by Carl Safina
And that’s why, even though Commons so outnumber Roseates, Roseates usually outnumber Commons right in the Cut. It’s still the kind of place Roseates are built for.
So to me, terns and Bluefish always seem like old friends coming home. Few people realize it, but the most satisfying part of science is the intimacy. And anyway, growing up looks overrated.
* * *
The Sound is in motion. Whitecaps and the wind make it seem not a day for boats, and I’ve spent it comfortably indoors, working. The phone rings. It’s my friend Bob, telling me he actually ventured out, and asking, “Do you want some mackerel?” Because I first got to know mackerel when their migration took a full month and their numbers seemed limitless, mere mention of mackerel sparks a flurry of childhood scenes remembered like old photographs: of fishing with my father; of tiny rented boats; of the sight of schools of fish pushing on a slick sea, and casting lures we’d shined with steel wool to make them irresistible; of catching mackerel from the shore and warming our shins and stiffened fingers with a morning fire in the sand, then enjoying mackerel for breakfast. All this and more comes to mind with one little question from Bob. “Sure,” I say, and drive over, and we end up talking for two hours simply because a few mackerel have convened our first visit in months.
* * *
To each May arrives a day when the songs of migrant warblers do damage to a morning’s work as the little sirens lure me out for eye candy. This is it.
Over the political and economic drudgery of the radio’s early news I hear their little chants and lisplike songs, their trills and glissandos, their declarations and affirmations. I click the radio off and close my computer, reach for my binoculars, and whistle Kenzie off her bed. Outside, we have a nice, warm southerly breeze following several days of inclement weather from the north. That inclement weather held up northbound birds; that’s what happens. (The birds know enough not to fight a headwind unless, say, they’re trapped over the ocean in shifted weather.) So they massed up patiently, until the breeze blew their skirts up and they lifted off. And here they are, in force. For starters there’s a multihued Chestnut-sided Warbler right in my rosebushes, eye level and just a few feet away, a lucky find and a rare and auspicious gift. So great in number and small in size are the birds today that in almost an hour I move barely a quarter mile from the house, looking into trees the whole time.
Warblers seem as thoroughly benign as any living thing can be. With more than fifty species on the continent—all variations on a theme, as though one plain little outline of a bird was given to an advanced art class to riff upon—American wood warblers are to my mind among the most alluring and endearing birds in the world. Except for the greenish Pine Warbler and the brush-dwelling bandit-masked Common Yellowthroat and the willow- and elder-hosteling Yellows with their sweet-sweet-sweet theme; and except for the bayberry-loving Yellow-rumps, with their high-contrast black-and-white and golden patches, most seem to prefer gleaning insects from oak blossoms. Inland, it can be hard on your neck, looking straight up the whole time. Here in our realm of salt spray and sea wind, most of the trees are scrubby, so that’s an advantage. And the leaves are still small. Many of the birds have just come off the ocean and haven’t yet dispersed inland and upward, another advantage.
What you do is, locate a caller and look for a bouncy little bird flitting and swooping among the drooping blossoms, or perhaps pausing just long enough for a few successive declarations. Binoculars are a must, and you need to be good at nailing your target on your first sweep of the glass. What comes into focus is pretty amazing, because without binoculars they’d just be little birds in the treetops; most people overlook them entirely.
I find a Canada Warbler (gray back, yellow belly, wears a necklace of black pearls), a Magnolia Warbler (black mask and cape, boldly black-streaked egg-yolk belly), an energetic American Redstart (unmistakable black and bright orange) eating a bright green caterpillar, Black-throated Blue Warblers, Northern Parula Warblers (blue-gray hood and wings, yellow throat, handsomely contrasting black-and-rufous breastband, olive cape), Black-and-white Warblers, plus a black warbler with white wing patches and an absolutely flaming head: the Blackburnian—truly spectacular beyond all bounds of its tiny size. Many are destined for much farther north and will be gone in a few days. That makes this a rare annual treat. If I’m traveling, I may miss the best action entirely.
