by Carl Safina
At eight P.M. Melissa asks, “Are we all ready for tomorrow?” Jason says, “Not fully, but I just realized I’m so tired my mind is not even capable of counting the sterile suits.”
Melissa says, “Hmm—must be your glucose level. Let’s check it, feed you, and check it again.”
At nine P.M., after a twelve-hour field day, Melissa is counting white blood cells in the lab. She was wet for a long time in the boat this afternoon after being caught in a squall between islands and fears she is coming down with a cold. I give her some vitamin C, but my talking interferes with her concentration, and she miscounts the white blood cells in the microscope and must start over.
She says, “Boy, I am beat. I haven’t had enough rest. I get up early to meditate for an hour. It starts my day, it makes everything work right. I used to do two hours, but it’s not practical. I think the secret to a good spiritual life is going to bed early. And that’s hard out here.”
Her eyes are red and tired looking. She’s taking samples and putting them into a solution to burst the red cells and dilute the white cells so they can be counted on a slide. She is being very deliberate and paying extra attention because she is so exhausted. She plants herself at the microscope with her feet apart, a steady stance. And counts again.
This time, I keep my mouth shut and don’t distract her.
At ten P.M., Melissa is still standing at the bench, her sunglasses still on her head. Mary, who said good night an hour ago, is back in the lab. She has a small puncture in her foot from today’s visit to East Island, and she’s not sure if there’s a glass sliver in there or possibly a piece of coral. She can feel something with a pin, and when she does that I can hear a little scraping sound that makes my stomach woozy. (Some people can’t stand the sight of blood; I have a problem with splinters.) She can’t dig enough to get it out because it hurts too much.
Melissa, turning her veterinary skills to the primate in all of us, examines Mary’s foot carefully with a magnifying glass. Nothing is visible. But soreness and a developing red streak leading from the wound raise concern of possible blood poisoning—way out here. She prescribes a Betadine-and-hot-water solution to soak in. If the red line develops any farther, she’ll prescribe antibiotics from her emergency kit. But with a little luck the soaking will loosen the splinter enough for retrieval and everything will be okay.
By now, Melissa is thinking about maybe eating dinner. “But first, I might even get to do a load of clothes for the first time in a week.” She asks everyone in the lab if they have clothes that need washing. Mary does. As the Zen saying goes, “After ecstasy, the laundry.”
Mitch offers to make some spaghetti for the crew, and I offer to help. We make our way down the quiet corridor to the darkened kitchen, where we light a couple of the oil lamps. Mitch says he spent his freshman year in premed at Duke University, but discovered pretty quickly that premed wasn’t for him. He went home and worked in a motorcycle shop for about a year and a half, selling parts and racing, before going back to finish a degree at the University of Maryland. He recalls, “When I first came to Tern Island fifteen years ago, I was a volunteer. I think everyone should have a job they’d volunteer for—y’know? So anyway, I was nervous; anxious to do a good job. As usual, I was being pretty hard on myself. My job at first was to camp over on East Island and document the amount of time different mothers were nursing their pups.”
Mitch’s superiors were not as hard on him as he was on himself; they hired him to come back. He went to graduate school for about a year but never completed an advanced degree. “I quit. I already had the job I wanted.”
For Mitch, this is a labor of deeply ingrained love. He searches for words, then says, “It may be hard for me to explain how I felt about being here that first year. I just absolutely loved watching those mothers nursing those little black pups on the beach. Just sitting, listening to the seals breathing, or hearing the babies sucking—this little woof-woof sound that they make. There were fifty-two pups born on that island that year. I learned more about Monk Seals that first season, by just sitting and watching for hours, day after day, than I have since.
