How do you say goodbye to a person you have known for over fifty years. Especially when that person is someone like Helen. A person who was responsible for the life you have had. I know that Ann understands. Ann and I have been together for over forty years, but we would not have met if not for Helen. In fact, many of my closest friends were met because of Helen. To say that Helen was unique, and a force of nature is a cliché and certainly does not do her justice. Helen, through her own love of nature and birds in particular, literally helped change the world around her. Through her work on Great Gull Island and the students she inspired she left a legacy that cannot be measured and that will go on for generations. The day she died I started sending the sad news out. Within twelve hours tributes to her were being posted on multiple continents. Helen herself had visited every continent except Africa as well as islands in the Pacific. Like her beloved terns she was a traveler. I was lucky enough to travel with her to South America many times where we encountered some of the very same individual terns we had banded on Great Gull Island. As everywhere she went she inspired people in South America to study and protect her terns. Of course, the Common and Roseate terns were not her only love. Before the terns she studied Ruddy Ducks in Manitoba and did ground-breaking work on the Spotted Sandpipers on Great Gull Island. She loved field work. When she wasn’t in the field she loved the theater, music and opera; all of which she enjoyed sharing with her friends.
	I still haven’t answered my original question about how to say goodbye to Helen. It is because I still don’t know how. There are too many memories. They give some comfort, and I take joy in looking back at the incredible and wonderful life she led and having some knowledge of the many other lives besides mine that she touched. So no, I don’t know how to say goodbye, other than to say: “Helen, I will miss you.”

Helen was my mentor and closest friend for 59 years. It started one June weekend in 1966; marking nests with Helen was so much fun I knew I wanted to be part of her new project.  Helen became woven into my life and that of my husband and sons. I miss her!
Helen’s enthusiasm about whatever question interested her was contagious. She was never happier than when she had a challenging question to answer. Whether it was hybrids, three Roseates on a nest, polyandrous Spotted Sandpipers, deformed chicks or finding the wintering grounds of Roseate Terns, each started with a question and a cheerful but relentless determination to find the answer.   
Each of these discoveries originated with her field-oriented approach to scientific research. She was continually in touch with the terns and their surroundings. If she noticed something different, her curiosity led to a joyful quest for answers.
An early, perhaps forgotten, illustration of this dates back to the nesting season of 1972. Helen picked up a few tern pellets from the rocks, examined them, and found they contained tiny plastic spheres. She showed me and said “Let’s find out where this plastic is coming from.” We traveled from MA to DE checking out waste water exiting from plastic factories. Undeterred by signs and fences, Helen boldly forged in to find little plastic balls, like those in the tern pellets, floating in the water being discharged. Our paper, published in the Linnaean News-Letter and reprinted in the Marine Science Bulletin, was the first publication to mention microplastics. It is cited in the University of Hawaii’s course on marine debris.   
This is an example of Helen’s “bottom up” field-oriented approach to scientific research; notice, wonder, find answers--- always done with the thought- “wouldn’t it be fun to ….” What a delightful way to approach life and discovery. 
Thank you Helen.

Poem for a teacher and friend

Away Yet Near

They clamor against the silken blue dark,
erupting suddenly in the window pane,
a black, westward winging skein,
a wavery, headlong, racing arc, 

and I want to join them, “outlook that mark,”
find the unknown grove beyond snow and rain
where you have flown, sweet bird, your new domain
unreachable by earthly means. How your stark

absence still roils my heart and always will.
Why didn’t we speak for so many years?
And why do only bird cries speak for us now?

Through indifferent night, migrating flocks thrill
with their ardent, antiphonal calls, quelling fears,
leading to where we’ll meet again somehow.  

				K.E. Duffin

Someone once asked Helen why she never married. She said, “Well, I was actually proposed to twice, and… Oh, I don’t know. It always seemed like so much work.” I almost said, “Ah, yes. Whereas saving entire bird species, providing the world with concrete evidence of what we were doing to the oceans, absolutely demolishing glass ceilings, and teaching countless thousands of people how to proceed… Nah, that’s not work.” But there were a number of people in the room, Helen didn’t like the limelight, and I’m not so very sure she thought of what she did as “work,” at least not in the traditional sense of the word.

The last time I was alone on the island with Helen, she and I were drinking tea one day, and I said, “I’m sure I’ve asked you this before, but how exactly did you go from Rudy Ducks to terns? I mean, what exactly caused you to make the change?” She said, “Well. I came to the island in 1965, and learned that there were only 1500 pairs left…and it just seemed wrong.” 

That was it. It just seemed wrong. And I’d like to think that if 40-plus years didn’t stand between us, I might have been a third man whose hand Helen rightly turned down, in order to save the world. And I do think that if each of us saw injustice as Helen did, and followed her example, we might just do that. Save the world.

Norman Lasca

OBITUARY

Helen Hays

January 22, 1931 – February 5, 2025

Frank E. Campbell - The Funeral Chapel

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