In the right weather—warm fronts and tailwinds—May propels such waves of migrant birds that my ability to keep track of arrivals falls apart. Many kinds of warblers, diverse arrays of sparrows, sandpipers, swifts, woodpeckers, gulls, hawks, grosbeaks, hummingbirds, kingbirds, tanagers, thrashers, orioles, flycatchers, and more hit our beaches daily and move inland or along the shorelines. They invade our coast. (I’m sure they’d say the same of us.) Sometimes, in the middle of a big push of migrants, the air will change direction or just go still or foggy. And then migrant birds seem to rain into the coastal vegetation until the weather changes. That’s called a “fallout.”
This morning, a few towns west of here, my friend Eric saw “waves of birds with literally hundreds of warblers coming in across the marsh.” The seventeen species of warblers he saw on his small property included Blue-winged, Nashville, Black-throated Green, and Worm-eating Warblers, Ovenbirds, and more. Adding other birds, he tallied sixty-five species for the morning, right around his house. Later in the month the tally will swell to over 260 species of birds seen locally since New Year’s Day.
Gray Catbirds, which seem to have all hit together, overnight, are meowing from the briars. A greenish vireo moving silently has spider silk wrapped around its bill, evidence of its last meal. Strikingly rufous-and-black Eastern Towhees offer their simple toast, Drink!, and their fuller song, Drink your teeeee! That and their scratching in dry leaves will again become familiar sounds. Song Sparrows pump their notices from bush tops; Barn Swallows zoom the dunes in precision flight. And ringing throughout the salt marshes are the self-titled songs of Willets. They’re not the most melodic, I admit, but are exuberant, their authors easily recognizable with long, stout bills, long legs, and wing patches flashing white over the greening marsh grass. The United States is home to about eight hundred bird species, including about seventy listed as threatened or endangered. Many of the warblers and shorebirds, especially, stand greatly diminished in number compared to decades past. But despite those melancholy notes, they can still amaze and delight. Most importantly, their songs continue to insist that we remember how things are supposed to be.
Soon, broadening leaves will make seeing small birds in high trees difficult. Knowing the songs—and I’m still learning—lets one envision birds you can hear but can’t see. And as always, the ability to envision what is just out of sight is more important than merely seeing what’s right in front of you.
* * *
Stepping out at four-thirty A.M.—still chilly, but I decided to get in a good spring walk before work—puts me and Kenzie on the shore in time to hear a Whip-poor-will give way to a Bobwhite, and see the year’s first skimmers yield night patrol to the gulls of dawn.
The rich rouge of first light seems to purge the lingering chill, and even if the effect is purely psychological, it works for me. Well before sunrise, the air over the beach and ocean has become a conveyor of loons. More loons than I ever remember seeing—all Common Loons—are streaming northeast into the red-throated dawn. Continuously, I have loons in sight. If a casual glance upward reveals none, a scan with the binoculars reveals many. They flap constantly, as if flying is always an effort. With their long necks extended and legs outstretched, their wings seem smaller than needed for so long and hefty a body. They come singly or in loose groups of up to about a dozen. Many come close overhead, their blacks lustrous, their whites luminous. By the time I leave the beach, the red sun of dawn has already mellowed to yellow, the blue sky paled, but loons are still coming. In an hour, I’ve seen about four hundred. Here on the flyway, they stream past in a living
river, but eventually they will fan out and sift themselves into forest lakes and tundra ponds. Their lonely tremolo will dissipate into the vast spaces of the great North, and, two by two, they will spend an all-too-brief season raising the new loons we will see southbound on the far side of summer.
* * *
Past the Cut the channel widens, letting the current drop its sand, creating shoals. Over those shallows, the tide is sending a clear sheet of moving water. From that quick-flowing sheet, Roseate Terns are picking off small fishes, their elegant tail streamers enhancing their grace of flight. An egret’s long stilts have taken it onto the same shoal, stalking the same fishes on foot. The water is still falling. On full and new moons, low tides expose several of the bars to air, drawing Willets and American Oystercatchers, who probe and pick over the wet, silty sand for worms, small mussels, possibly little Mud Dog Whelks, and fiddler crabs. Like them, I venture out on a part of the bar already exposed, looking for nothing in particular, a strategy that has fueled many a discovery.
