Doing a Good Turn : Crews Lay Tile Homes for Endangered Least Terns

Carrying a red clay tile that looked as if it belonged on an Irvine roof, Elizabeth McBride looked for a bare spot on a sandy island in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve.

McBride and six colleagues from the California Conservation Corps roamed the wildlife refuge on Wednesday, searching for spots to place the tiles that the endangered least tern will use to shelter its chicks.

“I was just trying to see where another good place for a house might be,” said McBride, 21, of Los Angeles. “I was just thinking, ‘If I were a bird, where would I want to live?’ ”

The work of the Conservation Corps members is part of an effort to protect the California least tern, a tiny gull-like bird that migrates from Central and South America and is expected to arrive at the reserve in about two weeks. “The Bolsa Chica area breeds 50% of least terns left on the face of this Earth,” said Curt Taucher, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game. “If we let that get away from us, we won’t have any terns left.”

Environmentalists are encouraging California taxpayers to make a donation for endangered species such as the least tern on state tax forms. About $910,000 was raised through this campaign last year to benefit rare, threatened and endangered species.

As a flock of sandpipers waded in the nearby marsh, Conservation Corps workers scanned the ground, stepping lightly to avoid crushing the nests of other birds and scouting spots for tiles.

Even though most of the hand-picked team of workers didn’t know what a least tern was before this assignment, they enthusiastically installed the artificial nests for the gray-and-white terns.

“I feel all the animals should be able to live,” said Robert Bolton, 19, of Los Angeles. “They have the same right we do.”

Chrystie Clark said she had helped clean up oil that washed up on beaches after the American Trader spill. She recalled seeing the rescue of an oil-coated gull.

“I’m glad I could come out here again,” said Clark, 20, of Pleasanton, Calif. “You want to do something for (the birds) besides clean up what a human did.”

Nature used to take care of sheltering the birds, providing driftwood in which fledgling least terns could hide from natural predators such as sparrow hawks, crows and red foxes. But the tern is not doing well in its competition with humans for open space.

“These birds nest traditionally on bare sand beaches,” said Charles Collins, a Cal State Long Beach biology professor who specializes in ornithology. “And since there’s competition for space on the beach for a small bird and lots of humans, birds tend to lose out.”

After the volunteers finished laying down the tiles on the reserve’s northern island, they set out for an island to the south, where they cleared land for bird nesting.

The effort might seem like a lot of effort for a bird that weighs about 45 grams when it reaches maturity, but wildlife biologists such as Esther Burkett say the endangered species must be preserved.

“If the least tern were to disappear, the world wouldn’t necessarily stop,” Burkett said. “(But) at some point, we will lose too many species. You start losing one and there are repercussions that start going down the food chain.”