Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  From albatrosses that lay one egg, they took many thousands. Laysan Island around 1900. (W. A. Bryan, courtesy University of Hawaii)

  All of that is a little hard to picture. Seeking clarification, I ask, “When you say ‘guano rock formations,’ what do you mean exactly?”

  Russ replies, “A layer of densely compacted bird manure so thick and heavy that it turns to rock. It’s shit happening.”

  Happening maybe, but happening very slowly. It takes millennia. For most of the time, it’s “same stuff, different day.”

  “You see these big rock piles over there?” Russ points. “That’s leftover guano that they didn’t take off, left piled there since the early 1900s.” They look like piles of light-colored bricks. Mining for phosphate-rich guano fertilizer was big business.

  From the beginning, there was no peace. When the guano miners raised a short, signaling mast, an eyewitness wrote, “An albatross returning from the sea and certainly never having seen such a thing before, flew into it with such force that the impact sheared off one of its wings, just as if it had been cut with a knife.”

  Max Schlemmer, the guano king, also let loose the rabbits that did so much devastating devegetating. But guano mining, egging, and rambunctious bunnies were almost quaint compared to what came next, here and throughout the North Pacific Ocean.

  At the end of the 1800s feathers were in demand throughout the Northern Hemisphere for bedding, quilted clothing, and pen quills. Additionally, feathers and birds’ wings had become wildly fashionable on women’s hats in America and Europe. Paris was the main market for the fashion-crazed millinery trade, and the fad fueled an insatiable demand for feathers from around the Pacific and the world. In the United States, the near elimination of various birds, especially lovely white egrets with their elegant plumes, sparked opposition that coalesced into the Audubon Societies. Then as increasingly now, global markets put catastrophic pressure on wildlife.

  At that time, Japanese businessmen were paying particular attention to seabirds, especially albatrosses. Albatrosses’ densely insulating body feathers were sold as “swan’s down” for soft, comfortable mattresses. Other kinds of birds were killed for just their wings (similar to the way many sharks today are killed for just their fins). Living birds sometimes had their wings cut from them.

  In addition to killing adults, feather gatherers also dipped live chicks in boiling water, then stripped their thick down. (As late as the 1990s, Japan proposed to “harvest” Argentina’s penguins for their down, for gloves. The government got interested, but the Argentinian locals were duly appalled by the mere thought, and rejected the offer.)

  In the early 1900s, on some of the remotest islands in the Pacific, the Japanese “fowlers” killed millions of albatrosses. They devastated the seabirds of the Bonins, Izu Islands, Wake, Marcus, and elsewhere. After snuffing out albatross populations around Japan and the western Pacific, they started moving east like wildfire, igniting chaos wherever they touched. If you were born a seabird, it was a holocaust.

  Hawaiian soils had become part of the United States in 1900, but poachers relied on the infrequent patrols in these remote islands. Light as a feather, the Japanese bird killers first touched the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 1900, possibly earlier. In 1902 a visitor to Midway Atoll found thousands of seabird bodies. He wrote, “Everywhere on Eastern Island great heaps, waist high, of dead albatrosses were found. Thousands upon thousands of both species had been killed with clubs, the wing and breast feathers stripped off … the carcasses thrown in heaps to rot … . Bird pirates had worked sad havoc … . I was convinced that … before long this colony of albatrosses … would be wiped out precisely as the one on Marcus Island had been.” By the time the poachers were finally evicted from Midway in 1903, they’d taken half a million albatrosses.

  In 1904, Japanese schooners landed seventy-seven men farther east, on Lisianski Island. In six months, they killed 284,000 birds. The U.S. cutter Thetis arrived in mid-June and arrested the men, who were happy to be taken from the infernal island they must have felt imprisoned on.

