by Carl Safina
One of the benefits of knowing the local birds is that the mind tallies what is here as well as what is not, filling in the blanks, rounding out the scene. In any work of art, you’re aware of what the artist has included. Yet what the artist has left out informs the work, making possible a picture that’s a little larger than life. And that’s partly why this coast of characters, so rich and so real, seems bigger than its physical dimensions.
The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, bare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It’s a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores; of tense negotiations with an ocean that gives much but demands more. Every year the raw rim that is this coast gets hammered and reshaped like molten bronze. This place roils with power and a sometimes terrible beauty. The coast remains youthful, daring, uncertain about tomorrow. The guessing, the risk; in a way, we’re all thrill seekers here.
One night last summer, the air was so still you could actually see distant lightning reflected in the water; that’s how calm it was. But soon that black downpour full of thunderbolts arrived upon ten thousand winged stallions that beat the water frothy, and my neighbor George’s anemometer registered winds suddenly leaping to over fifty knots before one staggering eighty-knot gust blew it to pieces that lodged under his roof shingles. The handset of his phone blew across the living room, and the wall got plastered with sand driven right through his screens. Marilyn Badkin, now in her mid-seventies, saw it full force because their tiny beach shack is right on the dune. The next morning she said approvingly, “That was a fantastic storm.”
Jackson Pollock, who worked just a few miles from here, famously said that his art was about the rhythm in nature. In a word, this place is fluid. Mountains, plains, and valleys dotted pleasantly with cows—to me, they seem uncomfortably … what is the word … stuck. The coast is no still life.
FEBRUARY
A Snowy Owl has its winter palace in the windswept dunes a few minutes’ walk from my door. Having a Snowy in the neighborhood isn’t an annual event; this bird is special. He—it’s a very white bird, a male—has been here a week, and on most days I seek a brief and respectful audience. In bright sun his feathers gleam, and I often see him. He’s harder to find on cloudy days, when his reflectance matches the pale swale of his sandy castle.
To animals whose food stopped breeding last summer, February makes no promises. For those of us accustomed to supermarket shelves that endlessly get restocked, it may seem like news to remind ourselves that winter is a race against time in a season getting hungrier. February becomes the deepest, sparest part of winter.
But lengthening days mean the sky is about to draw a deep breath.
* * *
The first singing Red-wing returns the world. This morning, the year’s initial hit of Red-winged Blackbirds have sprinkled themselves thinly across our marshes.
You can tell if a winter morning is on the warm side even while you’re still under your quilt with the windows shut tight, by whether the wrens are caroling, the crows crowing, the cardinals whistling, or the chickadees calling their own name. But no amount of wrens, crows, cardinals, or chickadees means spring.
One singing Red-wing means spring.
Except maybe to Kenzie, who just takes their calls in stride as we walk the marsh road.
Kenzie’s opinion notwithstanding, a full month before the equinox these Red-wings have delivered vernal energy to these drab marshes, their lush and lustrous blackness showing just as finely as the scarlet shoulders they so exert themselves displaying. Just four days ago, a mid-February snowstorm whitened our pines and beaches. Patches of snow now splotch the straw-brown marsh and ice-paned creeks. But these newly arrived Red-wings have the place lit up with sound, and the sudden visual shock of rubies in black velvet on the bare branches.
With no females in sight, it is nonetheless for females they compete. Each will be judged by the piece of marsh he holds against the ambitions of other males. For his status and his real estate alone might he be loved. It’s her proxy for guessing whether she’ll get what she needs if she puts her eggs in his basket.
Of females, males care only that they be fertile. This value differential—he for his wealth, she for her womb (so to speak; egg layers lack wombs, of course)—stems from the fact that sperm are cheap and eggs expensive. Her bodily investment in offspring is much greater than his initially, so she wants to make sure he’s got the goods to make the venture work. You see the implications playing out all over the animal kingdom, from the behavior of these birds to women letting men pay for a dinner date.
The Red-wings I’m watching are older, more experienced birds that have arrived first to claim the best territories. But in doing so, these pioneer pilgrims play a high-stakes game. Late freezes, cold rains that harden into ice storms, heavy snow: there are many ways to die early when you gamble for the benefits of being first.
If you come later you’re less exposed to dangerous weather, but you likely don’t breed. And in the harsh calculus of evolution, if you don’t breed, you don’t count. Not breeding is safer, but too much safety is a dead-end strategy. So for the chance to reproduce, much is risked.
* * *
These singing Red-wings are the first drip in the stream of life that will widen and deepen into a river of up-and-coming migrants. Over several months the stream will swell to include such varied components as hawks, woodpeckers, flounders, mackerel, herons, weakfish, warblers, striped bass, flycatchers, blackfish, butterflies, vireos, frogs, bluefish, terns, squid, skimmers, sharks, shearwaters, tuna, toads, dragonflies, porgies, petrels, and many others: sea turtles, whales, dolphins—. Of birds alone, over three hundred species regularly migrate through or stay to breed here. A sharp birder can see well over one hundred species in a day. This remains a place still—despite major losses—remarkably rich and alive.
