Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  It would be much the same with the i’iwi, except these tiny birds were not so keen on honey. This made it more difficult for the catcher, who had to climb into the tree canopy, wait patiently for a bird to perch nearby, and then snatch it quickly from the branch, taking care not be gored by its tiny, curved needle of a bill. This time the catcher took a few of the reddest feathers from its underbelly, and then opened his hands and sent the bird away, too, its rush of scarlet vanishing swiftly into the woods.

  There are four species of o’o and all are now believed to be extinct—but, and pertinently, they became extinct more than a century ago, long after the last feathered cloak was made. Disease is said to be one reason: o’o are particularly prone to avian malaria, and are dead within a day after being bitten by a mosquito.

  The last true Hawaiian o’o was seen in 1934, and the last Kauai version was believed to have been sighted in 1987. I, no birdwatcher of any kind, was fortunate enough to see one of the very last of the Kauai birds on a blistering summer’s day in the late 1970s. I was up in the Alakai Swamp, writing an essay on rain (comparing the feel of intense rain up on the island summit with what was then the other contender for the world’s wettest place, Cherrapunji, in Assam), when, suddenly, my guide shushed me, his hand on my arm.

  Through the dripping silence of the rain forest came a melodious, flutelike call, clear and loud. It sounded for maybe a full minute, then stopped—whereupon from directly ahead there swooped a compact black bird with a white-speckled chest and a short, uptilted tail and with, so distinctive that even one as bird blind as I could spot them, a pair of brilliantly yellow-feathered upper thighs. My guide nodded enthusiastically, barely able to speak, he was so enthralled. It was indeed one of the last living examples of Moho braccatus, of which back in those days maybe just a dozen pairs survived.

  Ten years later, all have gone, and the only feathers of an o’o bird are those stitched on the costumes of Hawaiian monarchs, who are quite extinct as well; and some of the choicest are to be found in this eccentric old museum in Oxford, as far from Hawaii and the Pacific as it is possible to be. A reminder of the sadness of all extinctions, and of the ways in which Pacific peoples, the royalty as well as the commonalty, once took far better care of their natural world than we have ever managed to do.

  The ocean has some recent success stories, though, and some noble attempts to turn back the trend toward oblivion. One was achieved by a Japanese academic ornithologist named Hiroshi Hasegawa, who had been working for more than thirty years to head off the potential loss of the North Pacific’s largest seabird, the short-tailed albatross, Phoebastria albatrus. In 2012 he announced that the crisis had finally been averted. A breeding colony of the birds had now been fully reestablished and was proving to be quite stable. The bird was, in consequence. tumbling off the world’s endangered lists, and was to be seen instead in graceful soaring flight in almost all its old northern habitats, from Alaska to Kamchatka, the Aleutians to Midway, Japan to Mexico. Hasegawa made his announcement at an albatross conference in Tasmania. Visibly moved by what many had already decided was his achievement alone, he allowed that the bird’s recovery had been nothing less than “dreamlike.”

  The albatross has a near-mythic standing among the world’s seabirds, a creature of poetry and painting, of legend and superstition and a thousand bosuns’ tales. Coleridge is to blame, in part; his Ancient Mariner was tortured and plagued by fiends, according to the poet’s famous eighteenth-century Rime, simply because he had used his crossbow to shoot an albatross, contrary to all the rules of seamanship—the birds were commonly believed to embody the souls of dead sailors; a terrible fate awaited a man who ever killed one.

  The biggest of all the birds lives in the Southern Ocean: Diomedea exulans, the wandering albatross, which can follow a ship for weeks at a time, an ever-present guardian-companion, but always out of reach. The vessel may be wallowing uncomfortably through the waves and troughs of the Roaring Forties, a sink of illness and misery, but all the while the great white and gray bird, as much as a dozen feet from wingtip to wingtip and with a body the size of a large child, will be gliding effortlessly alongside, riding on the gales, at one moment rising as high as the mainmast, the next with its wings almost grazing the sea. Once seen, an albatross is never forgotten. Anyone sailing by night into the Southern Ocean, and then waking to find a wandering albatross outside the porthole, has a story to tell the grandchildren.