“And it wasn’t just that—it was the whole thing: you’re trying to pay attention, trying to stay focused, trying to do your job. For me it’s like, it’s—present. The birds are all around you, the boobies yelling, the Wedge-tails squabbling; you wrap pillows around your head to stay asleep. And the turtles—the turtles would be coming up scratching, throwing big clouds of sand and stuff. You’re just smack in the middle of it all. You’re one of the wildlife beings. Seals would come up and sleep next to the tent. You’re lying this far away”—he shows with his fingers—“from a snoring seal. And then you wake up in the morning, and everything is beautiful. Waking up, getting your stuff together, making your little lunch, going out and setting up, seeing what new pups were born at night—. It’s just mind-boggling. I just—I don’t know how to put it.”
After a momentary reflection, he continues translating these deep feelings into a flow of words. “You’re sort of in your own world, and you have to confront your own thoughts. You have a lot of time to think. That could be nerve-racking at times. You have a lot of thoughts running through your mind about events in your life. Things I wish I might have handled differently—. Sometimes you think of something you wish you’d said to somebody.” He falls silent, then adds, “Is it odd to have those kinds of thoughts in a place so remote and beautiful?”
I say it’s not odd at all, that the same kinds of thoughts occur to me.
“So anyway,” he continues, “you’re seeing creatures being born all around you, things living, things dying. Once I was watching a pup that’d been born just that day; the mom was finally catching some sleep and a wave came up and grabbed the pup, and the pup was swept away in the current before the mother even woke. You might be sitting there so long that suddenly you feel a thump, and it’s a tropicbird that’s just come to be right next to you.
“When you first come here you’re sort of overwhelmed with how lovely and beautiful it is. The colors. The fact that half your view is the sky and the other half is the water. The wildlife everywhere. It’s very soothing. After a while it becomes the background that you accept. But it’s always wonderful.”
Now a typical year for Mitch and Melissa includes being here from April to September. Mitch adds, “Each year when you come back it’s very exciting at the beginning. Then you realize again, ‘Wow this is a lot of work.’”
He checks to see how the spaghetti is doing, then says, “It’s very important to me to try to excel at a job, and this job has a lot to it. It’s pretty complicated. And the fact that it means something for an endangered species—. To have my work affect something in the world that needs a lot of attention is really the best thing to be involved in. This job fills something for me. It makes my life feel worth living.”
In the soft light of the oil lamps, I sense there’s something darker lurking just at the periphery of this joyous conversation. I don’t press it. But Mitch tentatively reveals a little more, saying, “This job takes me out of myself, too. If I didn’t have this, I might choose not to live, or get off into something that was pretty distracting. Like—” He stops himself. “I could name all kinds of things. So this is sort of a saving grace for me.”
I nod, not really clear about what he is hinting at, but not feeling entitled to ask.
“I think,” Mitch says slowly, almost as if talking to himself, “I would disintegrate otherwise. I have my demons. Drugs. Beer. It’s a little too easy.” He brightens a bit and looks at me again. “But when I’m here I can do something tangible. I can move a lost pup back to where its mother is. Or, you feel good at the end of the day if you’ve removed two hundred pounds of lost fishing netting and ropes out of an area with seals.”
Mitch opens a container with some salad and offers me a bite. He says that when he sits on these beaches looking out at the lagoon and reefs, he gets the sense this has all
been here forever, and will be here forever.
I tell him that to me these shelly beaches and sandbars look so changeable, seem so transient, that I sense these islands will one day vanish. But I also know that the species are so ancient, that these creatures have moved in these waters for millions of years. So the animals prove the timelessness of a place that seems ephemeral.
Time seems to be happening here at different rates, on different scales. But we can only see it through the lens of our own experience, our own time. Mitch says, “I’ve known many of these animals from birth. I’ve seen them growing up, having pups of their own. So these are the friends that I have. They are the people that are my family. I’ve come to recognize their behavior and their nuances of expression, and whether they’re comfortable. I recognize a lot of them by sight. I wonder if they recognize me. I don’t suppose they do.”
MOVING ON
IN THESE FIRST FOUR TRIPS since her egg hatched beneath her belly, Amelia has logged round-trip distances of 506, 199, 917, and 2,388 miles.
