The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  Evolutionary theory predicts that the more diversified the living enterprise, the more it will adapt to change. The more diminished, the more trouble it will have. And changes are coming, faster than before, that will challenge all of us to adapt.

  * * *

  Over by the ocean, Kenzie and I find Sanderlings in flocks augmented by new migrants. They scurry along the surf’s foamy thrusts, probing the wetted sand with bills they work like sewing-machine needles. Over the next few days their numbers will quadruple. Then they’ll depart with their bills pointed northbound, toward the high Arctic. Some have wintered as far north as these beaches and Cape Cod, but many ventured vastly farther south, as far as southern Chile and the distal tip of South America. No one can explain that spread, but it means they’ll be passing through for weeks. They, and most other sandpipers, must have the longest, thinnest foraging range of any birds. Think about it; they live mainly in the hairline crack between high tide and low, between the wipe of waves. You couldn’t really draw their feeding range on a map of the continental coast; no line thin enough would be visible to the naked eye.

  About four dozen of the birds suddenly rise. They flare over the gleaming surf and flutter back upon the sand. Up ahead, another group stand on one foot, bills tucked under wings, indulging in brief rest.

  When I alter our path to avoid disturbing them, a young Harp Seal suddenly raises its head from the dry sand. I whistle Kenzie close until we’re past those big doleful eyes. This is not the white-coated infant that seal hunters have famously killed for fashion. It’s older, about four feet long, marked with large irregular spots. The killing—hundreds of thousands annually—did little to diminish their numbers; there remain several million. The seals’ main threat is not coldhearted hunters but the warmth that is melting away the sea ice required by Harp Seal mothers for giving birth. Throughout human experience, extinction has usually required rarity and a downward trajectory. Now an animal can be both abundant and endangered.

  I give this young seal a wide berth, so it won’t waste precious calories dragging itself back into the surf. I get the feeling that most young wintering seals here are within ounces of their lives. And sure enough, half a mile down the beach I find a young Harbor Seal, dead.

  When she comes to a series of high dunes, Kenzie, trotting a hundred yards ahead, glances toward me. And as soon as I turn around, she comes zooming back and continues past, loping the full mile down the beach. I know I’ll find her panting at the foot of the path, waiting, because she knows we’re family.

  * * *

  To March mud comes one of the more surprisingly risk-prone early arrivals, a strange, seldom-seen, earthworm-eating ground bird. Woodcocks began quietly slipping back into our woodlands during the last days of February. By early March many reside unseen back in their light-dappled haunts of wet bottomlands and damp meadows.

  Such optimism with the calendar and climate runs a high risk of frost. I have read that a week of frozen ground or snow cover will starve hundreds of them, and it’s difficult to imagine otherwise.

  Driving to the lighthouse, I draw the luck of seeing two of them at the edge of a woodland along the south-facing shoulder of the road, probing the sun-warmed mud with their long, sensitive bills and finding much success. I’ve never before seen one—much less two—calmly foraging in broad daylight. I open the window, switch off the ignition, and watch.

  Spending as much time as it does with its bill in the mud and all its foraging attention oriented downward, a Woodcock would seem particularly vulnerable to ambush assassins like Cooper’s Hawks. Indeed, the pressure must be intense, because Woodcock camouflage is exquisite. A Woodcock so well matches fallen leaves that if it remains still it is practically impossible to notice. I imagine that to be born a Woodcock with one white feather is to draw a death sentence. The hazards of being small and round and needing to keep your bill in the ground are further evident in the positioning of Woodcocks’ eyes. Predators’ eyes focus frontally. Often-preyed-on animals have eyes on the sides of their heads (think of a rabbit). Woodcocks’ eyes are positioned so far to the side that they sit toward the rear of their heads. It looks a little like their bill is attached to the wrong end of their skull, but with that bill in the earth and their eyes so far afield, they can still see well around them. Each eye has a 180-degree field of view, meaning the bird has no blind spot behind its head. Only an intense and continual process of elimination can evolve an animal to such extremes.

  When the two Woodcocks I’ve been watching melt back into the forest, half an hour has elapsed. It occurs to me that I may never again get so good a view of them.

  * * *

  But many things are risked for love, and Woodcocks don’t always hide. The normally invisible males parse the risks and rewards of courtship by calling attention to themselves—at dusk.

  Based on nothing more than faith derived from the smell of moist earth, I believe Woodcocks must now be present in the shadows among the fallen leaves and pinecones in the woods around my home. So into a chilly sunset, I step from my cottage to the edge of a clearing in the pinewoods, where the needles and sandy soil lie moist. That damp earth, smelling like spring to me, must smell to Woodcocks like reassurance of another few days of thaw and food.

  As dusk settles I hear that first “Peent!” More nasal than I remember it, almost an electronic buzz, it’s an April Fool’s joke of a voice. “Peent!” Suddenly there are two. Then a distant third.

