The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  * * *

  I keep casting and retrieving for about half an hour. Nothing at all happens. Even the loafing gulls look bored.

  Sunset yields to sundown, and the red west slowly deepens toward darkness. I’m about to quit when on a whim I decide to try changing lures. No fish have been showing at the surface, so I’ve been using deep-running lures. But when nothing is working, anything is worth trying, so I snap on a surface lure.

  I watch the lure sail into the deep dusk, plop down, and spread dark ripples in the flowing tide. I start retrieving, and since there’s not quite enough light to see it, I listen as I begin chugging it across the surface. Chug … chug … poosh! I see a black splash. The line stretches taut and the rod dips as a fish—a good one—thrashes furiously to shake the lure loose. Still attached, it catches the current and frantically beelines away.

  The fish runs and stops. I reel it closer, and it runs again. Failing to free itself, the fish slowly begins losing this tug-of-war. In a few minutes a Bluefish is thrashing at my feet and I grab the line and slide it ashore. Landing a Blue is an act so familiar it seems to sum up my whole life in the moment. I admit it’s not the thrill it was at fifteen, when my friend John and I would ride our bikes twelve miles to the shore in predawn darkness and cast to the sunrise. But because it was such a thrill, catching a Bluefish still feels like a genuine part of me.

  This early in May, however, this Bluefish comes as a surprise. In no prior year have I caught a Bluefish before I’ve caught a Striped Bass. This one seems early by a couple of weeks.

  The fish clamps the razor-toothed vise of its undershot jaw onto the shank of the steel hook. Exhausted and perhaps slightly dazed, it swivels its bright yellow eye but does not return my gaze. I put a foot lightly behind its head so it can’t thrash and slash my hand, then reach down with pliers and pull the hook. I pick up a fist-sized stone and hit the fish decisively on its head; its fins stiffen and shiver, then twitch a bit, relax, and go still. Less an act of “mercy” than of hastening the death I’ve chosen to inflict, this is the aspect of fishing I find least palatable. Simply letting the fish suffocate in the air is easier for me, but more prolonged. For the fish, I’m not sure which is worse.

  In two more casts I hook two more Bluefish. The motivation to catch persists longer than the actual need of food, giving rise to that most peculiar of all predatory acts: catch-and-release fishing. The problem with catch-and-release is that it’s hard on fish; the hooks injure them, the handling bruises them, the exhaustion makes them vulnerable, and some die. I am past catch-and-release. I now practice kill-and-go-home. Less is more. An ample sufficiency is enough. When I feel torn between sympathy and the urge to use—as I feel when I’m fishing—the balance becomes restraint. Maybe restraint is just selfishness that has learned to walk upright.

  As soon as I pull the third thrashing fish ashore, I hang up the lure, string up all three fish, and begin walking home in dense fog. Peepers are still calling into the spring air, now augmented by the little foghorns from Fowler’s Toads.

  Gutting the fish on my backyard table, I’m further surprised to discover that the Blues were eating butterfish, and large ones at that. This accounts for their preference for a big lure. Those butterfish are why they’re unusually fat for spring Bluefish. (They’re usually quite lean by the time they arrive here, on the north end of their journey.) And that unusual fatness, more so than the olive oil and oregano, is why they taste really, really good. While I’m watching the pan sizzle and trying to get a nice browning on the fillets, I can’t resist slicing a little off and nibbling it raw with just fresh lemon. So nice. Kenzie eagerly devours some scraps with her dinner.

  In savoring both the fish and my surprise at their early appearance, it occurs to me that I’ve also never seen a Bluefish before even the terns have arrived. Experience is worth less in a time without precedent.

  * * *

  Through this morning’s thick spring fog comes the call of a bird who has just ended a long migration, the year’s first Common Tern. The bird does not so much appear as materialize. It is its own annunciation, light and buoyant on the wing, precise in motion. As one Red-wing makes the spring weeks before the equinox, the first tern heralds summer with a month to go before the solstice.