  Secretary of State John Hay had asked the government of Japan to prohibit Japanese ships from killing seabirds on American islands. Japan’s foreign affairs minister immediately agreed to issue a warning but said he “could not guarantee that they would obey.” It’s unclear whether this was an honest evaluation or a promise to do nothing couched in fine diplomatic niceties. William Dutcher, the president of the new National Association of Audubon Societies, had appealed to Washington to stop the Japanese slaughter. He was taken by Japan’s charm offensive. Dutcher gushed, “It is with pardonable pride that I present to the directors and members [that] owing to the cordial cooperation of the Japanese and United States Governments, the large, important, and exceedingly interesting bird colonies are now, it is believed, safe from the ravages of plume hunters.” Peace in his time. Later, Dutcher would eat crow.

  In 1908, Schlemmer saw the guano running out (he made his last guano shipment in July 1910). In December 1908 he concluded a contract in Tokyo in which, in exchange for giving the Japanese the rights to “guano, and products of whatever nature” (read: feathers), he would receive $150 per month in gold. His legal basis for the agreement was at best debatable.

  Meanwhile, continual campaigning by the Audubon Societies prompted Theodore Roosevelt to issue an executive order on 3 February 1909, protecting the islands for seabirds. Laysan was now a federally protected bird sanctuary.

  Two months later, a dozen Japanese feather hunters were landed on Laysans, and they worked undetected. In August 1909 their schooner arrived, took away the feathers of 128,000 birds, and left the men to continue their albatrocities.

  Rumors eventually reached Honolulu, and the cutter Thetis was dispatched. It reached Laysan in January 1910. Captain W. V. E. Jacobs wrote: “One of the buildings was full of breast feathers … another was two-thirds full of loose wings, and two other buildings were partly filled with bales of feathers and wings, and … on the sand … were about two hundred mats … under which were laid out masses of birds’ wings in various stages of curing … . Along the beach and over the island were bodies of dead birds in large numbers, from which emanated obnoxious odors.”

  They also found cages in which birds had been imprisoned alive. In a dry cistern, hundreds of live albatrosses had been herded to die slowly of starvation, thus reducing the amount of fat beneath the skin, to make skinning and cleaning easier.

  The captain arrested the poachers, seized their feather booty, and uncovered 64,000 wings and nearly half a ton of other feathers, leaving them to spoil in the weather. By then, five-sixths of Laysan’s albatrosses had been killed.

  Moving up the chain to Lisianski, the Thetis arrested ten more Japanese feather hunters. The ship returned to Honolulu with something like 200,000 wings and two and a half tons of feathers valued at $130,000—a huge sum in those days.

  The Japanese workers produced papers from the American Max Schlemmer, purportedly allowing them to be there to extract guano. (Schlemmer certainly knew what the Japanese were doing, but nothing he had written could nail him directly to the poaching, and the charges against him were dropped.) Legal charges against the Japanese were likewise dismissed, and they got free passage home to Japan.

  In 1915—six years after the islands had been declared a refuge—the Thetis made another stop at Laysan and found that poachers had been there a couple of months earlier. “Between one hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand birds were found lying in heaps in all parts of the island. All of them were found on their backs with only the breast feathers missing … . No portion of the island was spared.”

  Eventually, the increasing American presence—and diminished numbers of birds—convinced the Japanese ships to stay away. For the next few decades, albatrosses were in great danger from Japanese feather hunters on many islands, but were protected in Hawaii.

  The trauma of that time endures. People have probably killed more Lays
ans than any other albatross, exterminating them from several islands where they once bred. Albatrosses formerly bred in larger numbers on Wake, and “in great numbers” on Two Jima before 1900. If the feather hunters had somehow missed a few albatrosses there, the ferocity and famine of World War II put an end to them entirely. The feather hunters did not miss Senkaku Retto (25° N, 123° E), nor did they miss a single bird there. Marcus Island, about 450 miles southeast of Japan, was hit early by Japanese feather killers. Marcus had probably provided nesting grounds for hundreds of thousands of albatrosses, comparable to Laysan Island today. By 1902 all that remained of the birds was large numbers of bones, and the claim by a local that a few years earlier he could kill three hundred albatrosses per day. None nest there today. Their failure to recolonize over an ensuing century probably stems from the island’s isolation and the birds’ fidelity to their ground of birth, but it’s as though the albatrosses have since shunned the place. It had taken six years to kill all the albatrosses on Marcus. It took longer—until the 1930s—to wipe out all three albatross species, including the Short-tailed, on Torishima.