  The North Pacific’s version of this magnificent bird is of the genus Phoebastria: narrower in its wings and with a more compact body maybe, but still the largest seabird north of the equator. It is also the longest-lived—one of the genus recently found on Midway Island had been tagged sixty years before and was thought to be the oldest wild bird on the planet. The bird is easily recognizable: it is alabaster white, with a golden streak on its head and a bill of bubblegum pink with a pale blue tip.

  The difference between these two creatures, south and north, Diomedea and Phoebastria, is that the first belongs to a population that is adequately healthy, and is respected and unbothered by those few humans who make it into the cold of the southern seas. On the other hand, the short-tailed albatross, in the north, has been on the virtual edge of extinction for much of the last half century. Its principal predator, making a regrettable contrast to the bird-loving Polynesians of Hawaii, has been the Japanese hunter.

  The breeding grounds4 of the short-tailed albatross have always been on the volcanic Izu Islands, a chain that forms a long, straggling line running for four hundred miles out into the Pacific due south from Tokyo Bay. It forms the northern part of the so-called IBM Line, the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Line, marking the western edge of the Pacific Plate, where it subducts beneath the small Philippine Plate. The islands, stretching between Tokyo and Guam, are marked by near-ceaseless seismic activity, and are thinly populated.

  Torishima, an island a mile wide and dominated by its twelve-hundred-foot volcano, lies almost at the southern end of the line. For reasons best known to the species, the dangerously active slopes of the volcano have been long favored by the short-tailed albatross as its primary breeding ground. There were once hundreds of nests, each one built on a small pillar of tussock grass; the albatross habit of mating for life would result in the production of a single egg per couple each year. The parents would teach the fledged youngster how to take off (at which albatrosses are notoriously inept), after which each would be on its own, bent on scouring the seas for the rest of its days, flying from Alaska to China on a perpetual hunt for food.

  Until the 1860s, Torishima was quite unpeopled: only shipwrecked sailors found sanctuary there.5 But then, with the surge in economic activity all across Japan that followed Admiral Perry’s arrival and the full restoration of the emperor, the little island became home to a population of hardy fishermen who collected guano from the enormous albatross population. A volcanic eruption in 1902 then killed every last one of them (an event serious enough and rare enough to be reported on the front page of the New York Times), and no one ever came to live there again.

  But word of the island’s huge albatross population spread quickly, and for the next several decades, hunters would come out on expeditions to Torishima, bent on clubbing the young birds to death to collect their feathers. For the next half century, there was an immense export of feathers from Japan—the quills were used as writing instruments, the wings and tail feathers for decoration, the downy underbelly feathers for mattress stuffing. And the birds were so easy to kill: the Japanese called them ahodori, “fool birds,” because they stayed patiently at their nests without moving while hunters clubbed one after the other. There followed years of casual and very profitable slaughter. The U.S. government calculated that during the early decades of the last century, five million birds were clubbed to death on Torishima—with the hunters stopping only when they had reduced the albatross population almost to zero.

  In 1940 there were only fifty birds left on the island; in 1951, just
ten. Five years later, it was widely believed that the bird was just about extinct. The Japanese government, shocked by the realization and shamed by what had happened, promptly declared the bird to be a Natural Treasure. Though it seemed the avian equivalent of shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted, feather hunting was swiftly made illegal and all further landings on Torishima were strictly banned. A few birds were still to be seen, clinging on, but their situation seemed dire, nearly hopeless.

  It was then that the young ornithologist Hiroshi Hasegawa, at the time a graduate student in the biology department of Toho University in Tokyo, decided he would devote the remainder of his days to saving these magnificent birds from total ruin. He won permission to travel to Torishima, and he spent the next thirty years working out cunning ways to protect, to sustain, and finally to expand the breeding ground, and to bring it back to normal.