  “Peent!”

  “Peent!” I say back.

  This actually works. The next peent comes from a place much closer. When I again respond, I see a shadow move even nearer in the dusk-grayed heather.

  “Peent!”

  An airplane drags slow thunder. A dog barks. The twilight woods tinkle with the calls of unseen birds already self-secured into briar-tangled roosts. Robins are talking in bed. I’ve been drawn into a world more of sound than sight. Listening more intently than usual, I’m thinking the wren seems loud. Traffic from the main road, a mile away, often unnoticeable, seems likewise loud. So does the snoring surf beyond that road.

  “Peent,” calls the cautious shadow.

  And now the act of daring and bravery I’m here to witness. Suddenly comes the strange twittering that signals Woodcock flight. I can’t spot the suitor until it has risen past the trees, but then I see that odd ball of a bird with round whirring wings and that bayonet bill emerge from the skyline of branches scrawled on the western blush of dusk.

  I follow with binoculars its wide-spiral display as the twitter of its whistling wings intensifies, then follow higher, till this noisy dot is almost directly overhead and its track crosses the night’s first star. It continues screwing itself deeper into the sky. The twittering climaxes to a frenzied pitch and peak, as the bird arcs through one last slow overhead spiral, drops a bit without letting up the frenzied fluttering, then suddenly goes silent, as though the faucet of sound has abruptly been turned off.

  I watch the bird plummeting rapidly, then slipping sideways like a falling leaf until I lose it against the trees; soon it lands again on the same stretch of open ground.

  Almost immediately: “Peent!”

  Through several such cycles, I linger. I hear other, more distant Woodcocks rise too and twitter ardor to the galaxy. Dusk pulls down the night, quieting the robins and a few chill-resistant Spring Peepers, who begin calling from a marshy pond at the woodlands’ edge.

  * * *

  Among Lazy Point’s many splendors is a sky dark enough to really fill up with stars as soon as night falls. The newspaper has reported, “Two-thirds of Americans and a fifth of the world can no longer see the Milky Way.” That’s not a problem here. Especially on a clear, moonless night. My binoculars are strong enough to pry apart the Pleiades star cluster, and reveal much more depth in the galaxy—many thousands more stars—than I can see by naked eye. Surely worlds lie up there? So far our navigational charts of space show only distant desert islands, of utmost host
ility, with this floating vessel our shared ark, our one chance. One day this understanding, too, may give way to include other worlds. Perhaps, as we fear, better worlds. But so far, this our world includes all the life, all the love, and all the mind yet detected. So, a question arises: What ought we do?

  It’s an old question. Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, Socrates realized that “we are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live.” Aristotle helped get the ball rolling twenty-three hundred years ago: “Plants exist for the sake of animals … animals exist for the sake of man.… It must be that nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.” Saint Thomas Aquinas (in the 1200s) believed that only humans have an eternal soul (implying that other animals are terminal cases with no escape from Earth), that God gave all the animals to people for our use, and that people can kill or use animals however we desire, “without any injustice.” “The world is made for man, not man for the world,” said Francis Bacon (around 1600). René Descartes (1600s) believed that animals lack consciousness and could be treated without concern for their well-being. He declared men “lords and possessors of nature.” Immanuel Kant (1700s) believed that each moral being has the right at all times to be treated respectfully as an equally free and rational being, but that only rational beings are moral beings, and only humans are rational beings. To Sigmund Freud, “the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’être, is to defend us against nature” (1927).

  These thinkers drew a chalk circle around humanity and erected a firewall between us and the rest of creation. They may sound arrogant now, but their time was not our time. The scale of the human enterprise was small, the world vast. They worried that nature would destroy people—and it often did. The world—so far as they knew it—didn’t need our sympathy. That humans might ever acquire power to harm the world could scarcely have crossed their minds. They thought only about creating a conceptual space for humanity and improving human interactions.

  Even the animal-rights movement, though often viewed as radical, focuses only on individual animals that appear capable of suffering (so, for instance, not oysters). The obvious limitations are major. A cow can experience pain, but a herd can’t. So conserving populations or preventing extinction lies outside animal rightists’ usual considerations. Saving pigs from slaughter is a concern of animal-rights proponents. Preserving a forest, not so much; the trees aren’t animals. Animal-rights activists have famously protested conservationists’ plans to live-trap feral house cats in order to save endangered colonies of ground-nesting birds like terns and plovers. Apparently the cats have a right to be free, but birds have no “rights” to be spared predation by people’s escaped pets. On the major issues affecting animals’ future—endangered species, human poverty, human encroachment, forest destruction, ocean depletion, pollution, climate and ocean-chemistry change—giving individual animals rights offers no actual help. Animal-rights philosophy, so focused on “sentience,” is itself unaware of ecological relationships and seemingly unconscious of the big picture.