  VENTURING TO A PLACE this remote at that time was difficult and dangerous. The work—the slaughter and the splattering blood and screaming birds and thrashing wings—must have been miserable in the heat and isolation. The effort surely entailed the impressive resolution, desperation, determination, insight, curiosity, brutality, and greed that have long been part of the human enterprise. The feather hunters’ arduous effort and excess was facilitated by the usual two things: profit potential and consumer apathy.

  So here we are now, trying to care, to right past wrongs. That’s why, when I see a young intern speaking gently to a starving chick, I don’t see it as pointless or silly. I see it as being as far as you can get from boiling chicks alive for their down. And so I applaud the chick soothers, Monk Seal workers, weed pullers, and anyone else who is willing to eat canned food for months just to help heal a place of such beauty, using kindness to benefit other creatures that have suffered at the hands of people who lacked humanity. Let idealism proliferate, let compassion thrive.

  PEOPLE NO LONGER COME ASHORE at Laysan with ill intent. But a measure of human thoughtlessness continually clutters this tiny coast. Laysan’s colorful shoreline is a jetsam jubilee, a festival of cast-up trash. Everything from boogie boards to booze bottles. The strand line is a wide band of bottles, floats, shoes, tires, plastic—. If you’re on the beach, you’re seldom more than a few paces away from something that doesn’t belong on beaches. There was debris at French Frigate Shoals, but nothing like this. This shoreline is a beach of burden, staggering under a bright array of mostly plastic rubbish that would look striking on a poster.

  A quick scan around confronts your eye with plastic beverage bottles, pieces of plastic pipe, empty containers of everything from laundry detergent to talcum powder to chocolate syrup. And various cast-up footwear. Glass bottles abound, too. Here’s a bottle saying Coca-Cola in English on one side and in Japanese on the other.

  A chick drags its fat belly across the sand and then digs a little divot for itself next to a piece of rusted metal. There are also a lot of coconuts on the beach, and some beautiful shells, like this large, gorgeous spiral snail about twice the size of my fist. Little red shapes sometimes turn out to be shell fragments and sometimes plastic bits. Plastic bottle tops are prominent. There’s the desiccated mummy of a unicornfish, its spines fixed and formidable, its eye sockets vacant, its mouth frozen in eternal surprise. It lies amid the cowries, clams, and barnacles—and trash—as though shell-shocked.

  Three adult Laysan Albatrosses are resting next to what looks like a glass fishing-net float on the beach. For some reason, the clear, spherical glass floats—many of which have probably bobbed around the Pacific for decades—have universal aesthetic appeal. Like most people, I find them quite attractive. But on closer inspection this turns out to be a bowling ball.

  The debris isn’t random. It piles up at certain spots. On the south point a hellacious concentration of trash, plastic fishing floats, and bunched-up fishing net stretches for a quarter mile. The northwest side of the island is a postcard of debris of the central Pacific. It’s a Monk Seal obstacle course, with seal tracks threading their way among buoys and bottles and balls. The Black-footed Albatrosses here are nesting densely among a psychedelic garden of round plastic fishing-net floats—four inches in diameter to larger than a basketball—colored to be visible on the sea. It’s a surreal-looking sight: big dark birds among big colored bubbles on a white sand beach against the blue ocean—like someone’s unsettled hallucinatory trip. As Coleridge, might say: garbage, garbage everywhere, as nobody thought to think.

  You would not guess that dumping plastics into the ocean has been illegal since the early 1990s. Some of the debris is indeed bizarre: Flashlights. A fake-grass welcome mat. A plastic wheel from a child’s tricycle. A big coffeepot and a scrub brush. Half a kitchen cutting board, well used. Suddenly there are three umbrella handles within three feet of each other, as though several people had been swept to their death together in a torrential rain and washed far out to sea, with only their umbrellas making the voyage all the way here.

  The debris piles up at certain spots—Laysan Island.