  Phoebastria, it turns out, were victims of their own fool bird-ishness. Unlike the wandering albatrosses of the southern seas, who build their nests on flattish and relatively protected islands off the coast of South Georgia, the short-tails of the north have the perverse habit of nesting on the steep slopes of an active volcano. The couples mate, build a ramshackle nest, lay an egg—and in all too many cases it promptly rolls down the slope and drops into the sea. Infant mortality isn’t much of a factor, because there are so few infants hatched in the first place.

  Hasegawa tried to ease this situation by first planting grasses on the nesting slopes, and in a single season—grasses grow furiously fast on Torishima, thanks to rich volcanic soils and warm subtropical weather—the egg survival rate doubled. But only for one season; in the next, there was a torrential rainstorm, and a mudslide carried everything away. Without a feather hunter in sight, the albatross population had suffered a serious setback. The first, as it turned out, of many.

  Still, Hasegawa persisted. The Japanese government gave him some money to help terrace the slopes, to make them more congenial for the birds. The numbers then crept up again; and as more terraces were added, matters got better. Still, the site was hardly ideal, and it required constant and costly human intervention. So Hasegawa came up with a more radical plan: he would lure the island’s courting albatrosses to a better, flatter, less vulnerable breeding site on the other side of the island. He would make these foolish birds change their minds—or if not their minds, then their habits.

  He found a new, flatter site. He hand-painted dozens of life-size decoy birds and placed them on the grasses. He set up hidden loudspeakers and tape recorders and played the sounds of albatross mating cries and courtship rituals. Overnight, he turned himself into a kind of circus barker, a street salesman, performing a birdman version of three-card monte, to attract a crowd and to get matters moving.

  And it worked. In only a matter of hours, clusters of young males appeared in the skies above the new site. Some of them settled, and some began performing the curiously choreographed mating dance rituals (heads to the sky, beaks clacking furiously) for which all albatrosses are renowned. And then the females started to arrive. Friendships were initiated, mates were selected, matings occurred—eggs were laid, they remained where they were, the broodings began—and with the volcano obligingly quiet, the hatchings started. Chicks were fledged, taught how to fly, and pushed off from the tussock grasses and into the air—to wander around the skies of the North Pacific in ever-increasing numbers, year after year after year.

  The short-tailed, or Steller’s, albatross, Phoebastria albatrus, almost vanished, the victim of Japanese commercial feather hunters. But a lone Tokyo academic, Hiroshi Hasegawa, has managed to rescue the birds, and there are now healthy populations, no longer threatened with extinction.* [Hiroshi Hasegawa.]

  Nesting sites then expanded to other islands in and around Japan. Down in the Bonin Islands, one new nest has been recently seen. And in the Senkaku Islands—claimed by the Chinese, a new hot spot in the coming collision between the world’s superpowers (since the United States is pledged to come to Japan’s side if the latter’s territorial sovereignty is impugned)—there are albatross nests, too. Good reason, one would have thought, to make sure the region remains at peace.

  In August 2012, Hiroshi Hasegawa, mild and modest like so many in the field, was able to stand before the audience at the Fifth International Albatross and Petrel Conference, in Wellington, New Zealand, and to declare that three thousand birds were now living on Torishima. Albatross have been seen soaring above the waves from Skagway to Shanghai, from Midway to Nome. By 2018 the numbers will have risen to eight thousand, by which time the bird will be officially declared no longer at imminent risk. The paper Hasegawa presented was headed “Success!” and the conference attendees stood to offer their applause—to one piece of good news brought via the work of one man dedicated to the natural life of the Pacific Ocean.

  There are still threats to this and many other Pacific birds, of course, threats mostly from the human community. The birds get entangled in long-line fishing gear, they are fouled by spilled oil, they are assaulted by mammals (rats, mainly) that are carelessly introduced to breeding grounds. One of the more spectacularly displeasing kinds of suffering comes from the creatures’ ingestion of plastic ocean debris, of which the Pacific has lately been found to contain more than its fair share, all of it swirling around in what is popularly and nightmarishly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre.

