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Hoboken’s honorary bird could soon get its own artificial island in the Hudson River.

Bird lovers are raising money to build a small floating island for common terns that will soon be evicted from a derelict pier on the opposite side of the river from Chelsea Piers. A pair of the pale grey, orange-beaked birds settled on the pier after Hurricane Sandy in 2013. Now, the colony at the former Shipyard Marina at Pier 11 in Hoboken has grown to around 60 terns. But the birds will soon need new nesting grounds due to workers on the $16 billion Gateway Project to build a new train tunnel beneath the Hudson River.

Hoboken’s official honorary bird, the Common Tern, has its own library card and will soon have its own parade throughout town. Local advocacy group Our Tern has been working to raise awareness about the Tern and its habitat, which is the marshy waterfront alongside Hoboken’s shoreline. In honor of the Tern’s role in Hoboken’s ecosystem, Our Tern has partnered with the Hoboken Business Alliance, local artists, local businesses, and community groups to put on a Tern Parade this spring. The event is a community-wide art activation with fun events for residents of all ages, taking place from April 1st through June 1st

If you walk to the end of the pier off 12th Street in Hoboken and look carefully at the neighboring one, you’ll see the city’s newest wildlife darlings, a colony of common terns tending to nests and hatchlings.

The migratory birds, not to be confused with seagulls, are the epicenter of a preservation movement that escalated just a month ago after two nests of eggs were successfully laid on a pier despite the pier’s private owners placing physical barriers to deter them.

The Mile Square now has an honorary bird. On the evening of Wednesday, July 10th, Hoboken City Council passed a resolution officially designating the Common Tern as the honorary bird of Hoboken. This designation comes after decades of efforts to protect the birds after being nearly hunted to extinction. A local advocacy group run by residents, called Our Tern, now leads the effort to protect the Common Tern’s nesting sites in Hoboken, with the help of the new designation. Read on for more about Hoboken’s honorary bird, and how local organization Our Tern is making a difference in protecting local flora and fauna.

On July 10th, 2024, the Hoboken City Council voted to recognize this terrific, tenacious creature. Our Tern is grateful to Councilwomen Emily Jabbour and Tiffanie Fisher for putting forth this resolution, and we are thankful to the Council for acknowledging and passing this important step.

Hoboken now joins other cities like Honolulu and Chicago in that we have adopted a bird and proclaimed to our citizens, and to the world, that we value sustainability and we protect the precious biodiversity living on our shores.

The Common Tern is likely to become the official bird of Hoboken with a resolution to ‘Protect the Hoboken Terns & Designate the Common Tern as Hoboken’s Official Bird’ up for a vote at Wednesday’s City Council meeting. 

Common Terns are a dwindling species of migratory sea-birds that have been nesting on Hoboken’s Pier 11 during the summer months since 2013.

The resolution notes that since the Common Terns were hunted for their feathers, by the 1900s only a few thousand remained along the Atlantic Coast and that their arrival in 2013 was a sign of the improved biodiversity of the once heavily polluted Hudson River. 

“The City wishes to designate the Common Tern as Hoboken’s official bird as a symbol of resilience, ecological renewal, and Hoboken’s commitment to a sustainable future,” the resolution states.

For the past seven summers in Hoboken, the end of Pier 11 has been the home to a colony of common terns — a type of seabird that migrates north in the spring after wintering in tropical regions.

The common terns would mate, nest, and raise their young on Pier 11 before flying back south again in the fall. Their arrival in Hoboken less than a decade ago surprised experts. It was hailed as evidence of improved biodiversity on the waterfront thanks to the many years spent cleaning up the Hudson River.

This summer, however, the colony has been greatly reduced in size after nesting deterrents were put in place by the pier owners, Shipyards Associates, who claimed the birds created an “unsafe environment.”

Jeffrey Train, known as “Mr. Train,” as he leads birding walks in Hoboken, has observed a colony of Common Terns mating, nesting and raising their fledglings for the past seven years on a Hoboken pier.

Last year, Mr. Train identified 50 terns and at least a dozen nests on this pier, known as Pier 11, just south of the Shipyard Marina at Hoboken’s north waterfront. The return of the terns this year, however, has spelled disaster.

On May 1, as the terns found their way back to Pier 11, they were thwarted by deterrents such as wire, reflective streamers, mesh netting and invisible string that had been installed several weeks earlier. Shipyard Associates, the pier’s owner, hired Bird Solutions to erect these devices, thinking that the terns would relocate elsewhere. They underestimated, however, the fidelity of these birds to return to this same spot where they had colonized for the past seven years.