  Light-plumaged and black-capped, its red-and-black bill brightened for sexual attractiveness, the tern flies gracefully thirty feet or so above the shoreline’s shallows, sharply alert for movement below. It parallels the shore until it reaches the Cut, turns a half circle with its forked tail flared, hovers for three beats of its slender wings, then sleeks itself and swoops into a shallow arc that wets its bill but fails to snatch a catch.

  The bird calls again but receives no answer. It merges back into the fog. Being an early arriver, this is likely a senior bird. From South American wintering grounds, it may be completing a migration it has made many times; they can live for a quarter century (as I’ll find out in a couple of months). My interest in terns goes back a ways, as well. I’ve spent more time with terns than any other animals, first because they led me to fish, then because they led me to a doctoral dissertation, then because they led me to realize that the whole ocean was changing. In that sense, terns made me who I am. I owe them, and I thank them; they have my admiration.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, many more—thousands—arrive to join that vanguard bird. Their flocks soon billow into white clouds diving into schools of small fishes throughout the Sound.

  The Cut is one of the most favored hunting sites for terns of three species breeding on several islands within a fifteen-mile radius; one island has perhaps ten thousand pairs and is among the world’s largest colonies. That’s one reason there are often hundreds of terns right around here. Terns come for the same reason the area draws the larger fish: the bay manufactures small fish by the millions, and the tidal current flowing through the narrow Cut concentrates them into a confined and vulnerable gauntlet.

  The terns’ season here is all about raising families. Over the weeks, their colonies go from busy towns of sexual politics to quiet communities of meditative incubation to bustling neighborhoods striving to bring off one more generation before they have to leave. In broad strokes, their nesting season is the life we all share.

  The terns lay two or three speckled eggs in shallow sandy ground scrapes lined with bits of shell or grass. Then the three-week countdown to hatching becomes a race against Raccoons, foxes, introduced rats in some places, gulls, and night herons, plus beach buggies, sunbathers, and dogs. Nesting on islands is the birds’ strategy for minimizing trouble from mammals, and the water barrier still helps—especially when boaters and their dogs cooperate with the “No Landing” signs (as they sometimes do).

  Great Horned and Short-eared Owls and harriers pose additional threats after the terns’ spotted chicks hatch. And then the birds must also cope with the near impossibility of finding food enough for all their young. Many chicks die in the three weeks between hatching and flight. Fledging and being on the wing guarantee nothing, either. At each step, the odds weigh against survival.

  Catching fish by plunging is so demanding a skill for an airborne creature that—very unusually among birds—adult terns continue to help feed their flying young, sometimes for weeks. The fish they must catch are small, mobile, and live mainly out of reach. Water diffracts angled light, making fish often appear to be where they are not. No wonder young terns need time to master fishing.

  * * *

  Each breeding colony is a fishing port. When a few birds arrive carrying fish, others mobilize, and soon whole squadrons are in the air, traveling over the waves toward the site of the lucky strike. Terns make a good fraction of their living catching small fish driven to the surface by larger fish. For a teenager fishing along the beach, diving terns were always worth a brisk walk and a long cast; they still are.

  In college I volunteered to work with a professor studying terns in their nesting colonies. From the beach,
I watched as the hungry ones flew seaward past the breaking surf on strong wings, direct and determined, and disappeared beyond the ocean haze. Others, from somewhere at sea, came bombing back fast and low, bringing glistening fish for hungry chicks. Somewhere out of sight on that wide ocean, they knew exactly where to go and what to do. It would remain their mystery as long as they could go beyond the blue horizon—and I could not. I wanted to go. I wanted to know what was out there.

  * * *

  I finished college and was faced with the need to get a job and, in general (so I was told), to grow up. All the men I knew were grown-up; I couldn’t see a way to avoid it. But then I discovered a remarkable social institution that allows one to defer growing up, sometimes indefinitely. It’s called graduate school. Signing up to pursue a PhD qualified me to apply for grants, and I submitted a proposal to get a boat to study terns. It worked!

