Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Anthony has short black hair, clean-cut features, an earring in each ear. Today, wearing a necklace of small shells, he tells me he grew up in Levittown, Long Island. Levittown was the world’s first suburban tract-housing development. It’s ironic that such an innovative concept would usher in such a peculiarly homogenized and sterile version of the American Dream. It helped form the modern concept of American suburban life—the manicured lawn, the attached garage, the chain-link fence, the station wagon, isolated “bedroom communities,” cultural alienation, the end of Main Street, the death of the Hometown, the decline of family-owned businesses, and the rise of the shopping maul. I grew up a few miles from there. I say, “I know it all too well.”

  “Exactly,” affirms Anthony. The knowing look we exchange bonds us.

  Trying to minimize disturbance, we come and go from each nest as quickly as possible. Anthony, checking one band, says, “Oops; got that one already. We didn’t need to disturb that bird again.” His discomfort with causing disturbance to the birds is further evidence of a new generation of kinder, gentler biologists.

  Kinder, gentler—and more physically fit. No beer bellies here. Even after hours of working outdoors, these people run laps, ride a bike, play basketball. One person jumps rope daily for half an hour. Assistant manager Mark even does some gymnastics. After the evening run, they pop in a workout video and the floor gets crowded with young interns following the exercises while the chef du jour prepares dinner for the entire crew.

  TONIGHT IS MARK’S TURN to cook. But before dinner he is taking a break, up on the roof, watching the world’s slow spin, scanning the ocean, looking for whales through a telescope. I climb the ladder to join him. Mark, thirty-three, has been a national park ranger in the Everglades and in Hawaii. Mark’s mother is a social worker, his father a country lawyer. “So I guess I was never destined for business. Who I am all stems from growing up in a tiny town on Mississippi Delta marshes. I love being part of nature; knowing the atoms in my bones are from fish I caught growing up in the Delta. At eleven I had my own boat, and I was free in that Delta wilderness—that joy. We’re losing that area now. I wonder what happens to kids living their childhoods there today.

  “But this,” Mark says, opening his arms to include all of French Frigate Shoals, “is fun.” He turns to me. “More and more, I realize I want what I had growing up—to be surrounded by wilderness, working outside, my body feeling the pulse of nature. When I worked in the Everglades, if the water dropped a quarter inch, you’d notice the birds’ and alligators’ behavior changes. I like living where your body and mind are tuned to what’s happening. I love cities and fancy restaurants, too, but it’s a blast to be in a place like this.”

  Mark resumes scanning the sea through the telescope, talking as he’s searching. “Hey! Breaching whale!” Mark calls down from the roof to some of the others. “I’ve got the spotting scope on it,” he yells as people are coming up the ladder. I swing my binoculars up.

  The Humpback’s spouts look like a white flag waving truce in the sunset. Soon six people are up on the roof, taking turns at the telescope. The whale lurches out in a half-twisting jump, big explosions erupting as he crashes back into the sea. You don’t need a telescope to see that. The whale comes for three big breaches. Four. We’re all cheering. The whale rolls and slaps the water with its long pectoral fin. Through my binoculars I watch his gigantic head and half his massive body launch in slow motion, turn sideways, and make a big belly flop, detonating tremendous ocean commotion.

  From the high tide of the heart, the mouth speaks: Mark shouts to the whole blue universe, “You are beautiful!”

  Truly this is a gracious place, rife with persistent life, noisy, smelly, all full of the stinking, fluttering, bustling hustle of muscle, corpuscle, and tendon. Let us shout with the pleasure and intensity of it. Behold, the real “real world.” Four billion years in the making, still trying its best to get it right, brimming with vivid power.

  “Not a bad pau hana,” Mark adds.

  I look at him questioningly.

  He explains, “Pau means done; hana means workday. Pau hana: happy hour.”

  IN LATE AFTERNOON, the Sooty Terns that have for hours been twisting overhead in swelling flocks begin touching down like a broad tornado funnel cloud; a storm of wings, a conflagration of voices building to a screaming white-noise cyclone of sound. By sunset the Sooty Terns’ collective voices begin to roar like fierce wind, like some physical force.