Just past the main sandbar, the channel’s shore takes a right-angle turn and the whole bay opens up into a pleasing vista of water and sky. Most of the bay is also shallow, with sandbars that discourage boaters. It’s the kind of place where jet-propelled watercraft excel. Fortunately, they’re banned here. Thus: quiet.
* * *
Down to these bars and shores, down out of the northbound lanes of May come Arctic-bound shorebirds whose travels stand among the most epic. This morning’s complement includes more of those harlequin gypsies the Ruddy Turnstones. Among them mix dark-bellied Dunlins, plus Black-bellied Plovers, whose new breeding plumage and striking black faces look painstakingly rendered in India ink. The bay shores and inches-deep shallows and mudflats also hold Least, Semipalmated, Pectoral, Solitary, and White-rumped Sandpipers, Short-billed Dowitchers, and other waders.
We should also be seeing a few Red Knots. But we’re becoming Red Knot have-nots; they’re going extinct. And part of their problem involves crimes against crabs. I’ll explain shortly.
In the sand exposed by the dropping tide, numerous foot-wide drag tracks lead to wet pits where horseshoe crabs were digging, mating, and laying eggs last night. The shorebirds are picking around the nest pits, eagerly eating some of the several thousand peppercorn-sized eggs planted like green-tinted pearls in the sand of each pit. I decide to come back tonight and see if I can find any horseshoe crabs in the act.
* * *
Day yields. Earth turns its face to outer space, and a tide of darkness signals the start of activities to night’s creatures.
I finish working, fry up some Bluefish, clean up just enough. Then Kenzie and I walk along the shore in fine moonlight. Several invisible Whip-poor-wills have again added their rhythmic triad to the night chorus. Their calls ring from the dark woods. A few remain to be heard here in the relative isolation of Lazy Point, but they’re vanishing in many places, possibly because ground nesting makes them vulnerable to loose cats. The ghostly birds chant incessantly, making their haunting call, so welcome at first, seem ultimately more forlorn than any raven of Poe’s. It’s as though they’re trying to etch themselves into memory before they’re gone.
But tonight it’s horseshoe crabs I seek. The night is stock-still. It remains too cool for mosquitoes, and I enjoy the quiet water, the mild air, the night chorus. When I reach the bay, the tide is within an hour or so of high. It’s so calm it touches the shore like pond water. I flick on my flashlight. The water is clear. I sweep the beam, startling a few small fish, illuminating a few snails.
I walk and stalk my way along the shore. And in just a few steps I find the first consorting horseshoe crabs. A large female, with a smooth, pea-green shell about two feet long, is traveling along the bottom with a male holding on to her and two smaller males following.
The horseshoe crabs’ main breeding periods straddle the full moons of May and June. It’s now two days to full. They’ve waited a year, and waited for high tide. Their hour arrives. Roused from depth by moonlight and some kind of memory, they begin working shoreward in the dark water. In the shallows they assemble for a rite ancient beyond human imagining.
Their rounded shield of shell looks a little like a horse’s hoof; a few older fishermen still call them “horsefoots.” To me their shell recalls a helmet. That helmeted body trails a spikelike tail that looks like weaponry, but they use it solely to right themselves if they get overturned. Unusually strange yet strangely familiar, these “crabs” are actually more closely related to spiders. But with a crablike shell shielding crablike legs, “crab” is the only word that works. Most jointed-legged invertebrates—arthropods—are either insects, arachnids (spider types), or crustaceans like true crabs. Yet within the arthropods, horseshoe crabs are in a class by themselves, called Merostomata, meaning their mouth is at the center of their legs.
