by Casey, Susan
By August, plenty of chicks had fledged already, and those that hadn’t yet were thinking about it. I walked along with Russ and Jen as they checked their rhinocerous auklet study plots, reaching their hands into burrows to determine if anybody was home, or whether the occupants had decamped until next season. After months of watching specific birds struggle to make it, the biologists felt like they were viewing a soap opera. On many days, the story lacked a happy ending. Tens of thousands of chicks, and even some adults, succumbed to what was noted in the field as “PIH,” or “Pecked-in-Head.” This was the gulls’ signature mode of killing, and it involved rushing at another bird and, as the acronym attested, knifing their beaks into its skull. Any bird could end up PIH; the gulls murdered their kin as exuberantly as they went after other species. When the fledging attempts began in earnest, a sort of PIH-alooza ensued as chicks wobbled around testing their wings, and stumbled onto a mature gull’s turf. At present there were PIH casualties strewn everywhere.
I stood on the lighthouse path, poking one of them with my toe. The bird’s beak was frozen open, midsquawk, as though it had been hurling insults right up to the moment the lights went out. Above me, pigeon guillemots peered cautiously from their burrows in the craggy hillside clefts. They were sleek, black birds, with ballerina necks, dove-shaped heads, and sexy detailing: each wing had a crescent-shaped white accent like something Coco Chanel had carefully designed, and both their webbed feet and the insides of their mouths were colored a hot lipstick red. Unfortunately, the pi-gus, as they were known, greeted the nose less pleasantly than the eye—they smelled like rotten fish.
Several yards below, Russ deftly pulled a rhinocerous auklet out of a hole in the ground. The rhino was a regal-looking bird with pale, thoughtful eyes and a horned bump on top of its sharp beak. He held it up for me to see. It looked pissed off. “These birds are a combination of beauty and badass,” he said, as it bit him hard on the thumb. “They’re puffins, basically. And they’re tough.” I’d caught sight of a tufted puffin earlier in the day, standing on a rock at North Landing, staring out to sea philosophically through red-rimmed eyes. Its vermilion beak was shaped like a pair of wire cutters and could take off your finger with similar ease.
We moved up the path. Russ bent down to pick up a dead bird. The bird was small and entirely black, no markings. Its eyes were gone. He broke off part of a wing and held it to his nose. “Petrel,” he said, handing it to me. The feathers smelled musky and heavy and sort of smoky, like the bird had been part of an all-night poker game. Its tiny body was covered in gull regurgitation, leaving little doubt as to how it had died.
A few steps farther up the hill lay another victim, a cassin’s auklet, a crush of gray feathers the size of a grapefruit. This one was fresh, staring straight up at the sky, and it looked pristine, until Jen flipped it over. The back of the auklet’s head was missing.
As we walked, gulls rushed us. Sometimes it was a bluff, but other times they meant business. “They know when you’re not looking, and they’ll coldcock you,” Russ said. Much of the time, the biologists wore hard hats. But that only seemed to make some of the birds more determined: One kamikaze gull had slammed into a biologist with such force that it died on impact.
The rhino rounds were done and I wanted to see the murres, the beleaguered bird so tied to the history of this place. In order to do so, Russ explained, we’d have to climb a near-vertical rock face to the murre blind, a rickety shack just big enough for two folding chairs. It was there that the biologists perched for hour after hour, studying the colony below. Walking among the murres was forbidden, as it would cause them to flush. Recently, a starving sea lion had charged through the colony, sending the murres off in a panic and gobbling chicks. The gulls followed in his wake, gleefully bolting down the unguarded eggs. Pete, who was in the blind at the time, watched in horror but there was nothing he could do. It wasn’t a biologist’s job to interfere with nature, only to observe it.
Looking down into the murre colony from the blind was like viewing an enormous protest rally from a helicopter—it was hard to tell where one head stopped and the next one started. In order to make sense of the mass of birds, the area had been divided into manageably sized plots. Russ, who was Canadian, took pride in pointing out the ones that had been named after provinces: “There’s Alberta. Oh, and there’s British Columbia, over there.” Everything about these birds was painstakingly recorded as part of a data set that was thirty-three years old, and counting. Only after cataloging the population for three decades were the scientists beginning to see the patterns emerge. In El Niño years, the warmer Pacific produced less food and the sea-dwelling animals suffered, breeding in far fewer numbers. Other years, things boomed. As it turned out, seabirds offered a perfect parallel for the overall state of the ocean, and a bellwether for ecosystem troubles. Such long-term research on a single marine habitat had never been compiled before. Just another pioneering bit of natural history going down on these desolate rocks.