The migrants’ imperative is about food and sex. (What isn’t?) For many, migration bridges breeding and feeding grounds thousands of miles distant. Whales that wintered south while fasting for weeks and giving birth now turn north toward summer feeding grounds that will soon swarm with fish and plankton. Sea turtles generally go southward when the north chills. They nest on warm beaches once every few years; in between, they may row clear around the ocean. Giant Bluefin Tuna and some other heavyweights also breed in warm seas, then move toward us. Only the birds do most of their breeding in the north, though some ocean-wandering birds nest in the distant South Atlantic and come here in summer when it’s winter there. These include several shearwaters; the occasional South Polar Skua; and Wilson’s Storm-Petrel, here by the thousands, which I’ve actually seen nesting in Antarctica. Either way, birds come northward as insects, small fishes, and the right plankton become available. Because insects and fish are profoundly affected by temperature, the birds that eat them are among the most migratory. Arctic Terns undertake the world’s farthest migration, following food and summer from the Arctic to the Antarctic, about ten thousand miles and four months—each way. They see more daylight than any other creature. They pass here but usually far offshore, and are seldom detected.
All birds must track their food closely. Many small birds have their heaters turned up so high that they can starve in a day if they get uncoupled from their food supply. That’s why these Red-wings sing: to hold down the territories that are their food banks.
There is no exact symmetry between northward and southbound migrations. In autumn, far greater numbers of birds and many fishes—adults and newly minted young following their first migrational urges—depart in great gusts of autumnal energy, the rushing peak of the year’s powers, an urgent emergency, an insatiable, frenzied evacuation.
Then—you’re left just standing there.
* * *
But I’m getting way ahead of our story. The coming days will deliver more Red-wings. Any misfortunes befalling the already arrived elders may mean a mo
mentarily vacant territory—a younger bird’s first chance to breed. But for now these birds on the reeds know little of what may happen to them tomorrow or next week. That is one of many things we share.
They fluff their plush black bodies and flare their scarlet shoulders and utter forth their souls. Their call is kon-ka-reeee, but a literal translation is “Here am I!” It’s a good thing to be saying in late winter. Many a Red-wing of last fall no longer claims a presence in this world. In this most meager of months, for these survivors, as for us, the inevitable remains forestalled, for now. Their turf holder, this ecstatic statement of fact: I sing, therefore I am.
Anxious to keep its foothold and its competitive edge, each Red-wing is, of course, a living, acting, self-interested individual. Living things are generally entities capable of growth, reproduction, and repair—but an individual isn’t as distinct an entity as it seems. No life is an island. We, the living, must be continually plugged into flowing energy and flowing materials. Animals such as we are like bonfires. Stop providing energy and material (food, fluid, and air), and we not only go out, we cease to exist. We’re not like a motor or computer that can be restarted. We’re much more networked, much more fragile, more ephemeral.
The biophysicist Harold Morowitz questions whether individuals are even real, “because they do not exist per se but only as local perturbations in this universal energy flow.” He uses the analogy of a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool does not exist as a separate entity; rather, it is made of an ever-changing collection of water molecules, facilitated by the energy of moving water. “It exists only because of the flow of water through the stream. If the flow ceases the vortex disappears,” he says. In the same sense, living things like Red-wings and you and me “are transient, unstable entities with constantly changing molecules dependent on a constant flow of energy to maintain form.” You don’t just go with the flow—you live by it. The loss of the inbound flow is death. Death is merely life unplugged.
* * *
While an individual is a real entity in some meaningful ways, blurring the edges of our sense of self gives a more accurate picture. We’re less like crisp photographs and more like impressionist paintings. Our material makeup is constantly changing. We are made individuals by our genes—which make us each a bit different—and by our unique actions, memories, and histories. But our histories are largely shared. All the creation myths that intuit a single origin for people are essentially correct. All life is of the same kind: a DNA framework and its consequent window dressing. There is one tree, one family of life, no other.
Albert Einstein went further, saying, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.”
If you still believe you are distinct from your surroundings, try reading the next three pages while holding your breath. The point is: you are not just an entity; you are an interchange.
A living thing is a knot of passing time, flowing material, and continuous energy. From dust, air, and water, energy assembles itself into the wood, leaves, bone, and muscle that we recognize as living. All lives depend on how energy pushes matter through plants and animals. Often the matter, like carbon, nitrogen, and water, cycles from one living thing to the next through the whole community. We are these dynamic processes in relationship to one another. We are a relationship to the world.
