Patty Loew:
It's a fly-in of another sort this weekend on Lake Superior and it only occurs once every five years. Environmental detectives will search for clues, clues to help Wisconsin's feathered friends near the Apostle Islands.  

Man:
I think, you know, this should only take probably couple hours, I think.

Jo Garrett:
Two guys in a parking lot just outside of Superior.

Man:
You could get fairly close going down.

Man:
Let's do what we did, last time, five years ago.

Jo Garrett:
What did they do last time, five years ago?  

Man:
Nothing on your side. So far? Three.

Jo Garrett:
What they did was count.

Man:
Another three.

Jo Garrett:
Birds. Put it this way. Each number is a clue. A 325-mile long detective story  solved by surveillance, stake-outs and good old-fashioned leg work.

Man:
Just barely over the ridge.

Jo Garrett:
The team, the national park service, the Wisconsin department of natural resources,  the Bad River Indian reservation and the US fish and wildlife service. A powerful posse that cowboys up in May every five years.

Man:
One, two, three, four, then a slash, five, that’s how we count them.

Jo Garrett:
Every five years they convene to count, to shadow a select group of birds on Lake Superior.

Man:
It's the third winter.

Jo Garrett:
Mr. Madison, avian ecologist for the Wisconsin DNR and lead detective describes the job.

Madison:
This is a survey of water birds along the entire Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior from the Montreal River up to the Duluth Superior harbor. 235 miles is shoreline, including 169 miles in the islands.

Jo Garrett:
They dog these birds across the entire lakeshore, a dragnet that takes in the Apostle Islands, all 22. A dizzying task. And the time line? Two weeks.

Madison:
We started in 1974, so this is the 30th anniversary. And the reason we do it is that we're trying to track changes in water bird populations. By water birds I mean gulls, terns, herons.

Jo Garrett:
Six different species of colonial water birds. They're called colonial because they nest in colonies, colonies that they wing back to. If you know their haunts, they're easy to find.

Madison:
They come back year after year to the same place. Essentially they're high sight. It's easy to monitor their populations because they are coming year after year to the same area. They're a wonderful research tool because of that.
Jo Garrett:
An easy to find research tool that dines high on the food chain and can live up to 25 years. For an environmental detective, these birds sing.

Madison:
Kind of like the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, because they're very sensitive to contaminants such as DDT, PCBs. We know if there are changes, for example, and if this is something that occurs throughout the survey, then we know it's a cause for concern.

Jo Garrett:
Numbers are the clue. You can't know the word on an individual species, ultimately how the environment is doing, unless you've done the detective work, unless you know the numbers. But getting those numbers. But getting those numbers - well, it's down these mean streets a man must go.  

Jo Garrett:
Bird by bird. Yes, the locations may look idyllic. Madison is on the outer edge of Outer Island, the northernmost point in Wisconsin. But the soundtrack tells a different story. 

Madison:
Ahh! 

Jo Garrett:
If you paid him by the mile, Madison would be a millionaire. It's wet feet and long hours.

Madison:
A little bit of agility left in those old legs.

Jo Garrett:
These gumshoes must go where the birds are. Like Gull Island, barren wasteland to some, nesting wonderful to water birds. Julie Von Stebens is the park ecologist.

Julie Von Stebens:
If you look at Gull and Eagle Island, they have 80% of the nesting gulls. This little three-acre island and generally you have at least 1,000 nests. That's an awful lot of birds.

Jo Garrett:
Beaucoup birds, beaucoup trouble to get there. Rocky shoals ring the island and cold water survival suits are required in case of an early exit.  

Woman:
He was just flittering around in there. We could see inside the egg. It was very cool.

Jo Garrett:
The Apostle Islands are a terrific resource, a refuge for birds. But there is an even larger block of critical land on Lake Superior. The Bad River Indian reservation. Tom Dolittle is the tribe's natural resources manager.

Tom Dolittle:
Bad River reservation manages almost twice the land area of the Apostle Islands. So -- and there's a lot of remote lands. In fact, some of the most remote Wisconsin lands are here in northern Wisconsin and on the Bad River reservation.

Jo Garrett:
So remote that Dolittle must fly in to count these heron nests. It's called Lost Lake rookery. Dolittle and the tribe have been a part of the bird count for decades. His perspective on Madison.

Tom Dolittle:
He is driven. He has this sense of adventure that is always entertaining. He just goes. I'm kind of the turtle.

Jo Garrett:
He leaves them in his wake. It's the harbor of the city of Superior. Yeah, it's urban. Yeah, it's full of birds.

Madison:
This is an interstate island in the Duluth Superior harbor full of ring-bill gulls, 10,581 nests this year.

Jo Garrett:
Another corner of the Superior harbor and things are not so well. On the trail, scoping out an old ordock. Five years ago, this was home for great blue herons, pushed out of their homes in the woods.

Madison:
This is the great of a great blue heron colony or rookery in 1999. Unfortunately, their love affair has ended and they're not here now. We'll hopefully find them up the St. Louis River estuary someplace or maybe not. Maybe they're gone from the area.

Jo Garrett:
Farther up, the Superior harbor, into the St. Louis estuary, it's not good news.

Madison:
This is where the heron rookery used to be. It's now a 10,000 square foot home. I don't know how big it is, but there it is.

Madison:
We had 50 to 60 nesting pairs.

Jo Garrett:
He has to know the numbers. He has to count to know the changes in the story that's unfolded over 30 years.  

Madison:
It speaks to the importance of having large blocks of unfragmented forest and wetland habitat. Very important to the preservation of these species.

Madison:
Means a lot to me to be able to get out here and do this survey. It's a very special environment.   I enjoy working with the different partners involved.  

Madison:
Especially as I age, gives me a different sense of time and what time means. We think of geologic time. That's one sense of time. Our lifespan is so short. To be able to come up here every five years is a remarkable opportunity.

Jo Garrett:
An opportunity to do some detective work, to shed some light on a fascinating and important natural mystery.  

Patty Loew:
And that remarkable bird watching opportunity will happen again this weekend at the annual Chequamegon birding and nature festival. For more information just go to our website, wpt.org/inWisconsin. The south shore of Lake Superior is among the best birding destinations in the Midwest, with nearly 300 bird species. This is expected to be another peak weekend for spring migration.