The girl’s just warming up.
Amelia is a workaholic. Though she’s just returned from an eight-day trip of over two thousand miles, she seems to think there are better things to do than sit around brooding. After a short nest rest—just a few minutes—she walks slowly to the runway, turns into the southerly breeze, and cranks herself into the wind. Once airborne she wheels and puts the wind behind her. It’s a good start, because this will be an even longer trip.
In the last couple of weeks Amelia has spent a lot of time foraging in the meager tropics. Her devotion shows; her chick has grown vigorous and healthy. But she has put all her surplus energy into her chick, and she herself has been losing weight steadily while scouring thousands of miles of ocean slipping beneath her.
Despite her hunger, the small size of her chick urges her to begin this trip as she began the last: looking for food nearby, trying not to stray too terribly far from Tern, searching the trackless, crystalline tropic sea.
At sunset the shining sea stretches away and around the world like a gold-threaded tablecloth. Her hunger briefly pulls her in the direction of reliable food she knows lies far north. She swings northward but then swerves east, into the night, then into dawn. After flying 360 miles Amelia is back in the concert hall, foraging among the Musicians Seamounts. Without slowing perceptibly she flies the length of the Chopin Seamount, then swings up across the Haydn and skirts the Handel, turning northwest. Measure by measure, mile after mile, she waltzes along. Though the sea is wide as ever and she is hundreds of miles from any land or visual marker, she travels along the seamount province as though able by magic to divine the lay of the seafloor miles below. She swings past Tchaikovsky, performs a thirty-mile loop like a ballerina dancing Swan Lake on the world stage, and swoops back up to Debussy.
Her grace and style are breathtaking, but she is repeating her last, marginal trip. That trip worked well enough for the chick. But what worked well enough then does not work well enough now. It’s a week later, a week further into her hunger, into her loss of weight and body condition. Her devotion to home wavers. Her blood chemistry is signaling her brain. The long averaging process of evolution steps in, as though whispering, “I am crucially hungry. No chick benefits from a mother starved to death.” So the seesaw between maternity and hunger tips—and now hunger wins.
Amelia has decided: she will go for food. Real food. Much food. She’ll ignore the sight of a few flyingfish, and she’ll ignore every faint cue the tropically warm ocean gives her about small snacks or some fish eggs here or there. She is no longer foraging. Now she is truly traveling. And she knows exactly where she’s headed. She strikes north. Directly north. Absolutely north. Straight as an arrow: north.
She’ll leave the boobies and frigatebirds and terns far behind her. She is headed to the edge of cold water. She burns past Stravinsky Seamount like a firebird and hurries past Schubert as if she has unfinished business. For the first time in months, Amelia will fully unfurl. Like an Olympic runner just stepping onto the track, she will now be what an albatross is all about: traveling to the limits of any sea. No ocean stretches far enough to outdistance an albatross. They seem to bend the laws of physics; in this magic realm space collapses and single birds command whole ocean basins, and time’s arrow becomes elliptic, cyclic, as the birds become consumed with going and returning.
On a favoring wind, Amelia sails nearly six hundred miles in thirty hours. Much of that time, she flies in half-sleep, on and on. In a 1926 poem the South African Roy Campbell imagined himself an albatross,
Stretching white wings in strenuous repose,
Sleeving them in the silver frills of sleep,
As I was carried, far from other foes,
To shear the long horizons of the deep
… I floated like a seed with silken sails
Out of the sleepy thistle of the sun.
Over the miles, the sea temperature begins dropping slowly. Eventually, Amelia reaches the southern edge of a broad frontal zone that blends warmer and colder water. Nine hundred miles now from Tern Island, Amelia slows along this edge. The broad boundary she is working flows across the entire North Pacific in a slow but highly dynamic current that wavers like an unmanned fire hose. This fountain of change separates the warm-hearted central Pacific from the chill subarctic. All things referenced as “tropical” now lie far behind her.