Ecology—the term was coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 from the Greek word for “household”—blurred the individual further. Ecology investigates how all living things depend on other living things, and on that flow of energy and materials. Ecology reveals a world where each individual seed, each creature, is an experiment, testing the waters with its own uniqueness, striving for a fit. But the chances of surviving to adulthood range from under 10 percent—for most mammals and birds with highly developed parental care—to as low as one in millions, for example for big fish that lay immense numbers of eggs.
How can so harsh a world brim with life? The whole thing works because nature preserves not individuals but the enterprise by which life struggles to survive and adapts to changes. In other words, individuals disappear, species disappear; what survives is the process. The living enterprise continues because the process continues. To keep life alive, what’s important is this: preserve the process.
Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity’s relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we’ve learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is—more than anything else—a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time, and various living things. It’s not just about human-to-human interaction; it’s not just about spiritual interaction. It’s about all interaction. We’re bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we’re in—and reality’s implications—we’ll face big problems.
* * *
The Red-wings call, listen, call again. One note is not music. It is what lies between the notes that makes the music. And what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, “What is the meaning of life?” is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, “Where is the meaning in life?” The place to look is: between. Neither the Red-wings nor Kenzie need to be taught that what’s crucial is that we be mindful of the relationships.
* * *
In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We are that meaning. “And what we see,” says the poet Mary Oliver, “is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish.” As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself.
We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to these words, repeated each time: “I love you and I miss you; come home safe.” Companionship, relationship.
Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn’t it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes. It’s got to be part of the reason I feel that the animals expand the circle of my life. It’s another reason living here feels more plugged in, more vivid.
Still February, yes, but the Red-winged Blackbirds awaken all this. Their voices anticipate that first faint springtime greening that makes it seem the whole world’s inhaling.
MARCH: IN LIKE A LION
The first Northern Harrier in weeks comes slowly tilting just above the marsh reeds, its attention focused downward, intent on seizing opportunity. Harriers are at all times heavily invested in vole futures. When the short-tailed, small-eyed marsh mice are showing profits in progeny, harrier living is easy. Vole scarcity means hard times.
Binoculars inform that a patch of white in the marsh is not snow but—long legs, long neck—a Great Egret. I know its grace. It knows its hunger. With the temperature around freezing, this egret crucially needs the pond’s saltwater to remain open so it can stalk small fish and begin reversing the depletion of its journey.
Pioneering Yellow-rumped Warblers, still molting toward spring brightness, are just beginning to filter in. And one lone Tree Swallow is zigging the marsh. Though I’ve recently seen
a few bees and the year’s first Mourning Cloak butterfly, being the first swallow seems a risky gambit, foodwise. But if the insects remain scarce, as they surely are in the chill today, Tree Swallows, unlike other swallows, can eat leftover Wax Myrtle berries—those waxy, perfumed “bayberries” once favored for candlemaking. The Yellow-rumped Warblers, formerly called Myrtle Warblers, can also digest wax. Bayberry wax is mainly made of saturated long-chain fatty acids. To turn wax into food, Tree Swallows and Yellow-rumped Warblers bring to bear an assemblage of adaptations, including a slower rate of food movement through the digestive tract, a back-and-forth movement of food between gizzard and intestine, and an increased bile concentration in the gall bladder and intestine. The ability to digest wax allows these two birds to spend winters farther north. And they can return here well ahead of the dozens of other warbler species, ahead of other swallows, such as Rough-winged, Bank, and Barn Swallows, which remain flight-delayed until warm weather makes insects reliably airborne in late April and early May. So no matter how small or similar to others, species are usually specialized and distinguished in ways not at all obvious. These varied adaptations are both the outcome of past evolution and the raw material for adapting to future change.
It’s probably worth pausing to mention that the biggest misconception about evolution is that it’s “only” a theory. To most people, a theory is an untested hunch. But in science, a hunch is called a hypothesis. If a hypothesis is tested and confirmed repeatedly, and if all the confirmation creates a body of knowledge useful for predicting events, the knowledge is called “theory.” That’s very different. Imagine a girl sitting at a piano for the first time. She notices that some keys sound dissonant together, and others harmonize. Eventually, the child may know how notes will sound before she plays them; that’s music theory. It’s not “just” a theory. It’s an understanding of music so thorough that one could compose a symphony despite being completely deaf—as Beethoven did. This predictive sense of “theory” is the same way scientists use the word. Atomic theory predicted that a series of procedures would cause a big explosion. Germ theory predicts that if surgeons wash their hands, fewer people will die of infections. Evolutionary theory can predict, for example, that excessive fishing will create genetically smaller fish. It explains why malaria and insects develop resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Evolution is as scientifically accepted as gravity. And while we don’t quite understand how gravity works, we know a lot about how evolution works.