  The birds begin landing, but time and again, a sudden intensification of their calls accompanies a mass liftoff, as though the birds all decide “Let’s not land after all.” Perhaps the idea of committing themselves to firm ground after months or years at sea seems so unfamiliar and terrifying a prospect that almost anything can prompt a general alarm. Perhaps there is simply some other sense of liberty or fear in their minds that rejects forsaking the free sea for the arduous ardor of breeding that will leash their lives to land. But land they do. Just after dark, part of the runway is absolutely crammed with Sooties. We’re enveloped amid birds and their wall of sound. The sheer volume of their yakkering is absolutely deafening. Painful. You can’t take this much noise for long. It’s hard to imagine how the birds themselves can stand it.

  AS MARK PREPARES to cook dinner, Anthony and Karen volunteer to make an appetizer for everyone. Frans has bread in the oven. The military-sized kitchen is dominated by hanging pots and pans, as well as a big, festively painted ocean mural featuring frolicking stingrays, colorful reef fishes, sea turtles, a Monk Seal, albatrosses, a large Tiger Shark, frigatebirds, and flying fish. Thousands of years ago, cave-dwelling peoples painted images of surrounding wildlife on their walls, and in this cavernous kitchen it’s clear human nature hasn’t changed. We still decorate with reference and reverence to nature; painters, potters, sculptors, and fabric designers do not create decorative images of cell phones and computers. No one paints murals of executives in board meetings discussing votes on mergers. Art tends to reflect what we really care about, our true delights and frights. Art has a fairly good sense of human nature; it’s a pretty honest broker of subjective human truths. When new parents anticipate the arrival of a child, they decorate the baby’s room with elephants and striped tigers and rainbowed parrots and festive fishes and other animals. This speaks volumes of our wish to welcome our cherished children into a world rich in the company of other beings, of the true, deep importance of animals in our psyche. Of all the many good reasons to defend animals’ existence, this alone seems reason enough. If we let the world finally lose its wild elephants and tigers and parrots—as we are doing—wouldn’t it be unbearably sad to ever again paint them on the nursery walls?

  A white-noise cyclone of sound—Sooty Terns, with nesting albatrosses

  MARK COOKS a delicious vegetarian meal. Responding to compliments, he reveals his secret: “This recipe was: look only at the date and cook what’s oldest.”

  The salt and pepper shakers on the long dining table are incongruous porcelain snowmen. The oil lamps bring dinner conversation to low and intimate tones. We talk about the day’s work and the changes in the animals. With the different stages of reproduction, there’s plenty to talk about. Fairy Terns and Red-tailed Tropicbirds hatching; albatrosses with growing chicks; Red-footed and Masked Boobies both hatching and on eggs; Brown and Black Noddies, some with chicks, some still incubating; Great Frigatebirds courting; Sooty Terns now nesting. Turtles on the beach. Someone’s seen a large shark near shore.

  Missing from mealtime are the Monk Seal researchers. They tend to begin early, work late, and eat together even later.

  But we don’t lack for extra company. During dinner a Black Noddy flies through one door, across the big room, and out another open door. A little later, as we’re cleaning up, a Fairy Tern comes in like the Holy Ghost, fluttering and hovering. Interestingly, its flight is not the mad dash of a bird feeling trapped. Anthony escorts it outside, into the night.

  I walk
out with him, then linger when he goes inside. The darkness seems to be intensifying the birds’ racket into a great, roaring bonfire of voices. The night air carries the guttural grunts and honks of boobies, the brays and bill claps of the albatrosses, the murmurs of the noddies, and the Sooty Terns’ squeaky I’m wide awake, wide awake. The air also carries the unabated scent of nesting seabirds. A bird colony gives off a certain pungent, powdery sort of smell. It’s pleasant to me because it evokes the nostalgia of days working on splendid island beaches with cherished friends and colleagues.

  Jason and Mary, two of the seal researchers, appear and join me. While I’m getting sentimental over the eau de guano, Jason confides that he doesn’t like the birdy stench. Instead, he loves the stink of seals, because he’s studied them for years and has developed a fondness for everything about them. Beauty is in the nostril of the beholder.