Amelia hesitates, turning toward the northeast a ways, following a hundred-mile meander in the flowing current. This front constitutes the northern border of the six-hundred-mile-wide North Pacific Current. The current’s broad northern and southern margins, undulating across the ocean at roughly 30° and 40° N, are known respectively as the subtropical and subarctic frontal zones.
The wide North Pacific Current and its frontal borders separate higher-salinity tropical southern water from the cooler and fresher subarctic water to the north; they separate two enormous regions of the North Pacific, distinct biological realms inhabited by very different groups of animals. The tropical side is the sparsely populated solar realm of frigatebirds, flying fish, and tunas. The cold side, near where Amelia is now, is the richer polar kingdom of fulmars, herring, and salmon. Two worlds.
The North Pacific Current itself originates in the western Pacific, spawned where the warm Kuroshio (“Dark Blue Current” in Japanese), coming north along Japan’s coast, collides with the cold Oyashio (“Mother Current”) flowing down from the Bering Sea. This tangled mass of enriched water then heads eastward as the North Pacific Current.
Where the North Pacific Current crashes into North America, the portion deflected north becomes the Alaska Current, flowing up along British Columbia and then curling west along the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. The part turning southward becomes the California Current, a meandering jet of water flowing south, shedding eddies and cool filaments. It keeps the coastal ocean chilly all the way down past San Francisco. Near the equator, the water turns back westward, recrossing the Pacific Ocean, and when it hits Asia the part of it that turns north along the coast becomes the Kuroshio all over again. The round-trip takes about five years.
IN SIX DAYS AT SEA Amelia has flown from latitude 23° north to 40°. This is like traveling from southern Baja, Mexico, to the Oregon border, or from the Bahamas to central New Jersey.
She is now foraging the border waters of the subarctic frontal zone. She’s hunting intently, scrutinizing the greener water here. When the scent of a school of fish wafts to her, she flies a mile or so until the scent dissipates, then doubles back until it gets stronger, then passes it until it again grows faint. Once more she wheels and doubles back, until she’s found the perimeter of the densest scent and has some sense of the school’s direction of travel. Now she searches intently over the thickest aroma, flying mile-long patterns for a couple of hours, waiting for the light to weaken and the fish to rise.
Packs of fish called sauries, elegantly thin and about six to eight inches long, com
e up into view. She lands near a dense group, and they scatter. She lifts off again, resuming her large oval flight patterns. Amelia finds one dying saury, then a dead squid. Glimpses of fishes in the closing dusk are followed by squid rising under cover of the gathering dark. With eyes nearly as well-adapted to the dark as an owl’s, Amelia begins seeing more squid here and there as the sunset melts away to the shine of midocean starlight.
But she is still working hard and traveling many miles between mouthfuls. Hungering still, she breaks off her search. Again she swings straight north, skimming over piling swells that roll like dark marching hills, and white-capped seas whipped by blustery new winds that have come to oppose the current, until another 180 miles of water separate her from Tern Island. Well over a thousand miles from her chick, Amelia is now on the northern edge of that broad subarctic frontal zone, bordering the cold water.
Amelia zigs and zags this boundary. The weather isn’t so nice, but to Amelia the chilly air feels refreshing, brisk, bracing. The water slipping beneath her now is plain cold, as low as 54° F (12° C). The single-celled drifting planktonic plants at the bottom rung of the sea’s larder like it cool, so this cooler water is greener, cloudier with plankton. It has lost its tropical clarity. With that lost clarity and the new chill, the water has also lost its tuna, and with the tuna have gone the tuna-dependent tropical seabirds: the boobies, tropical terns, and frigates. Those birds are much better than Amelia at making a living among the ballistic beasts of the tropic seas, but they can’t make a living out here at all. This is the advantage of albatrosses: to make a modest living yet be able to do so over most of the ocean. Laysan Albatrosses can feel at home anywhere in all this vast realm, and that’s why there are so many of them.
