by Paul Bogard
No one I know has written more eloquently about night than Henry Beston. His book, published in 1928, relates the story of his year of living on this beach alone in a small two-room house he designed himself. A frequent summer visitor to the Cape, Beston found in the fall of 1926 that he could not leave, that “the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not let go.” It also didn’t hurt that his girlfriend had offered the special motivation of “no book, no marriage.” Over the next four seasons Beston paid close attention to “the great rhythms of nature, to-day so dully disregarded”—with special attention to the rhythm of day into night, light into darkness—and called for the recognition of their essential value. “Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night,” he wrote. “With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea.”
That Beston was aware of “lights and ever more lights” back in 1928 is remarkably prescient. It would be decades before electric lighting reached much of rural America, and could we step back to see the country then, most of us would not believe our eyes—this was still a very dark land. Yet in addressing his contemporaries, he sounds as if he’s addressing us. “To-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night,” he wrote. “Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.” Highly attuned to “nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit,” Beston spent hours walking the beach and reflecting on the natural life he saw there—including a sometimes starry, sometimes moonlit, and always dark sky.
Beston was especially attuned to the birds on Cape Cod. In his second chapter, “Autumn, Ocean, and Birds,” he developed his observation of “the lovely sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into a fugitive Pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions,” into one of his most memorable passages. He asked, “Are we to believe that these birds, all of them, are machina, as Descartes long ago insisted?” Asserting that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” he argued that in “a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” He was writing of the sensory gifts the birds enjoyed long before scientists would make the same argument, his perceptions of the birds simply the result of his paying close attention to his world.
One night after 2:00 a.m., his room “brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the ticking of my watch,” Beston walked to the ocean’s edge and heard “the lovely, broken, chorusing, bell-like sound—the sound of a great flight of geese going north on a quiet night under the moon.” Describing it as “a river of life… flowing that night across the sky,” he knew he was witnessing the springtime migration of “the great birds.” Here were night-migrating birds using the cover of darkness to make their biannual flights as they had for millennia. He wrote, “There were little flights and great flights, there were times when the sky seemed empty, there were times when it was filled with an immense clamour which died away slowly over ocean. Not unfrequently I heard the sound of wings, and once in a while I could see the birds—they were flying fast—but scarce had I marked them ere they dwindled into a dot of moonlit sky.”
Were he alive today, Beston would probably not be surprised to learn that our “fantastic civilization” increasingly disrupts this river of life. In the United States alone, estimates are that at least one hundred million birds die every year as a result of human-made structures. In fact, says Bob Zink, curator of birds for the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota, “estimates range from 100 million to 1 billion birds a year… Basically, it means we have no idea.” (“Most sites are never visited to find dead birds,” Travis Longcore told me, “and most of those that are surveyed are visited only sporadically.”) What we do know is that some seventy-five million (and growing) communication towers prickle our country’s back, most lit and held upright with guy-wires (these wires themselves deadly obstacles), while lighthouses, oil rigs, smokestacks, and wind turbines pepper the land and sea. Most significantly, in urban areas our high-rise buildings create an indecipherable maze for any bird drawn off track. Together these structures present a deadly obstacle course that no bird has evolved to survive, especially at night.
“Nocturnal bird movements are clearly billions of years old,” says Andrew Farnsworth, of Cornell University. “The effects of various anthropogenic behaviors, like illuminating what had been, up until a hundred years ago, a dark night sky, can have some potentially dramatic and serious effects.” The lights seem to attract and confuse the birds, drawing them toward collisions with human-built structures. Some of the most dramatic instances include a night in 1954 when fifty thousand birds were killed following a beam of light from a Georgia airport straight into the ground; a weekend when more than ten thousand birds collided with smokestacks in Ontario in 1981; another when ten thousand were killed at radio transmission towers in Kansas in 1998; and most recently, in late 2011, a night when more than fifteen hundred grebes migrating over southern Utah apparently were confused by city lights shining off clouds and crashed into parking lots they mistook for ponds. Thankfully, major episodes such as these tend to be the exception. But it is the accumulated carnage of a single bird here, a handful there, a hundred more on a very bad night, that combine to create such a terrible toll. Of the huge number of birds killed, not all can be directly linked to artificial lights, and we are only beginning to understand the exact relationship between artificial lights and bird mortality. But, says Clemson University’s Sidney Gauthreaux, “all evidence indicates that the increasing use of artificial light at night is having an adverse effect on populations of birds, particularly those that typically migrate at night.”
Within North America alone some four hundred to five hundred different species migrate at night, Farnsworth says. “It spans the taxonomic range, from herons to shorebirds to cuckoos to songbirds. Even some gulls and terns migrate at night, as do a lot of waterfowl and loons and grebes.” Many of these species are actually primarily diurnal, and only become nocturnal in their activities during migration season. Farnsworth says that this “season” in fact extends for much of the year, given the many different species of birds involved. “So even though we think about spring and fall migration—and the bulk of it is really April/May, September/October—it’s almost all year that there can be movements at night. And that is just in North America. There are definitely quite a number more when you expand that around the world.”
