Ocean Watch

Every day
is Halloween
on Tern Island

Here on remote Tern Island, where only four of us live with thousands of animals, there's almost always something spooky going on.

Everything that happens has a logical explanation to it, but still. Some events would send shivers down anyone's spine.

Take the vampires. Every night that I go for a walk, hundreds of these black-caped creatures soar over my head, threatening to swoop down and bite my neck.

OK, I know they're frigatebirds but that doesn't help. When these big birds fly low on moonlit nights, their speeding shadows loom large on the white runway, and it doesn't matter what I know. I flinch.

On pitch-black nights it's no better. Then I hear the whoosh, whoosh of wings over my head but can't see where they are. "What are you doing?" I called to these ghostly birds on a recent dark night. "Go to bed."

Some seabirds, such as boobies, do sleep quietly at night, tucking their heads neatly under their wings like pet parakeets. If you wake them while passing though, they issue a startling squawk.

I try to avoid waking these birds at night, but the masked boobies sleep scattered on the white runway like big white footballs. In the dark it's almost impossible to take a walk without shocking a few birds, and yourself in turn.

Unlike booby birds, sooty terns do not settle down and sleep quietly. They screech and fly around the clock. Alfred Hitchcock used the shrieks of sooties, nicknamed wide-awakes, in his creepy film "The Birds."

On Tern Island, sooty terns land to breed. Most are gone now that the breeding season is over, but a few linger, issuing their scary-movie screams all night long.

The most sinister sounds here, however, come from the sweet-natured wedge-tailed shearwaters. These nocturnal seabirds make eerie mating calls, not quite human, yet with a human quality that resembles crying.

Even though shearwater breeding season is ending, and our wedgie chicks are beginning to leave, the wedgetails' plaintive moans still go on all night long.

These are the mateless birds that live in hope.

Wedgies' come-on lines may sound good to each other, but their continual, nocturnal cries could generate nightmares in a zombie. Because these ground nesters love hanging out beneath the barracks, our dwelling sounds like the night of the living dead.

In their search for mates, wedgies also wander. Last week, U.S. Fish and Wildlife worker Alex Wegmann woke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone walking in his room, close to his mattress on the floor. Before the biologist could react, a shearwater hopped onto the bed and sat on his chest.

The encounter was harmless, cute even, but it sure got his attention.

Fortunately, everyone's most chilling nightmares never occur here. Muggers, rapists and serial killers don't travel to tiny islands in the middle of the ocean to do their foul deeds. This is one of the few places in the world people can walk alone on the darkest, stormiest, scariest nights and feel perfectly safe.

Tonight, as usual, our vampires will swoop, zombies will roam and poltergeists will shriek. We'll probably light candles and tell spooky stories, but we do that anyway.

On Tern Island, every day is Halloween.