A LEGEND AMONG THE MASSES

At barely 5:30 in the morning Tiedun Island is already buzzing with action. The rocky islet off the coast of Zhejiang Province is steeped in mist, but the rain that has smothered eastern China for days has finally stopped. More downpour is imminent, providing only a brief window for a covert operation that’s been stalled for days. “We should do it now,” says Don Lyons. “There’s no time to lose.”

Crowding around a computer screen in a cramped hut, Lyons, director of conservation science for Audubon’s Seabird Restoration Program, and his Chinese colleagues are trying to pick out their target via a live stream. They swivel the mouse to scan the nearby bustling seabird colony and then zoom in on a single bird incubating an egg. The black-and-white speckled oval it’s sitting on looks like any of the thousands of tern eggs laid on Tiedun this spring, but it’s a singular life hiding in plain sight. It belongs to one of the 69 critically endangered Chinese Crested Terns among the island’s more than 4,600 Greater Crested Terns.

With only 100 or so individuals globally, the Chinese Crested Tern is one of the rarest avian species on Earth. Asian birdwatchers call it the “bird of legend,” a moniker inspired by the tern’s return from oblivion. The sleek seabirds were thought to have gone extinct nearly a century ago, only to be rediscovered serendipitously in 2000. Despite renewed interest since then, little is known about the life cycle of these feathered seafarers, especially where they go outside of breeding season, where they overwinter, and their migratory routes between those places.

The team staking out the egg is hoping to fill in some of those gaps by attaching, for the first time ever, a satellite tag to an adult Chinese Crested Tern. “Satellite tracking could provide the urgently needed, vital information to help save the species,” says Fan Zhongyong, an ecologist at the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History in Hangzhou, who has been trying to conserve their breeding colonies in eastern China for 16 years.

Concealed in a hut abutting the nesting grounds, Fan, Lyons, and Lu Yiwei, another Zhejiang museum ecologist, survey the colony with binoculars. The relatively few Chinese Crested Terns here depend on their close relatives—greater in both size and abundance—for protection from predators. As a human visitor quickly observes, safety in numbers makes for