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

by Carl Safina

  I’ve known that baymen use horseshoe crabs for bait. But knowing is not the same as seeing an ancient rite turned wholesale into flying junk. My heart starts pounding with both rage and fear. In the inevitable confrontation I know is coming in the next minute, I’m afraid things may get out of hand.

  He hasn’t seen us yet.

  Patricia charges into the water—with her cell phone in her pocket, I’m pretty sure—and now she, too, is jerking crabs from their nests. But instead of throwing them ashore she is flinging them as far out as she can, beyond reach of a man in boots.

  The man—a guy in his twenties—notices her and yells, “Hey! Stop!” At first he doesn’t realize she’s doing this for the specific purpose of putting the crabs out of his reach. Then he gets it—and gets mad.

  Patricia, waist-deep in chilly water and soaked to the neck, is likewise wound to a furious black anger. The more he yells at her to cut it out, the faster and more determinedly she works. Every crab is to him a living, to her a life. There is no chance of a meeting of the minds here. He speeds his truck to where I’m standing, hops out, and gets in my face.

  He wants me to get her to stop. One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. He’s clean-cut, athletically built, wearing hip boots and a light long-sleeve shirt. His brown hair makes a straight sweep across his forehead. He’s angry, but his eyes suggest that he feels some combination of exasperation and worry; it’s the look of someone already feeling besieged. I see at least the opportunity to remain calm and prevent the situation from coming to blows.

  He tells me that what he’s doing is legal. I say I know it is. What Patricia is doing is legal, too. To oversimplify: she wants to take the horseshoe crabs from him; he wants to take them from her.

  He wants to know how I’d feel if he came to my office and disrupted what I do for a living. I try saying that if you want to keep making a living, killing your animals while they’re breeding seems a risky strategy. He says that’s nonsense; his grandfather did this, too. They’ve been doing this for generations and look: the crabs are still here by the hundreds.

  Yes—because taking a few for bait is one thing. Loading a pickup truck is another. Selling them out of state is yet another. Gold rushes have a way of crashing. His grandfather took crabs, but he didn’t take every crab.

  At stake for him is his self-identity, his family history. But his problems here go far, far beyond Patricia and me. It’s a traditional way of life already eroded by overfishing, undermined by overreaching, overdevelopment, deteriorated eelgrass and a consequent crash of scallops, and a flood of linen-wearing outsiders who come to socialize while sipping wine in the sunset but don’t really understand what this place is about. I empathize. Our worries largely overlap. The declines that threaten his interests also threaten mine. But at this moment, we have a significant difference of opinion.

  He reaches into the cab to show me his license. Embarrassed by this, I tell him he doesn’t need to do that. He says he’s got a day job working for the town. He is pressing the point of his legitimacy. He is trying to show me that he’s a respectable member of the community and that he’s upholding a long-standing family fishing tradition. We’re talking, not screaming—which is good—but we’re talking past each other.

  His job with the town indicates that you really can’t be young and earn a full-time living as a bayman anymore. Not with the combined pressures of depletion, shrinking fishing options, out-of-sight real-estate prices, and soaring property taxes. I say we can’t do what our great-grandfathers were doing. He points to his license again. I know, it’s legal, I say again. But times change. What others did in the past limits our options now, because a lot of it was overdone. I just think he shouldn’t be taking crabs at this rate—not filling trucks while they’re laying eggs.

  He says, earnestly, that he can’t take every crab; they have a limit: “We’re limited to five hundred a day.”

  “Five hundred? A day?” There aren’t five hundred crabs here right now. That’s the kind of limit that represents no limit. I tell him, Look, you can’t just come and take every egg-laying female you can get your hands on and expect this to be here in a few years. Five hundred just seems excessive; that’s how it strikes me, anyway. And even if he complies, who’s checking what goes into other trucks?

  Nearly four hundred people hold licenses to take horseshoe crabs from the waters of this state. In the old days, limits on catching horseshoes seemed unnecessary. But market demand for whelk and eels increased rapidly in the 1990s, and so did demand for crabs as trap bait for them.

  In the year 2000 the state set its first quota: 366,000 crabs. That seems like a lot, but to fishermen, it seemed too little: they took 628,000 crabs, way over the limit. In 2004, due to widening concern about the crabs and about the shorebirds who use excess crab eggs as migration fuel, the state cut its quota to 150,000. The take actually dropped for a few years, then ballooned. In 2007, fishermen took 284,000 crabs—nearly double the quota.

  Not only is no one watching, the state relies on the fishermen themselves to honestly and accurately report their numbers. It’s unlikely they took fewer than they claim.

  Another pair of headlights turns onto the beach, a death warrant for another five hundred horseshoe crabs if they can find them. There are two guys in that truck. This changes the dynamic. Patricia is down the shore, still grimly flinging crabs into deeper water. The guy I’m talking to drives over to consult with his buddies. I’m expecting a unified confrontation, but instead they decide to leave.

  In the time it might take them to go have a beer, we’re long gone. There is no one to call, because this is legal and the “limit” is so stratospheric there’s no way they can exceed it, even by laying a hand on each and every crab they see.

  In the morning the beach is laced and churned with tire tracks. They came back, of course. Others came, too. There is something in man that hates natural abundance, and something that clings to excess.