  We turn our biased noses toward the heavens. The night unlocks, the sky unfolds like a jewelry box. From the diamond expanse of space I pick out Orion, my favorite constellation. A point of reference not only in space but in my life, Orion’s presence makes me feel at home no matter where I am.

  Why do we think of only the night sky as the heavens, why not the day? And why heavens, plural? Jason knows much more about the stars than do I, and he orients us to the sky. There’s Orion, yes. The Orion Nebula. Sirius. The Andromeda Galaxy’s saucerlike pugmark in far space. The Pleiades (or Makali’i—Little Eyes—who tied all humankind’s food in a net and hung it in the heavens until the rat-god gnawed the ropes, letting the food tumble back to Earth). Jupiter, with two of its moons visible through binoculars. Jupiter’s moons have lovely names: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto (those are the “Galilean moons,” discovered by Galileo himself in 1610 and named after mythological lovers of the god Jupiter), Amalthea, Leda, Himalia, Lysithea, Elara, Ananke, Carme, Pasiphae, and Sinope. What does it say of us that we have not afforded our own lone moon the full acknowledgment of a name? We appreciate the distant more than the close at hand. We see a man in our moon, yet keep him anonymous. No wonder that in his frozen orbit he reflects light with bright intensity, yet maintains a dark side.

  Two meteors. And two satellites. Sooty Terns are flying constantly overhead among the immense density of stars. All this noise and noisomeness and vibrancy makes it feel as if the lens of the living Pacific has focused on this dot of sand, and on us.

  IN A TURQUOISE MONASTERY

  BEFORE DAWN, while the sky is still full of stars, the Monk Seal lab is already casting a glow down the corridor. A day of Monk Seal work can require six hours of preparation. Today’s work plan involves actually handling the endangered animals, so all boots, suits, gloves, nets, and sampling instruments must be sterilized or new. Normally, the researchers take great care not to disturb the seals at all, because decades of harassment were a major cause of their current low numbers. But more insidious potential problems with toxic chemicals and possible new viruses now need evaluation, requiring that some seals be biopsied and have their blood sampled. It’s for the seals’ own good, but the researchers would prefer if it weren’t necessary.

  Mitch Craig is standing on the porch eating cereal, assessing the impending morning. Mitch takes his empty bowl inside, reappears on the porch with his binoculars and a pair of sandals, and goes to see which seals are on the beach. Though it’s light enough now to make out colors well, the sun remains subterranean.

  Mitch looks like a rock star: square jaw, pale blue eyes, and frizzy, longish, sun-bleached, dirty-blond hair. You could imagine him up on stage in a white-hot follow spot, wailing away on a guitar. But actually he’s very soft-spoken, reflective, thoughtful.

  The seal team here consists of Mitch, Melissa Shaw, Mary Donohue, and Jason Baker. Mitch is the field operations leader. He’s worked out here for almost fifteen years and has handled hundreds of Monk Seals. Jason is Mitch’s superior back at headquarters, but he’s new on the job, so he is deferring to Mitch. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, with wavy hair and several days’ growth of beard. Mary, a sweet-voiced biologist with a fresh Ph.D. in physiological ecology, is also new on this job. Mary has her shoulder-length hair pulled into a ponytail while she works outdoors. Melissa—in her early thirties, petite—is an experienced veterinarian and has worked here several seasons. Her blond hair is also ponytailed, and she’s wearing a blue floral bikini and a necklace of small beads.

  Mary and Jason are new to the tropics, but they have extensive experience with seals in Alaska. Their partnership extends across the borders of the professional and the intimate, as does Mitch and Melissa’s. Jason and Mary met in Alaska’s Pribilof Islands, while he was doing a study of Northern Fur Seal foraging and she was studying pup development. Melissa met Mitch while studying the Monk Seals.

  We load all their equipment onto a cart. Much of it is in buckets. For drawing blood samples we have a variety of syringes, needles, and storage tubes. For bacterial, viral, and parasite sampling, we have swabs and probes. For biopsy samples for dietary and contaminant analyses, we have large hollow needles. All the team members will be using disposable white synthetic overalls in addition to sterilized boots, sterilized calipers, and a sterilized net.