But while the sheer numbers of birds killed is dramatic, what’s potentially more devastating are specific species of birds killed. In other words, if we’re killing five thousand pigeons, that’s one thing; but if it’s five thousand of a certain warbler, that’s another. “If you’re killing a substantial portion of an endangered species at night,” Farnsworth tells me, “relative to something like a gray catbird or scarlet tanager or something that’s a little bit more abundant or widespread, it’s a different scenario.” It’s for this reason that Farnsworth and others are working to discover the many different strands in the “river of life” flowing overhead. While radar allowed for the discovery of great movements of birds at night, it couldn’t tell what kinds of birds were involved. Recent advances in acoustic monitoring technology—using microphones to record the vocalizations of the migrating birds, then using computers to sort the sounds—has allowed Farnsworth and others to begin to reveal the makeup of night migrations. “Each species has a unique vocalization for nocturnal movement,” he explains. “Then, you can either listen to them real time, or we have various automated algorithms that can go through it and post-process the data, and that gives you a clue as to what the composition of a noct
urnal migration is.”
Recently, Farnsworth and a colleague were doing such a monitoring near the Tribute in Light at the September 11 Memorial, on a night when so many birds were drawn to the light that the memorial had to be shut down. “There were thousands of birds up in the beam,” he says. “And there was a tremendous amount of calling going on. And as soon as the lights were off, the calling activity dropped to almost zero.” The rapid diminishment of the birds’ calling was, Farnsworth says, a “striking example of the way various aspects of migratory behaviors change drastically when under the influence of light.”
In Toronto, Michael Mesure, founder of the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP), told me that for many years after the city’s CN Tower was constructed in 1976, it was lit with spotlights. “On a number of occasions I was onsite observing hundreds, if not thousands, of birds that were circling the structure, trapped in those pencils of light. In fact, the numbers were so great that some were flying right into the concrete, while others were colliding with each other. And then when the lights went off around one in the morning, all those birds that remained trapped in the light just fluttered down to the ground—it was hailing birds everywhere—and it dawned on me, if you’re in a brightly lit room and someone flicks a switch, it takes a while for your eyes to adjust. One by one they picked up and flew off into the darkness again.”
Within urban areas, perhaps no individual has done more to help night-migrating birds than FLAP’s Mesure.
“I had heard about this problem and didn’t believe it,” he says. “I had to see it for myself. So, I got up bright and early one morning back in 1989, and, lo and behold, I was picking up birds there in the streets of Toronto before day broke.” In the years since its founding in 1993, FLAP has made significant progress against bird mortality in Toronto by developing guidelines for architects, engineers, and building owners; having mandatory anticollision measures put into place for all new construction; and helping ensure the development of aesthetically pleasing tinted window-film for corporate structures. Following FLAP’s lead, similar groups are active in cities such as New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Calgary. Mesure says that while daytime mortality numbers from birds flying into structures are actually higher than night numbers, FLAP has found that the two issues are directly related. “The mass numbers of birds we were picking up after day broke was a result of those birds that were initially drawn into the urban environment at night, and if they managed to evade exhaustion or collision with those lit structures at night, they then had to contend with all the reflective surfaces during the day.”
While he uses phrases like “baby steps” and “patience” to talk about the progress made and the work yet to come, Mesure cites two causes for optimism: the rising energy costs of lighting buildings and the new ways of doing business. For example, “the old way of cleaning a structure,” he says, “was to come in at the end of the day and sweep through from top to bottom. And the result of doing so was that for about half the night entire structures would be lit.” Mesure says that daytime cleaning has become increasingly popular. It once was avoided, due to privacy concerns, but in fact tenants appreciate the chance to establish communication with the people cleaning their offices. As a result, nighttime lighting is no longer necessary.
Mesure argues that the problem of bird mortality in urban areas is not difficult to solve. “If a lake is contaminated or an entire forest is depleted, it will take years of hard work and monies to bring that lake or forest back to life again. But overnight we could solve this problem. How often can you say that?” He says that any person renting space in an office tower has the power to help initiate this change, by requesting changes to building lighting. Already in Toronto, he says, questions about a building’s bird-friendliness have become routine for potential tenants. “It’s just a matter of time before this becomes how buildings are run,” he says.
Mesure’s dream is to see all urban centers in Canada and the rest of North America have mandatory measures in place for both new and existing structures to protect migratory birds. He has already seen some of his dream happen, and he doesn’t have to go far to be inspired for the work to come. “The moment you start to pick up some of these birds that in many cases people haven’t seen in their lifetime, it all comes back. It’s a painful reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
Why am I walking Beston’s beach? To really see the world he described is to see it after dark. Of course, coming to Cape Cod for a single night (or even a week, a month, or a Beston-like year) won’t give me a full understanding of the night Beston knew. And I wonder if what he knew is much diminished, maybe diminished beyond recognition. But that’s another reason to visit, to see how much is left.
