It is home to terns, plovers and loons, as well as many species of hawk.
Some researchers think the changing climate may be disrupting the food chain in the birds' winter destination, Antarctica, leaving them too weak to breed in Maine.The shortage of fish prompted 3,500 Arctic and common terns to abandon their nests on Machias Seal Island, once the largest tern colony in the Gulf of Maine, from around 2006.
Arctic terns had been increasing until about five years ago.
Without herring or hake to feed their chicks, desperate terns may resort to larger butterfish.
Gradually, the troubles of the terns are likely to ripple up the food chain.
Half a century later, the Japanese quietly took this name and fashioned out of it a Japanese one for their virgin isles: Senkaku, or "Pinnacled Pavilions".The islands were filled with the deafening cries of breeding boobies, terns and the "Gigantic petrel", by which Belcher presumably meant the short-tailed albatross.
Yet Arctic terns are not as tough as all that.
They are useful, if sad, indicators of the health of the oceans, as fish eaten by the terns also sustain species important to people, such as cod and tuna.
More than 2,000 miles out, a flock of small white terns skimmed past the Hokule'a heading for the still invisible Mataiva Atoll, next to Tahiti.
Every species on the island retreated to a small islet offshore, Boatswainbird Island, except for a few individuals that held on to the most inaccessible cliffs, and the phenomenally scrappy wide-awake terns that visit the southern plains to breed.
Arctic terns each year make the journey from one end of the planet to the other.