  With an eighteen-foot boat named Ternabout I was thrilled to begin discovering what seabirds did at sea. I also discovered—slowly—the elegant power of science. I’d locate a feeding flock, then pilot through and past the diving birds while generating a sonar profile of the fish below. Next I’d tally individual birds’ fishing success rates. I also trolled fishing lures behind the boat, so that if a fish grabbed a lure just after dark marks appeared on the sonar, I could reel it up and say what kind of predatory fish the marks represented.

  This clearly beat growing up. And the prospect of building a body of work, rather than performing a job task, was much more appealing. There was something primal, too. Birds have been leading other animals to food since honeyguides somehow figured out that certain mammals, including humans, can open beehives. Hunters have watched the skies since circling vultures led early people to lion and hyena kills they might commandeer. Seabirds themselves spend a good part of their time watching for other birds that have found fish. And I was involved in their lives. I was at work in the real world.

  There was growing up during those years, too. I commonly saw tuna ripping through the surface, sharks swimming along with dorsal fins out, marlin charging through balled-up schools of small fish. But each year, I saw fewer. The loss and diminishment compelled me to get involved in conservation. Out on the ocean alone, merely following curiosity and a quest for beauty, I also found a calling, and my life’s work.

  * * *

  This was all in the waters around Long Island. Here, when terns are working over larger fish, it’s usually Bluefish. Every fisherman chasing the Blues knows the obvious: that in pushing small fish to the surface, Bluefish provide a feast for terns. Every fisherman is basically wrong, but it’s an easy mistake to make, and even the terns make it all the time.

  When I studied them, terns always arrived from migration before Bluefish. For a couple of weeks the terns often fished in large, loose, relaxed feeding flocks. Tern feeding flocks can last hours, until the tidal conditions change and the fish schools’ locations shift. The terns often patrol back and forth in easy ellipses over schools of small fish they can see but cannot reach, waiting for the chance to dive. Terns can catch fish only within a foot or so of the surface. My sonar showed that schools of small fish usually remain at middle depths, maximizing their distance from both diving birds and bottom-traveling predators. Eventually, the small fish rise to feed on swarms of near-surface plankton. Or tidal currents sweep them over a shallow sandbar. When opportunity arises, the terns seize it quickly, diving rapidly, often reappearing with a wriggling fish and swallowing while looping back to position for another plunge.

  The terns had little trouble gaining the considerable energy needed to finance a clutch of two or three eggs. Males supplemented females’ foraging by delivering whole little fish, highlighting the bill-to-bill transfer with a flourish and a formal display. Often, just after the male provided dinner, the two would mate. It appears that certain dating traditions were invented long before humans came up with theirs.

  Each year, there comes a morning when the large, loose feeding flocks are suddenly replaced by small fluttering tornadoes of tightly packed terns hovering excitedly for a few moments, breaking up, and forming again nearby. The quiet contact calls and evenly spaced flocks of recent weeks change to loud vocal threats and outright attacks as birds collide and jostle each other for position at the focal point of the tornado, right at the water’s surface. A few small fish spray from the water directly beneath the birds, and only the nearest terns get a chance for a rapid plunge. Quickly the tight pack disperses and spreads out. When a distant tern stops to hover, all the birds within hundreds of yards rush toward it. A small skipping fish vanishes in a sudden explosion from below, while several terns grab others. Approach by boat, and distinct marks appear on the sonar screen. If you’re trolling, the rod suddenly starts bouncing. The Bluefish have arrived in force.

  Caught between the Bluefish onslaught from below and the terns raining from above, the prey fish panic. As their schools fragment, individuals fall vulnerable to being singled out and nabbed. This seems a boon for terns, because the Bluefish obviously do chase up small fish that would be unavailable in deep water. But the Bluefish set the terns up for ecological betrayal.

