Project Puffin Research Assistant Aubrey Alamshah spent weeks on Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock to study puffins and other seabirds, but let her heart be captured to the unsung birds of the island, sparrows.
“I know was I there to study the seabirds, and specifically the puffins, but I really fell in love with the sparrows on the island. It’s not that the sparrows there were particularly rare or interesting, the regulars around the campsite were mostly just Song and Savannah Sparrows, both of which I’d seen a million times before back on the mainland. But amidst the frantic jeering and constant movement of the breeding terns and gulls, these small, brown, unassuming songbirds always seemed to catch my eye. They’re half the size of the smallest seabirds on the island, and their songs were almost entirely drowned out by the constant ruckus of the Laughing Gulls. They’d be easy to miss if you weren’t looking for them, but I always did.
I think what I liked about them most was how unaffected they were by the veritable circus all around them. The island is a busy, fast-paced environment in the summer and everyone seems to be in a perpetual state of excitement or panic. Everyone is trying to make babies, raise babies, get enough for the babies to eat, and not let the babies get eaten themselves. In addition to that, they’re perpetually being watched and messed with by human researchers. It’s tough and it’s stressful and tensions are obviously high. The sparrows didn’t seem to get the memo, though. While the big, flashy seabirds dashed from one place to another, screaming and calling and chasing one another around, the sparrows went about their sparrow business at their own leisurely pace.
Even as I wrote this, a Song Sparrow was sitting on top of one of our dishes left over from lunch, pecking at a piece of rice and wiping his bill on the edge of the plate between bites. Nothing seemed to faze these guys. Are all the terns on the island rising up into the air in an angry swarm to attack the researchers in their nesting site? Sparrows don’t care. Is a rogue Black-backed gull terrorizing all the other birds on the island? Sparrows don’t even notice. Strong winds, eight-foot swells, and torrential downpours? Sparrow’s outside taking a bath. Life wasn’t always easy on the island, for the birds or the people watching them. When the job got difficult or overwhelming, when things happened that you weren’t expecting or weren’t entirely prepared for, it was kind of nice to know there were a few inhabitants of the island who didn’t seem to notice or even really care. I could probably learn a thing or two from those sparrows. If those tiny birds can ignore the daily insanity that comes with sharing an island with a bunch of breeding seabirds, there’s probably nothing I can’t handle with that same level of calm and tranquility too.”