  Every few steps reveal new types of junk: A golf tee. A small perfume bottle, a plastic folding hairbrush, a toy cowboy, a thread spool, a vacuum tube like one from an old television set. A syringe. A refrigerator door. Small rubber balls. A human skull—of plastic. A toy truck. Toy soldier. A three-inch plastic dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). A plastic elephant. Plastic cat. Even some of the fish on this beach are plastic ones.

  That warm Kuroshio Current streaming past Japan, whose waters eventually pass Hawaii as the North Pacific Current, is troubled with trash coming from Asia because that’s the direction the flow takes it. This stuff, conveniently swept from its sources by the grace of moving water, gets inflicted on the ocean’s wildlife. (As you’d guess, the middle of the North Pacific isn’t the only place with this problem. In the middle of the South Atlantic, to give just one example, at an island appropriately named Inaccessible—uninhabited, seldom visited—bird researchers Peter Ryan and Coleen Moloney documented “exponentially increasing” accumulations of litter, mostly plastic from South America, two thousand miles distant.)

  The most ironic piece of trash ever found on Laysan was a sign in Japanese saying SAVE OUR OCEANS AND RIVERS—DON’T POLLUTE. Here’s an insulated beverage container from a brand called Kansai Attaché. It reads: “The power of nature to suit the mind of the city dweller.” An exquisitely vacuous example of the marketer’s vapid craft. We may find ourselves poetically inspired to answer their slogan with a haiku:

  City dwellers’ trash

  Fouling shores of paradise.

  More is on the way.

  Laysan’s beach also bears multitudes—tens of thousands—of chemical lightsticks used by the millions to attract Swordfish and tuna to baited longlines. Fishing-net floats of oblong foamy plastic are also abundant. They’re probably from the superscale “curtains of death” drift nets of the 1980s and early ’90s. People here say they’ve seen adult albatrosses regurgitate these floats and pass them to chicks. That’s hard to believe. At fully six inches long and two inches wide, a float would occupy inside an albatross a lot of space that should go to food. Especially in chicks. Likewise, the birds swallow the lightsticks.

  Feeding its pineapple-sized chick

  These fishing implements begin to hint at pressures untold and uncontrolled on the Pacific’s underwater wildlife. We use these implements to empty the oceans, and then the sea itself casts them up to heap havoc on the remotest shores. From the time this fishing gear is manufactured, everywhere it goes it’s trouble.

  I’d noticed several hooks hanging in the cooking tent. One of them looked like a halibut hook. One was a shark hook. The bird crew found them next to bird nests. Two days ago an albatross chick here had a braided plastic cord e
merging from its throat. Others have had mono-filament line hanging from their mouths. Russ says, “You pull a fair amount of the line out and suddenly it’s tight, like there’s a fish hook in the bird, so you just cut the line.”

  I wonder what happens then. A few steps farther is one small albatross chick’s carcass with bright bits of plastic sticking through its ribs. You get the feeling the plastic will remain here even after the bones themselves bleach and pulverize into dust and blow away. A little farther along lies another dead albatross chick, its whole rib cage packed with plastic—various shades of blues, pinks, orange, various pieces of bottles, the legs of a toy soldier. And a colored cigarette lighter. Lighters are one of the more horrifying—and more common—things you see in these dead chicks. This fresh carcass seethes with maggots, making the bits of colored plastic look woozily alive.

  In fact, every decomposed chick carcass seems to have plenty of little colored bits of plastic. You can often tell where chicks died last year because piles of colorful plastic particles that used to fill their stomachs mark their graves like Technicolor tombstones.

  It is unlikely that any living albatross chick on the island is free of plastic. Laysan Albatrosses eat greater volumes and more varieties of plastics than any other seabird. Of 109 identifiable plastic items found inside Laysan Albatrosses in a formal study, 108 had originated in Japan. Plastic can’t be good for the birds, and it must kill a few. Large volumes of plastics might give a false sensation of satiation and suppress their appetites. This may be enough to starve or fatally dehydrate chicks already in poor condition. Birds may absorb toxic chemicals from plastics and other artificial things they swallow.