  Bluefish eat a lot, and they greatly outnumber terns. And what they don’t eat seems to flee the area. So arriving Bluefish dramatically drop local prey fish densities. The relaxed and bountiful days terns enjoyed before the Blues arrived grow few; the small fish just aren’t there in those numbers. When that happens, diving over Bluefish schools becomes the only game in town. Common Terns are often forced to chase the Blues just to make a living and raise their chicks—but their fishing success rate declines. So the relationship is a lopsided dependency in which terns first benefit but ultimately suffer. The Bluefish look like they’re helping, but they can be the terns’ worst competitor.

  When I studied this relationship, the prey fish abundance increased through May as the small fish migrated into the area. Their abundance peaked in early June, then fell off when the Blues arrived. Food was already declining by the time tern chicks were growing rapidly; starvation of one or two siblings out of two- or three-chick broods was, and is, common.

  Nowadays, Bluefish are arriving weeks earlier, as spring water temperature warms. But the terns, traveling from their South American wintering areas, base their migration on day length. They’re keeping the same schedule as always. What might this mean for the birds’ food supply?

  Common Terns are versatile birds; a significant part of their continental population even nests inland, along large lakes. So how these coastal nesters will cope with change isn’t clear. Shrinkage of this population seems possible as their major competitors for food—Bluefish—arrive earlier.

  * * *

  About a week after that first Common Tern came calling through the fog, a whiter tern, with a slightly more rapid wingbeat, appears at the Cut—the endangered Roseate Tern. It was a treat to see them in Belize, and I’m happy to see them come “home,” as I think of it.

  I’ve never met a tern I didn’t like, but Roseates are unusually elegant. And Lazy Point happens to be the best place I know to see them from shore. Newly arrived Roseates sport a jet-black bill and longer tail streamers; while they’re still courting, you might catch that rosy cast if the light is low and the sun angled just right. But it took me a whole season before I could tell them from Common Terns at a distance. The main thing is a subtly different wingbeat. For them, that subtlety has major implications.

  A puzzle: Why are there about a hundred Common Terns for every Roseate? After all, they often mix in foraging flocks and are so closely related they occasionally interbreed. What could possibly account for their grossly disproportionate numbers? I could not imagine. So I spent a lot of time watching Common and Roseate Terns fishing. Feeding flocks formed in inlets full of tidal energy, on shallow sandbars, and in deep water over churning schools of predatory fish. Traveling to different places where they foraged, I’d stay out for several days in a new boat named First Light, anchorin
g for the night as the red sky darkened, then waking up to calling gulls.

  Some of the loveliest spots I worked remain largely unchanged. The same little islands still bear cloaks of breeding terns, keeping the faith of cycles that make the world round. My favorite among their foraging sites was a slender teardrop-shaped shoal at the end of a large, nearly uninhabited island. I lived far away from it back then, but now it lies in view of my cottage, only about two miles from Lazy Point. And even without binoculars I often see that terns still find it well worth their travel.

  At first it looked like Roseates caught more fish than Common Terns. Roseate Terns’ slightly smaller wings mean they’re a little more compact, and this seems to let them dive just a little deeper, catching some fish that Commons cannot quite reach. If anything, then, there should be more Roseates, not the other way around.

  But when Bluefish are driving the prey fish, the terns’ tables turn. That same slight difference in wing-loading lets Common Terns hover better. They can hold the positions required for quick, successful dives when fish suddenly surface. Because Roseates can’t hover as well, they can’t hold the choice spots in dense, competitive crowds of fluttering wings. Pushed to the periphery, they’re seldom in the right place at the right moment to dart in when the Bluefish drive up small fish.

  Because Common Terns can feed over schools of predatory fish in deep water, they forage over vast areas that Roseates can’t well exploit. Roseates’ best foraging sites are confined to inlet sandbars where currents and shallows concentrate prey fishes and force them within reach. In such limited places, Roseates excel; their catch rates exceed those of Commons. But the key phrase there is “limited places.” This is how they coexist, and why Roseates are so rare. In the days before dredging made life better for boats, just about every inlet and harbor mouth was full of shallow bars and, probably, full of Roseate Terns.