The beach I walk lies on the other side of Boston’s “great yellow sky,” opposite of where I was at Walden, so the entire western horizon suffers a sky glow that blots the stars high into the sky. And worse, turning south I see two dozen bright “security” lights on a distant shore. In a community as focused on the natural world as Cape Cod, it’s surprising that lazy lighting like this would be allowed. (But this is America, after all. Author David Gessner’s compelling essay “Trespassing on Night” tells of a new neighbor on the Cape who insisted upon “plans to illuminate us: thirty-five various spotlights, groundlights, and pool lights,” and defended his right to light his property as he pleased by dressing himself in “the scoundrelly cloak of patriotism.” Gessner and his wife had been drawn to the Cape by its “feeling of wildness,” but, he writes, “here is what all of the new lights did to my wild neighborhood: they tamed it.”)
Thankfully, at least on this immediate stretch of national seashore, there are no lights, and I am hoping it won’t feel tame. After a while even the shore fires have been doused, and—having made a long detour through Nauset Marsh, past hollow cracked crab shells and the frazzle-feathered bones of long-ago broken birds, around a section of beach closed to protect piping plover and least tern habitat, species Beston would certainly have known—I am nearly alone. Two young fishermen share the beach with me, their poles planted in sand, their lines stretching taut to the surf, where schools of striped bass come close to shore after dark. On the farthest point of land I cross dozens of shorebird footprints in the wet smooth sand, Y-shaped tridents running this way and that.
You can’t walk any farther south—the spot of sand where Beston lived lies underwater now, the beach washed away by storms and time. His house, moved back from the edge-of-the-sea setting Beston knew, was named a National Literary Landmark in 1964. With his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth (her requirements for marriage long satisfied), Beston came to Cape Cod for the last time for the dedication ceremony. He died four years later, and, just years after that, in 1978, an enormously powerful storm swept the house to sea.
The horizon now is just the line of darker presence under a line of dark sky, with silent stars rising from the boom and crash of surf and sea. To the north, the Nauset Light rotates past in regular intervals, to the east a handful of fishing boat lights bob, to the south the lights of insecurity claim the bluffs, and there is the ever-present sky glow to the west. But all in all this is still a dark place, dark enough for a good, deep Milky Way to arch over the ocean, running almost parallel to the beach.
Near the end of his book, near the end of his year, having intimately known “the great rhythms of nature” for nearly four seasons through, Beston wrote of an appreciation for “a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow’s morning will be as heroic as any of the world.”
Though some sand has been washed away, as well as his house and some of the sky, this place at night feels close to what it might have been when Beston was here. I wanted to walk this beach to see if I could sense the power of the old world he’d known, and, though diminished, it is still here—the birds still migrate at night, the schools of fish still move close to shore, the Mi
lky Way bends as it always has. I wanted to see if night here still grows dark enough for such wildness, if it’s still possible to step for yourself through a place where the world we will know is still being formed. In the darkness of this sky, the beach, and the sea, it is.
“Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it,” wrote Beston. “For, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depths to the adventure of humanity.” When I lie back and close my eyes, this farthest lip of beach right next to the edge of the ocean feels like being up close to an enormous breathing being, the bass drum surf thump reverberating through the sand. Living out here with no lights, alone, you would indeed become sensitive to seasons, rhythms, weather, sounds—right up next to the sea, right up under the sky, like lying close to a lover’s skin to hear blood and breath and heartbeat.
4
Know Darkness
But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations—just as they are.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE (1903)
Twelve miles of washboard dirt mark the homestretch on the drive to New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. My car twirls a dusty white plume as I rumble my way toward the place most refer to simply as Chaco, reaching the park before evening, in time to tour the canyon in what remains of the day’s light. Located three and a half hours’ drive northwest of Albuquerque, Chaco is famous for the civilization that existed here for three hundred years starting in the mid-800s. Visitors come to wander among the ruins of several “great houses” and kivas that lie spread about the valley, including Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the great houses, built in a half-circle with more than six hundred rooms, many stacked three and four stories high. A circular drive makes most of the main buildings easily accessible, but Chaco’s remote location keeps the numbers of visitors low, and it’s easy to find yourself standing alone where a bustling city stood ten centuries ago. At Casa Rinconada, the great circular kiva, I watch the sunset ignite ancient stones and canyon walls a burning orange, and with a deep blue sky going ever deeper blue, I hear the dusk’s first crickets, and the day’s last birdsong, and wonder what it’s like out here at night. What must it feel like to be amid the ruins surrounded by the ghosts of those from a thousand years ago? What would it be like to see the corners and courtyards, the small rooms and stones lit only by the moon?