ALL DAY THE AIR HAD BEEN DAMP BUT NOT COLD, AND THE SKY WAS A soft gray. This was gentle, mild weather, a Kleenex draped over the island. We were in a tropical depression, apparently, and there wasn’t a hint of wind. This calmness, combined with the peak of the waning moon, created an ideal opportunity to go out and catch birds in the dark. So that’s what we were planning to do after dinner.
Tonight’s mission was to lure the island’s stealthiest seabirds, the ashy storm petrels, into a gossamer-fine mist net so they could be counted and banded. During the day the petrels hid in impossible places; despite the fact that the world’s largest colony lived on these shores, they were almost never seen. At 10:30 p.m. the six of us headed up to the net, which Pete and Russ had stretched between two posts on the side of Lighthouse Hill.
As we walked, our headlamps bobbing in the bottomless pit of a night, I asked Pete for his opinion about the ghost stories. He told me that he’d not had any encounters himself, but most of the biologists believed the island was haunted, and that a number of them had been scared by footsteps on the stairs, just as Peter had been. One of them, a friend of Pete’s, had awaked to a female voice urgently whispering in his ear, speaking in a language that he couldn’t understand.
Turning off our headlamps, we sprawled out near the net, pretty much on the exact spot where earlier in the day I had marveled at the carnage. “I smell something dead,” Melinda said cheerfully. “I’m probably sitting in it.” It would be hard not to. I was beginning to get used to being surrounded by dead birds, I was slowly becoming inured to the waves of PIH victims, but I really did not want to touch maggots, which everyone else seemed to accept here as a matter of course. (I also preferred not to contract bird lice, another seabird job hazard.) No one else seemed squeamish about lying on the ground, however, so I kept quiet and resisted the temptation to turn on my headlamp.
A scratchy cassette recording of petrel mating noises pierced through the darkness. The nocturnal birds all had eerie calls that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside them; this one brought to mind a heavily loaded Styrofoam box being dragged across a linoleum floor. Almost immediately the petrels began to appear. They were the approximate size of a moth on steroids and they came fluttering toward us with erratic, batlike motions, diving into boomerang turns when they got close enough to spot the net. Often, it was too late. When one of the birds snagged itself, whoever was closest jumped up, snapped on his or her headlamp for a second, and carefully extracted it from the mesh. Jen was doing this right now, and after popping the bird into a little sack to weigh it, she handed it to Pete. He pulled out a pair of pliers and affixed an orange metal band to the bird’s ankle, then blew on its stomach feathers. If the petrel was breeding, it would have a brood patch, an almost-bare spot of skin that rested directly on its eggs, warming them. This one did. He passed the bird to me. It was chinchilla soft, and its heart whirred in triple time. The petrel looked up at me with alert, obsidian eyes. There was nothing mean about it—no shar
p beak, no raking claws. It had a tube nose: a shiny, two-holed appendage on its beak that served as a kind of portable desalination plant, enabling the petrel to stay at sea, drinking salt water and shooting the salt out of its nose afterward. “I’m so into petrels,” Russ said. “They’re just absolutely incredible birds. The true oceangoing wanderers.”
The petrel banding would continue until 2 a.m., but after a couple hours of lying in the bird graveyard, I became cold and decided to head back to house. There was no light beyond my headlamp and the lighthouse beacon sweeping the Pacific. In the utter darkness all sounds seemed amplified: the screaming gulls, the caterwauling nightbirds, the PIH scuffles, the crashing water. Vaguely gull-shaped things whirled in my direction, vying for a crack at my scalp. I began to walk faster, anxious to get indoors and with Alfred Hitchcock to thank for my state of mind. As I passed the coast guard house, solemn and mute next to its lived-in twin, a large white shape flew up into my face. Too big for a gull. I stepped back, frightened, and then froze for a moment. My headlamp illuminated a single, barren spot on the wall, but beyond the edges of its beam shapes of uncertain origin darted around. “There’s just no way this place needs ghosts,” I thought, resuming my pace. “Ghosts would be total overkill.” Now the wind was picking up, shaking things, and the air was fat with moisture. Tendrils of fog spilled across the path, licking my feet. It was moving in fast and low, erasing the edges, creeping onto the island like an animal.
