Boobies on the Runway

If we don't hit Ascension

My wife gets a pension.

So sing U.S. flyers of the South Atlantic. This week the Army officially revealed why. Tiny (34 square miles) Ascension Island, 1,400 miles from the bulge of Brazil, is one of the vital links in the Air Transport Command's world-girdling chain of airfields. Ascension is the dot in the ocean that made it possible to fly Lightning (P-38) single-seated fighters across the South Atlantic to combat fields in North Africa and England.

Army Engineers were sent to Ascension with the greatest secrecy in March 1942. In three months they converted the pile of volcanic rock into a base. Since then Wideawake Field has handled 5,000 planes.

The difficulties of maintaining the place have been its remoteness, its lack of any natural advantages, its. birds. Hundreds of thousands of "wideawakes" (terns) stubbornly nested on the handy, open runways. No matter how often they were shooed off, back they came.

The Army appealed to ornithologists, who scratched their heads. Cats were imported, but large-winged boobies routed the cats. Dr. James Chapin, associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History, made a special trip. His uncomplicated solution was to destroy their eggs until the birds gave up, nested elsewhere. Last week ATC personnel ate eggs, walked on eggs, had the situation at Wideawake "fairly well" in hand.

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