Their looks are debatable, but one can hardly argue with their track record of success. With no other defenses than this shell, they’ve existed for 450 million years. In other words, their same basic body plan has worked for nearly half a billion years. None of us can imagine what that kind of time even means. When horseshoe crabs were new under the sea, fish did not yet have jaws, corals were just evolving, and flowering plants, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals did not exist. Hundreds of millions of years later, dinosaurs would arise, flourish, and vanish. Right around closing time we’ve strolled in, and they’re still here.
Four horseshoe crab species survive worldwide, two off the east coast of Asia, one in the Indian Ocean, and these American Horseshoe Crabs. Sea turtles of several kinds are just about the only things that naturally prey on the adults. Yet nowadays, they’re defenseless toward their new major predator: guess who.
Though the Asian species are apparently considered a delicacy during breeding season, American Horseshoe Crab eggs can reportedly cause poisoning and death. That would seem sufficient to save them. But a few years ago enterprising fishermen discovered that cracked-up egg-bearing females prove peerlessly attractive in luring eels and whelks to traps.
* * *
Dark shapes appear farther out in slightly deeper water, like an approaching armada of landing craft. Each couple of steps reveals more horseshoe crabs along the shore, and more in deeper water, males scooting along in deft pursuit of brides, and females already burdened with love. These animals are not just ancient, they’re old. They’ve molted their shells about seventeen times before reaching adult size at around nine years of age (unmolested, they can live to about twenty years). Males ultimately emerge into adulthood with a distinguishing pair of “boxing glove” claws on their front legs, designed specifically for clinging to the shell of a female. The male rides a likely mate, and when she digs a nest and lays a clutch of eggs, the male fertilizes them with a cloud of sperm.
Right along the waterline, crabs are working at various stages of their task, some females just bulldozing their way into the sand, others sunk almost to the roof of their shells, with males holding fast to their prizes.
Walking a little farther, I realize there are hundreds of these animals, all intent on mating and laying eggs. This stretch of the bay must be a major nesting site.
Finding this mass arrival in the pull of the moon feels like stumbling upon a major secret. I reach for my cell phone and call a friend who I know would appreciate seeing all this.
In the act of coming shoreward to dig nests, the horseshoe crabs remind me a little bit of sea turtles, for which I hold affection. Anything that returns repeatedly, for long enough, can inspire feelings of reassurance.
Their rite is beyond reassuring: it’s sacred. Nothing is more venerable than the act of creating new generations of living beings—or more vulnerable. And that puts my heart on alert. Something in the pit of my stomach tells me that, after 450 million years, the only way to go from this feeling is down.
My friend Patricia arrives. She works at an aquarium where, among other things, she’s a kind of horseshoe
crab ambassador to school groups, showing students how, despite their weirdness and their spiky tails, the animals are interesting and harmless. But it’s one thing to pull a horseshoe crab from a cooler in a classroom, or find one along a shore, and quite another to see this nocturnal ritual, to feel them keeping the ancient faith, to watch them gather like some secret clan, to find them in such numbers in the moonlight.
The scene and its magic immediately enchant her.
In a few hours the ebb will leave their eggs above high-tide line. They’ll be somewhat vulnerable to birds, but out of reach of the carpeting snails that graze the bay floor and can more thoroughly relieve a nest of its contents than any birds. The next moon-aligned tides will rise high enough to fetch tiny hatchlings, who’ll start their perilous bid for long life. Of course, only a small fraction will succeed. And if all goes as it’s gone for the last few hundred million years, that should be enough.
But “enough” might be a concept better understood by horseshoe crabs than by humans.
The moonlight suddenly shrivels as high-beam headlights bounce onto the beach. Patricia and I stare like deer. I have a feeling I know what’s coming.
The pickup stops and a man gets out. I hear him sloshing in the water, and soon I hear the thuds and bangs of horseshoe crabs hitting the bed of his truck.
The night, the spell—. The magic turns toxic, almost mocking. I begin to hate myself for having so enjoyed the scene. So naïve.
He moves his truck along, stops, gets back into the water, and we hear crabs hitting metal by the dozens.