Diving inside the house, I immediately hit all the light switches, before remembering that you weren’t supposed to do this; it blew the auklets’ cover. When light streamed out the windows, they could easily be seen by the gulls, guaranteeing a massacre. Reluctantly, I turned off every light but the kitchen’s, where I sat with a plastic cup of leftover dinner wine, trying to convince myself that I was not scared. It was rare to be alone in the house at night. In fact, it almost never happened. Which, judging by how I felt at the moment, was something to be thankful for.
I went upstairs to my bedroom. It was past one o’clock, but no one had returned yet. Falling asleep to the sound of a quarter-million shrieking birds took some practice, not unlike becoming accustomed to the car alarms and the sirens when you first move to Manhattan. I tossed for a while in my sleeping bag, heard the others come in, and then drifted off.
An hour or two later, I’m not sure exactly what time it was, something struck the side of the house with a heavy thump. I woke with a start. The birds had gone quiet. Jen lay asleep in her bunk across the room. Suddenly, in the still air, I had the feeling of not being able to catch my breath. There was a tight, unyielding pressure on my chest and it was not at all subtle. Breathing took effort; it became something I had to do consciously. Panicking, I sat up and looked over at Jen, who had her back turned. At that moment, she lifted her head, twisted around in her bunk, and stared straight at me, eyes wide open. “I’m cold,” she said, in a high-pitched voice. “I’m so cold.” I could tell she was not really awake, that she wasn’t seeing me. Then she lay down again and was silent.
I felt my chest ease up, as if something heavy had been lifted, and I was able to inhale again without having to think about it. I lay with my heart pounding, trying to come up with a logical explanation. Everyone knew Jen talked in her sleep. This was just a weird coincidence. Wasn’t it? I wasn’t entirely dismissive of ghosts, but I wasn’t a wild-eyed believer either. What was it that I felt? It had been definite and strange, but not hair-raisingly scary. The vibe was weak, and it was sad. Like a child struggling to breathe. Like one of the lighthouse children who had lain here, perhaps, in the last, fatal stages of diphtheria.
Chapter 5
One attack on pelican off Shubrick. The bird died.
—FARALLON ISLAND LOGBOOK, NOVEMBER 27, 1987
AUGUST 8–10, 2003
“What year is it? Hey, it’s an odd year. Stumpy could be here!” Peter was standing on the whaler’s gunwale, hands in the pockets of his vest, looking hopefully at the bright yellow surfboard that was floating off the stern. Shubrick Point rose in the background. “Or Trail Tail, who used to hang out with Stumpy. She was this unbelievably big female. The first time I saw her it was like a bus went by. Scot tagged her. I’m not even sure she noticed.” He took a few nonchalant steps along the whaler’s edge in his knee-high rubber boots. It made me nervous when Peter walked around on the rails without a handhold.
He’d arrived in the shark boat earlier this morning with two trophy salmon that he caught en route. On his way from Bolinas the gold morning light had flashed across relatively silky seas and things were just hopping, rockfish flipping around like popcorn and shearwaters swooping off his bow and humpbacks rolling through the channel, and it seemed wrong not to at least dip a pole into the water. A few hours ago, he’d hailed the island on the marine radio so that Russ could come down to crane him up. Everyone gathered at the landing to greet him; for young ornithologists, Peter stopping by was like John Coltrane suddenly walking into a class of saxophone students. Each of them had a well-thumbed copy of his book Identification Guide to North American Birds, also known as the bible of bird banding. Peter, of course, would never mention this unless pressed, but in the course of my reporting, I’d discovered gushing reviews and a roster of awards he’d received for the volume.
It hadn’t taken us long to relaunch the whaler and make our way out here. After a few days saturated with birds and ghosts, I was itching to get off the island, and Peter thought the water looked “sharky.” To me it looked like it usually did: blue-black and sinister. Of course there were sharks in it.