  On the Kamchatka Peninsula in the fall of 2014 I was walking along a beach, a sandbar a mile long with the Sea of Okhotsk on one side, a lazily flowing estuary on the other, and behind, the grassland and low marshy scrub and pine forests that are typical of this remote corner of Far Eastern Russia. It was a brisk sunny day, the water boisterous with white horses, the wind so bracing a walk became essential to keeping warm.

  But everyone in our group kept stopping: to collect the abundant flotsam we found on the tide line. There were amusingly shaped lengths of driftwood, of course; and there were old coils of frayed ropes and bottles abraded until they were smooth and opaque. But the most sought-after items were the small hollow spheres, each four inches in diameter, that seemed to be sprinkled randomly over the beach. They were floats that had once held up the nets of a Japanese fishing boat. Some were black and plastic; some were machine-cast glass, with a seam from the mold. But the choicest were the hand-blown floats, each different, all slightly imperfect, that had bobbed about on the ocean surface for the many decades since they were first made. They had survived a thousand storms and had covered untold distances from where some trawler captain had cut them loose. Each time one of us found one, he or she cried out with pleasure, like a child on an outing.

  Ocean flotsam and jetsam were long thought of as mainly charming. Once in a while—it happened once when I was sailing, though in a different sea—you hit a half-submerged shipping container, and it damages your boat, and you curse its presence in the ocean. But more often, if you find a glass float or a rubber duck or, best of all, a bottle with a message inside, there is a moment of quiet delight: the sea has yielded up a small treasure, part of what we suppose the sea is meant to do.

  All this changed in 1999 when a sailor, passing between Hawaii and the coast of Northern California, claimed to have passed through an enormous field of floating plastic garbage. He reported that he had seen bottles, tires, milk crates, the hulls of broken boats, toys, old fishing nets, and all in concentrations that suggested one might well be able to walk across the sea on top of it. Three U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists in Auke Bay, Alaska, said they were not in the least surprised: they had written a paper a decade before suggesting that if careless dumping from ships and thoughtless overuse of indissoluble plastic on land did not end swiftly, then the patterns of currents in the Pacific would assemble the entire mess into one great vortex of discarded rubbish. What had been found, evidently, was what they had warned about.

  The story from the mariner gained traction from that moment on. Quite swiftly t
he word gyre—all oceans have gyres, gigantic mid-sea swirls around which all the currents circulate—became, along with flotsam and jetsam, part of a new lexicon of world-affecting horrors, part of the immense matrix of anthropogenic global warming accusations that have dominated human dialogue ever since. But thanks to the popular press, and the difficulty most people experience in visiting the gyre to check, the story has gotten slightly out of hand.

  “The Pacific Garbage Patch” is the imaginative name given to an area in the northeast Pacific, between San Francisco and Hawaii, where there is a high concentration of barely visible particles of man-made plastic. Its discovery has triggered major moves to limit ocean pollution.* [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).]

  The garbage gyre certainly exists. Samples of seawater have proved incontrovertibly that there are concentrations of unwanted material floating in an area of the sea once known as the horse latitudes, suspended in the calm waters6 lying between the westerlies and the trade winds; these waters lie north of the Tropic of Cancer and run from just east of the Hawaiian chain to five hundred miles off the American and Canadian west coasts. But the gyre, the vortex, the patch—whatever it is called—is much less dramatic than first reported.

  It consists mainly of tiny confetti-size particles suspended in the upper few feet of the sea, with around twelve pounds of garbage in every square kilometer of ocean. It is generally quite invisible to all, although it is no less dangerous for being unseen. You may not collide with it in your boat, you may not be able to see it from space, you may not be able to take photographs of it—but the particles are indeed made of plastic, they are small enough to be ingested by surface-swimming sea creatures, and they can well enter the food chain, disruptive to all who live along it. And where an island exists close by, its beaches are often badly polluted by the larger pieces of material that have been sifted out by time and tide. Photographs of a dead Laysan albatross on Midway Island, its stomach filled to lethal bursting with plastic rubbish of one kind and another, have brought widespread public sympathy and attention.