The Bird Catchers

Short Film || 5 Minutes

Sooty terns are long-distance flyers. Spending up to four years without touching down for a single rest, they disperse across tropical oceans following warm water currents. Yet once per year, more than 20,000 sooty terns will return to their birth colony in the Dry Tortugas to nest and raise their young. 

For the past forty years, the National Park Service has been banding the terns in order to monitor the colony’s population and calculate survival rates. The program relies on a team of volunteers and students. A team of Bird Catchers.

Winner of the Wesley Hogan Documentary Film Award at the 2019 Duke Independent Film Festival