pairs. The US government took control of the island in 1896, transforming it into a military base known as Fort Michie. Completed with an underground tunnel system, human activity escalated until terns were forced to abandon their home.
The American Museum of Natural History later bought the island for a dollar in 1949, promising to restore the seabird colonies.
Since that restoration began, thousands of roseate as well as common terns have returned to the island. Despite this success, concern remains that the island’s ecosystem could collapse under bigger threats. In 2022, partners at the University of Connecticut and University of Rhode Island applied for a Long Island Sound Partnership Futures Fund grant to create the island’s first conservation plan. Priorities include protection against erosion, predation, disease, and the island’s failing infrastructure from humans.
Achieving this plan requires as many hands as possible.
An Evolving Landscape
The island staff greets the volunteers as they land. The island is quiet during the pre-season. Soon, that quiet will be overwhelmed by tern squawks, eggs hatching, and chicks feeding.
Approximately 4,000 breeding pairs of roseate terns survive in northeastern North America, and roughly 2,800 of those pairs nest on Great Gull Island. These terns like to nest in boulder fields along the shore, threatened by rising seas. If this island’s ecosystem fails, the species loses one of its most important remaining strongholds. The species is listed as endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Joan Walsh, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, and Margaret Rubega, a biologist at the University of Connecticut, coordinators of the island’s research, warned the students before departure that there was no guarantee they would see birds. It is early in the season, before the full nesting colony has arrived. But the absence of birds today is a good thing. A window of time, barely a month, between snow and spring migration provides the only time to restore the island. And there is a lot of restoring to be done.
As one volunteer put it, the Army “didn’t do a good job of cleaning up after themselves.”
That evidence is everywhere. Great Gull overflows not with marine debris, but with shingles, bricks, utensils, glass bottles, and chunks of old piping. The structures slowly disintegrate year after year, leaving fresh rubble after every winter.
One University of Connecticut volunteer, Sydney Horan, is almost impressed by the long shadow of human influence far under her feet. The volunteers occasionally hit the military’s old tarmac while digging for debris. “And yet, the terns are still here,” she marvels.
For a bird, or any wildlife, to live safely here, the island must be cleaned up and restored before every summer.
“The island would strongly benefit from several weekends where 30 people come out here to work, and stay overnight, but the island is too poor in resources for that,” said Rubega. “It’s a frustrating situation.”
All in a Day’s Work
There’s little time for island appreciation before the first task begins. Another boat has arrived with 250 new wooden nesting boxes, funded by the Long Island Sound Partnership’s Futures Fund. Managing the production of the boxes is a joint effort from Margaret, Joan, and their colleague, Peter Paton, from the University of Rhode Island.
Volunteers and island crew form a human chain down the dock, passing the boxes hand to hand toward shore. It takes 25 to tango.
The boxes are a small intervention to solve a much bigger issue. Like razorbills and puffins, roseate terns raise their families under boulder berms. Great Gull’s shores have plenty of cliff-side boulder fields but rising sea levels threaten to wash eggs and chicks out from under them. Island scientists recognized that risk years ago and began testing manmade alternatives. One design, called a “pup tent,” resembled an A-frame cabin with no front or back walls. The terns nested in some pup tents, but not as many as square boxes.
The new boxes are about the size of a shoebox. With four walls and a small access point, they provide more warmth and protection for the terns.
Once the boxes, affectionately dubbed “terniture,” are unloaded, the volunteers cart them to the eastern side of the island. Each pup tent is retired and broken down for reuse. Sturdier boxes take their place overlooking the water, side by side. Volunteers record this data in an online app that tracks the island’s progress.
Andrew, a senior from the University of Rhode Island, laughs as he records the box placements.
“It looks like a trailer park for terns.”
It is a trailer park the crew hopes will stand the test of a changing climate.
On the other side of the island, volunteers pull invasive plants from the ground, replacing them with native goldenrods. Dead vegetation is cleared away.
Any volunteer whose back is beginning to hurt can opt to help install bird blind covers. On Great Gull, blinds are six-foot tall platforms used for seeing birds closely but obscurely. Ocean wind blows the cover in the wind as volunteers crouch on ladders to get it rigged securely.
Meanwhile, laughter erupts between groups. Volunteers stand up to stretch, covered in dirt from their boots to their fingernails. The morning blurs to early afternoon.
There is no denying the work is strenuous. But out here, a sore back is the best sign of progress.