  Viewed by the light of what we know, much of mainstream philosophy can seem like an astonishing series of self-serving cop-outs. Essentially all of philosophy misunderstands where attention must be paid if humanity might ensure its own longevity and the continuity of the living enterprise. These are the foundations of Western self-identity and our declared relationship with the world.

  The things that matter in the long run—life-supporting systems and the very cycles that produce and facilitate people, culture, living things, and the future—are the things ethicists have almost completely ignored. That is quite an achievement of Western thought!

  In the main, philosophy hasn’t had the world in mind. And the problem is—it shows.

  * * *

  The second week of March opened with the kind of deep freeze that can kill early migrants. Temperatures down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit grew shelves of shore-fast sea ice in the Sound. Biting winds drove explosive surf that recontoured the oceanside beach.

  But the ides of March dawns sunny, and the air has that spring-morning light that promises later warmth. Unlike the withering cold blasts of a few nights ago, today’s wind, though cool, blows southerly, pushing the tails of oncoming birds, bringing more first arrivals. On the marsh shore stands the first American Oystercatcher, wielding its wondrous crimson pry-bar bill.

  Momentously, our first Osprey sails over and hovers in the stiff breeze above the pond, feathers rippling, before swooping across the marsh to light upon its massive aerie. Its first task: defend the fortress and deflect rivals. Challengers soon appear. They can all see one another very well up there, and before long three of the big fish hawks are writing the letter O across the sky, negotiating airspace. Their thin chirping whistles are not what you’d expect from weapon-wearing birds with six-foot wingspans.

  Over on the ocean beach, the first Piping Plover looks like a running dollop of sand. When it stops, it disappears. These tiny plovers were once perhaps the most endangered nesting bird on Long Island. A couple of decades of keeping people away from their sandy nests with nothing more than one strand of string and a little flagging tape has done much to help them. Protecting their nests with cages that are pervious to plovers but impervious to cats, coons, and foxes has helped as much, perhaps more.

  From just outside the surf and above the ocean horizon, skeins of scoters are purring by, draining away toward the distant north. They continue steadily for the hour Kenzie and I are walking, about three hundred birds per hour. Winter birds are leaving, summer birds arriving, everything shifting north toward the lengthening sun.

  * * *

  Just as I was getting used to spring, this morning delivers a dusting of snow at a startling 23 degrees. It chills the Red-wings to silence. Our hardened ponds have locked out the ducks. In a brilliantly cold blue sky, a Red-tailed Hawk circles the marsh; it knows a snow-white tablecloth is good for spotting mud-brown voles. The voles know too, and hunker tight in their highways in the bent-over grass.

  * * *

  I’m going to correct myself. Or at least amend something. I’ve said that ethics, religion, and economics reflect philosophies devised centuries ago and doesn’t accord well with the last 150 years of science, and that our thinking is way behind. But not all the old thinking was narrow. To every tide, a countercurrent. A few philosophers came closer to getting it right. And in every case it’s because they actually left the house to see what the world is really like.

  In the mid-1700s, Gilbert White of Selborne, an English clergyman, helped establish a respect for nature as a kind of philosophical subtheme. In the early days of systematic observation, many important men of science were clergymen. Studying God’s work—the world itself—was a way to better understand the Creator. White thus introduces his purpose for writing The Natural History of Selborne:

  If the writer should at all appear to have induced any of his readers to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of the Creation, too frequently overlooked as common occurrences; or if he should by any means, through his researches, have lent an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries of historical and topographical knowledge … his purpose will be fully answered. But if he should not have been successful in any of these his intentions, yet there remains this consolation behind—that these his pursuits, by keeping the body and mind employed, have, under Providence, contributed to much health and cheerfulness of spirits, even to old age.

  I like that phrase “enlargement of the boundaries.” It’s the pattern of all human progress. Later in his book, he says,

  The most insignificant insects and reptiles are of much more consequence, and have much more influence in the Economy of nature, than the incurious are aware of; and are mighty in their effect, from their minuteness, which renders them less an object of attention; and from their numbers and fecundity. Earth-worms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable
chasm. For, to say nothing of half the birds, and some quadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them, by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, and rendering it pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawing straws and stalks of leaves and twigs into it; and, most of all, by throwing up such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called worm-casts, which, being their excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. Worms probably provide new soil for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earth away.

  At that time, earthworms were believed to be pests, so his observations required the courage of the original eye. “Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms; the former because they render their walks unsightly … and the latter because, as they think, worms eat their green corn. But these men would find that the earth without worms would soon become cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and consequently sterile.”

  David Hume, also in the 1700s, saw sympathy as fundamental to humanity. For him this feeling for the other is central to the origin of ethics. He clearly distinguished between what is and what ought to be. Rousseau saw our human self as “true” in a state of nature, but by society corrupted. “Man is born free,” he wrote in 1762, “and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more a slave than they.”