A Stumpy sighting, not only seeing a Sister looming underneath the boat but discovering it to be the queen herself, was a long shot. Yet despite her discouraging hiatus, she was so invincible that no one had really given up hope. As we drifted across her turf, Peter recalled how during the filming of the BBC documentary, he’d been sitting in the Dinner Plate on this very spot, in similarly flat water, with an island intern and the film’s director, Paul Atkins. The three men were waiting off to the side while preparations were being made for a shot from another boat. Abruptly, the little boat rose on a foot-high crest of water. And there was Stumpy, looking directly at them with her ink-black eyes. After a moment of scrutiny she dropped back down, circled the boat, and vanished. When Stumpy’s fuselage of a noggin lifted up from below, the intern had imagined her to be staring straight at him and he’d panicked, yelling, then hyperventilating. Afterward, he had declared his refusal to go out in the boat ever again. “She was just letting us know that she knew we were there,” Peter told the intern, like that was going to reassure him.
No action in Sisterhoodville today. No boils, no outsized tail fins, no curious sharks giving us a once-over. We drove slowly around the island in a counterclockwise direction, heading south past Tower Point, past Sugarloaf, into the sneaky, double-reefed waters of Maintop Bay, and then, approaching the western tip of the island we came up on Indian Head, also known as Rat Pack headquarters. The surfboard followed behind us, stoic and unmolested. “Okay. Now we’re in the money spot,” Peter said, stopping one hundred yards away from the sharp rock walls.
Here was where Cuttail had lunged six feet out of the water in a tailstand, chasing Peter’s pole camera, the underwater casing of which happened to be colored seal-meat red. Here was where Scot was bumped so hard in the Dinner Plate that its stern lifted clean out of the water. Where Ron watched a shark in pursuit of a seal rocket to the surface five inches from his flipper. Where an abalone diver named Mark Tisserand had been shaken by his left ankle for fifteen seconds before the shark released him and he swam seventy feet to the surface with his foot hanging by a lone hank of skin. This was the spot where a six-hundred-pound elephant seal carcass had once drawn, Peter estimated, a dozen individual sharks, where the waters were stained by “the most blood I’d ever seen and ever will again.”
Rounding Indian Head, Peter felt hopeful. “I would be very, very surprised if we didn’t get a
hit here,” he said. I watched the board with great concentration, willing a boil to emerge next to it. We dragged the surfboard back and forth several times down Shark Alley, and then we circled Saddle Rock and idled in front of the East Landing for a while longer. But there were no takers.
Because the sharks were so famished when they arrived here at the beginning of the season, they would promptly investigate anything that was dropped in the water. Sometimes, at first, Peter and Scot didn’t recognize sharks they knew well because they were so emaciated. Half Fin in particular would arrive looking downright gaunt and acting crazier than usual until he managed to cut himself in on a carcass. As the sharks fattened up throughout the season, sometimes to the point of whalishness, they were less likely to take a run at the trick fiberglass. But right now, in early August, if any Rat Packers were swanning around Indian Head, there was no way they’d be able to resist the decoy.
Peter turned to me with a sad look. “They’re not here yet.”
No sharks was an empty feeling, a core letdown. Coming into a silent room where you thought there’d be a party. Discovering that your sweetheart had left you and taken the dog too. The Farallones without great white sharks was a movie without a hero, a military campaign with armies and no general. It was boxing without a super heavyweight division. It wasn’t the same.
WHY DID I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THESE FISH? WHY DID WE ALL? THEY were always in my thoughts, even when I was sleeping, and as I’d confided to Peter, not a day had gone by in the two years since I’d encountered the sharks when I didn’t think about them. After that experience I knew one thing for sure: Great white sharks are something altogether unknown in the lineup. Any description of them requires tossing aside the usual vocabulary and settling in with a six-pack of hyperbole—the most mysterious creature on Earth, the last untamed beast, the ultimate predator, the most fearsome monster imaginable, absolutely, positively, supremely adapted for its role. They’re simply different. As the legendary Australian diver and underwater cinematographer Ron Taylor once put it: “My own feeling was that there was a strong intelligent personality behind the black orb. Not evil, but more alien and sinister than that.”