“The Island is Trying So Hard to Fall Apart.”
Margaret sits with the student volunteers outside of the research shack. The building used to be a place where the Army developed designs for bombs. Now, it has a propane kitchen and workspace areas with laptops scattered about. There is a real refrigerator, and Starlink Wi-Fi. It’s not the first time Margaret has enjoyed lunch watching a new group of young people grow attached to Great Gull. The same thing happened to her as a teenager, under the guidance of Helen Hays, an ornithologist and Great Gull legend who oversaw the museum’s Great Gull Island Project for decades and died in 2025 at 94.
Over the course of more than 50 years, many of them under Hays’ tutelage, dozens of crews spent months, and years, of their lives living on the island to work on restoring bird habitat and bird populations. Margaret tells stories of life on the island before there was internet. She mentions an island lunch tradition, the Culver Williams Sandwich, started by a student crew member from Yale in 1945: peanut butter, jelly, and sardines. A more modern tradition—double Oreos with peanut butter on the sides—is quickly thought to be a more appetizing idea by volunteers.
Students finish a lunch of cheeseburgers, cookies, and grapes before returning to chores and mingling.
Joan hangs back a moment to chat. It’s difficult for her to know how much work there is to do on the island that will never truly be done. But it’s a labor of love.
“The island is trying so hard to fall apart, and we are doing what we can to push it back together. Sometimes it feels like it might collapse. But at the end of the day, we’re doing this for the birds. That love is the driving force for this island’s success. We all have that.”
A Bright Future
The boat arrives back at the island to collect the volunteers, who are now a little sweaty, tired, and ready for a snack. But the group’s renewed energy is impossible to miss.
One volunteer expresses that in a world of such intense change and conflict, it is hard to find ways to feel like one has been effective. But by taking part in a day of work to support a beloved seabird species, she remembers that even her smallest actions have effects.
Birds will start returning to the island in a matter of days. Within two weeks, the spectacles of returning birds and new chicks will be prevalent.
The island staff is momentarily unsure how the nesting boxes will do. There’s a lot about the season of which to be unsure. That’s island life.
As Horan puts it, a day of improving the island helps both humans and wildlife. Especially for humans who are enthusiastic about birds.
“Everything in an ecosystem connects, and birding can help you appreciate that bigger picture. I do feel strongly that everyone should have at least one hobby that brings them out into the natural world. It will surprise you how much it enriches the rest of your life, even if the connection doesn’t seem obvious at first.”
If volunteers cleared just one patch of land and increased their island appreciation, then it was a laborious day well spent.
To be continued.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), in cooperation with the Long Island Sound Partnership, has opened the LIS Futures Fund 2026 request for proposals. Full proposals are due May 19th, 2026 at 11:59 PM, EDT. The review period runs through the fall, with award announcements anticipated for November, subject to change. Proposal Labs, for those interested in seeking guidance from NFWF experts on their projects, are ongoing through April 30th. Links to the proposal request and to register for a lab are below.
The Future Fund grant program, launched in 2005 by NFWF, the LIS Partnership, and EPA, supports efforts to test innovative approaches to conservation, as well as supporting people and communities who value the Long Island Sound Watershed and take a direct role in its future.
Project types range broadly, from habitat restoration planning or implementation in the Long Island Sound coastal zone, resilience, education, water quality and fish passage projects in the Long Island Sound boundary in Connecticut and New York, and nitrogen prevention or reduction planning and implementation projects in the Long Island Sound watershed boundary in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. There is a potential total funding of $12 million for projects with individual grants ranging between $50,000 to $2 million.
Funding priorities support the goals of the LIS Partnership’s Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan:
For more information and to submit a proposal, click here. Register here to book an LISFF 2026 Proposal Lab appointment.
Note: this article, originally published on March 4th, 2026, has been updated to include information on the LSFF 2026 Request for Proposals. All information is accurate as of March 11th, 2026.
The spring 2022 issue of Sound Update focuses on Long Island Sound Partnership’s Year in Review of 2021. Various clean water, habitat restoration, education, and science projects from Connecticut and New York are highlighted, including the new Long Island Sound Marine Debris Action Plan, Community Science Long Island 2021, and the latest findings on hypoxia in the Sound.
The spring 2021 issue of Sound Update focuses on Long Island Sound Partnership’s Year in Review of 2020. Various clean water, habitat restoration, education, and science projects from Connecticut and New York are highlighted.
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