  I ask Jason, “Why all the sterility? Don’t the seals on the beach spread to each other whatever diseases they have?”

  “Maybe, but Monk Seals don’t lay all over each other in crowds like some other species. These seals are usually spaced out along the beach. We don’t want to take any chance of being an additional disease vector. For instance, when we put a net over a seal’s head, against its muzzle, it’ll be getting saliva and snot all over it. We don’t want to take that to the next seal.”

  Mary and Melissa are wheeling the piled-up cart down the runway. Mitch is walking ahead, carrying over his shoulder a circular net about three and half feet in diameter. Jason carries the largest pair of calipers I have ever seen—for measuring the length of seals that can weigh up to five hundred pounds—and is carrying another bucket and two small tubs. Still getting his first impressions of this place, Jason is looking around at the boobies, frigatebirds, and albatrosses, commenting, “You come to an otherworldly place like this, where we humans are in the minority, and it’s a pretty peculiar feeling. It completely jerks your perspective. When the Sooty Terns are in full swing, there’ll be, like, a thousand birds every thirty feet along this one-kilometer strip. It’s not that it makes me feel small or appreciate the vastness of the universe or anything like that, but the abundance here gives you a sense of what the world used to be like.”

  The main objective of the team is to resample some seemingly healthy seals that earlier tested marginally positive for morbillivirus. The results were at a level that sometimes gives a false positive, and are considered inconclusive. But the implications of this type of virus are great. Morbilliviruses have caused major die-offs elsewhere, killing half the Harbor Seals in the North Sea, thousands of Caspian Sea seals, and large numbers of dolphins—thousands—in the Mediterranean Sea and other parts of the world. Morbilliviruses have been suspected in multiple mortalities of Mediterranean Monk Seals. They cause measles in humans and distemper in dogs. Sled dogs brought to Antarctica introduced canine distemper to Crabeater Seals, and Siberian dogs passed distemper to Lake Baikal Seals. In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, dogs owned by military personnel during recent decades could have harbored seal-deadly viruses, but luckily no dog-to-seal infection seems to have occurred here. There remains the possibility that other infected marine mammals, such as dolphins arriving from elsewhere, might have introduced morbilliviruses to the local Monk Seals. So there’s intense interest in seeing and sampling these animals again, to either confirm or rule out the presence of that type of virus in these individuals.

  Elsewhere, the deadliness of the viruses seems exacerbated by toxic chemicals like PCBs (which were used by the military here at Tern). Morbillivirus-associated mass mortalities have hit mostly marine mammal populations carrying relatively h
igh contaminant levels. In a European experiment, captive seals were fed herring from either the contaminated Baltic Sea or the much cleaner Atlantic. Those fed the more contaminated herring experienced diminished T-cell function and reduced killer-cell function—both of which are crucial to antivirus defense. Wild European seal populations that suffered mass mortalities had PCB levels higher than those levels found in lab experiments to cause immune problems. So some animals that might otherwise have fought off the viruses are probably getting sick nowadays because PCBs and other chemical pollutants have weakened their immune systems.

  We walk farther along the runway, scanning for seals along the lagoon shore. Two large seals and a smaller one that may be a yearling are spaced out on the sand, dozing quietly. Mitch is looking first for the ones they need to retest for exposure to the disease, and secondarily for solitary individuals, to avoid disturbing other seals.

  One qualifies. It looks like a large male. Mitch goes to the berm and assesses it from a distance, then comes back. Mitch whispers, “We’ve jumped this one before. He’ll be a little wary. We’ll try sneaking up. He’s probably not really sleeping. I’ll take the net. Mary and Jason, you watch me. Carl, just stay a few feet behind Melissa—and tell her what a great a job she’s doing. Get ready to move fast, especially before the drug comes in; if the seal rears back we’ll all be coming backward.”

  I ask if it is wearing an identification tag in its flipper that Mitch can see.

  Mitch whispers, “Yeah, but I recognize scars. See that scar on the right rump? Probably an old healed-over shark bite. He’s an elder male, looking a little older than last year—a bit more scratched up, not as robust, a bit thinner.”