Woman dedicates life to endangered birds on N.Y. island

You can easily miss Great Gull Island - it is a tiny speck on Long Island Sound between New York and Connecticut, looking like nothing more than a rocky strip of land. But up close, it's not just what you see, but also what you hear: tens of thousands of common and roseate terns, CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller reports.

"You get used to it. You don't hear it after a while," said Helen Hays, an ornithologist who has lived with the birds for 43 years.

Every April, these birds migrate from South America and stay on the island to mate and raise their offspring.

Hays has been monitoring that migration since the late 1960s, when the American Museum of Natural History bought the old fort and asked her to pay a visit.

The terns were on the verge of extinction. Hunters seeking their beautiful feathers for hats decimated the population in the early 20th century. As few as 2,500 birds remained.

"I think we care about them just because it's careless to lose a species," Hays said. "If you know they're endangered and you know some of the things they need and if you have some of those things, then you should try to put them together."

Working out of the old barracks, she and a handful of volunteers are the only ones living here six months a year. They keep tabs on the terns, weighing them and tracking their most precious find - what researchers call the elephants, youngsters who haven't quite learned how to fly.

Today their numbers are thriving: some 26,000 terns are on the island, more than 10 times the number when Hays started.

Hays, who's somewhere in her 80's, is thinking about retirement. She never married or had children, but says her life has always had purpose.

"It's too late to have regrets. Definitely too late," she said.

And as far as leading an exciting life, Hays told CBS News, "I suppose as hard as it seems to believe, I feel I have!"