GAILLARD ISLAND — “Has everybody got hold of something?” Glen Chaplain yelled over his shoulder, as he steered the small boat out of Dog River. “Have you got your hats on good and tight? Because we’re getting ready to run.”

Then he pushed the throttle down on the Auburn University Marine Center research vessel, and the boat roared to 25 knots, bouncing across the waves on the last day of May toward an unusual man-made island in the middle of Mobile Bay.

“He knows more about the birds out there than anyone,” Chaplain said, referring to Roger Clay, a biologist with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries. “We go out to the island two or three times a year with (Mobile Bay) Audubon and teachers.”

Chaplain was trained as an ecologist, working now with the Auburn marine extension service based at Brookley Field, doing research on oysters in the area.

He is carrying half a dozen people laden with expensive cameras and binoculars, while a larger boat with another half dozen or so races ahead toward the spoil island created by material dredged to build the Theodore ship channel in the late 1970s and ‘80s.

“Wilson Gaillard was a local birder and conservationist,” After the boats landed, Clay talked to the group about the Mobile dentist who advocated for creation of the island. “I think he had the foresight that it might become a haven.”

The island of about 1,200 acres is credited with helping the brown pelican make a dramatic comeback in the area, after the pesticide DDT blamed for the near extinction of the species by its widespread use, was banned in 1972.

The first pelicans nested on Gaillard Island in 1983 with four nests. Clay said this was the first documented nesting of brown pelicans ever in Alabama. By 1999, the size had grown to 5,200 pairs, with the numbers now between 4,000 and 5,000 pairs.

So, every spring Gaillard Island becomes a true lover’s nest and one of the country’s premier nesting grounds for the large colony of brown pelicans.

The island is also the occasional home of dozens of other species of birds, and a large population of nutria, the large rodent that lives on vegetation, not eggs.

“That’s not a bird you see everyday,” said Christine Lundquist of Fairhope, about a black-necked stilt in a pool of water in the interior of the island several hundred feet away.

“He’s putting on a kind of hurt-wing display,”Clay said about the bird’s impressive act to possibly draw attention away from its nest.

“That’s a good one to see,” Lundquist said, looking through her binoculars.

As the group walked along the tall dike that surrounds and protects the island from the constant wave action and currents of the bay, the distinctive odor of large populations of birds grew stronger. They were getting closer to the colony of approximately 500 mating pairs of brown pelicans.

“That’s not a good place to be little darlings,” said Jane McPherson of Fairhope, kneeling down to look at a pair of laughing gull chicks sitting exposed on the clay.

While the group walked along the dike deep with brush grass, their eyes scanned their feet in front of them as they shuffled along, making sure they didn’t disturb or step on the many small nests of laughing gulls at the base of tufts of vegetation, usually with clutches of three eggs in each.

The odor was very strong when the group stopped. They had arrived at the brown pelican rookery and looked down toward the bay from the dike at what appeared to be hundreds of small mountain peaks topped with snow amidst a rolling green forest.

“It’s so funny to see their big pelican heads sticking up out of the clumps of grass,” said Sherry Frost of Fairhope, who was on her second trip to the island with the Mobile Bay Audubon Society.

Like a number of people in the group, she took lots of pictures of the pelicans, royal terns, laughing gulls and other birds, some of which she might enter in the Weeks Bay photography contest, she said. Several winners from that contest took part in this year’s trip to the island.

Clay said the group could walk down from the dike and move among the hundreds of nests, but they shouldn’t stay there long. He said the parents would abandon their young temporarily while they were there, and the young would get excited having to fend for themselves.

“How do you describe that sound,” one person in the group said. “It’s like something from Jurassic Park,” came the answer.

As the group serpentined slowly through the tall brush grass, featherless pelican chicks growled and barked and struck with their mouths open at the intruders, putting on a fearsome display. The large nests held two or three pelican chicks each and many still had large unhatched eggs.

“They’re really not happy we’re here,” another person said.

It was hard to move without causing a growling barking sound from these young brown pelicans.

“They look like little velociraptors,” one person said.

“It is a very primeval scene,” Clay said.

Back up on the dike, the group took dozens of pictures of the large colony of colorful royal terns and then headed back to the only beach on an island that is off-limits to everyone but researchers like Clay.

“The more we know about the requirements of royal terns and brown pelicans the better it will be for us and future generations,” said John Borom, who holds a doctorate in biology and, as president of MBA and director of Faulkner State Community College, has been leading groups to the island for several years.

“It is important for us to remember that we share this planet with many other creatures, and that our actions have far-reaching consequences. The simple truth is that our quality of life is directly linked to the environment. We should all make the effort to pass as much critical habitat as possible to those who come after us.”