  * * *

  The Red Knot is a dove-sized shorebird with a straight, stout black bill and, in breeding plumage, a pink or brick-red breast. In physique it merely pleases, rather than impresses. But it is an athlete of almost incredible accomplishment. It undertakes one of the world’s longest migrations, its twenty-thousand-mile annual round-trip spanning the hemispheric landmass from the tip of South America (Tierra del Fuego) to the Canadian tundra.

  For more than half the year, Red Knots are urgently on the move. Even their destinations make no promise of reprieve. Once, in June, in Canada’s high Arctic at the northern tip of Baffin Island, I was stunned to see a small group of Red Knots hunkered against a late snow squall after enduring their incredible journey, weathering an unleashed wind that could still lash and sting.

  Typically for them, they’d gotten there anticipating two weeks of cold weather. To carry them through weeks of scant sustenance, they’d brought an emergency supply of fat—fat from horseshoe crab eggs. The fat gathered by horseshoe crabs and garnered by the knots allowed them to survive, court, mate, and lay eggs before insects became available in the short burst of Arctic summer. So the crabs’ eggs were both fuel and survival rations.

  Back then (1986) nobody was terribly worried about Red Knots, merely impressed by them. They were just one among a spectacular group of shorebird species that all stopped for a few weeks each spring to fatten up on horseshoe crab eggs before continuing long northbound flight treks. They’d stop in many estuaries, but the epicenter of horseshoe crabs—and the main fuel depot of North America’s northbound shorebirds—was across the New York Bight from here, on the shores of Delaware Bay. In those years so many crabs jammed the bay’s shores that they dug up one another’s nests. Billions of eggs drifted into windrows on the wave-lapped shores. You could skim them up with your hands. Famished shorebirds by the hundreds of thousands—officials estimated a million birds—swarmed in clouds on the flats and beaches. I saw them. I saw knots there, too, during those years.

 
; * * *

  Exceptionally nutritious, horseshoe crab eggs allow shorebirds to put on weight faster than any other food. The birds can double their weight in two to three weeks—if the eggs are there.

  Delaware Bay’s positioning, and its role as the horseshoe crabs’ densest breeding ground, is not just perfect for the migrating birds—it is crucial. To hit the Arctic on schedule for breeding in the short flare of summer, the birds need to get their timing right. A significant decline in the number of horseshoe crab eggs would make it impossible for many of them to complete their journey to their breeding sites, or even survive.

  Here’s the math: after an arduous four-day nonstop flight from South America, Red Knots arrive in Delaware Bay so depleted they weigh a mere 90 grams—3 ounces. They look emaciated. They must eat and eat until they recover from the depletion of the first part of their trek, then pack on enough fat for the next. After more than doubling their weight, they can safely depart weighing a plump and robust 200 grams.

  If you took that crucial fueling stop out of their northward journey, you might as well pull the plug; they’d go down the drain.

  And they have. Between 1990 and 2005 horseshoe crab egg numbers along Delaware Bay dropped 90 percent. Over that same time, eastern Red Knot numbers (a western population migrates between Alaska and Pacific Mexico) dropped 80 percent, from a high estimate of as many as 150,000 to about 30,000. During a study spanning 1992 to 2000, annual adult survival dropped from 85 percent to about 55 percent. And in a single year, 2005, the remaining population fell by half.

  Knots have other problems besides crab depletion. Birds seem to be dying on their wintering grounds, and something is causing some birds to arrive along Delaware Bay a week or two late, and in poor condition. This makes it even more crucial that those birds that get to Delaware Bay find enough crab eggs to fuel them for the remaining eighteen hundred miles to their Arctic breeding grounds.

  Red Knots must put on at least 6 grams per day at the horseshoe crab banquet so they don’t fall short going toward the Arctic. In the late 1990s, the Red Knots could put on 8 grams per day. Ten years later, many couldn’t gain more than 2. And when they launched the next push north, they starved. Researchers surveying parts of the Red Knots’ vast Arctic breeding areas could no longer find any birds.

  * * *

  If recent trends continue, the eastern Red Knot will, by 2020, follow the Passenger Pigeon into the mists of memory. Like the Eskimo Curlew, which was once abundant enough to be shot by the wagonload, even its memory will fade. If the Red Knot comes undone, it will be just the first in an oncoming chain of shorebirds derailed in the crab-overfishing train wreck.

  The government report on the Red Knot’s status states: “The main identified threat to the population is the reduced availability of horseshoe crabs eggs in Delaware Bay arising from elevated harvest of adult crabs for bait in the conch [whelk] and eel fishing industries.”

  Fishers have long used egg-bearing females for eel bait. But in the mid-1990s, fishermen’s take of crabs went from tens of thousands to over two million. Needless to say, that bent the horseshoe crab population downward. Newly maturing female crabs’ numbers dropped nearly 90 percent just between 2001 and 2003. As usual, the first response by fisheries managers was cobbled together after an avoidable disaster was already entrenched. The crabs could recover; they have a history of doing so. Horseshoe crabs were once used for fertilizer. Horses drew wagonloads from the marshes.

  Because of drastic—though necessary—limits on crab taking, recent counts suggest that Delaware Bay’s breeding horseshoe crab population may have stabilized. Along Delaware Bay’s New Jersey side, the heart of the shorebird stopover, the numbers of juvenile and male horseshoe crabs appear to be up slightly. To that extent, the plan is working.

  But what the crabs need and what the birds need differ. The crabs need to lay enough eggs. The birds fatten up with excess eggs. The birds’ abundance depends on egg overabundance. Because the crabs need about a decade to mature, even if fishermen stopped taking the crabs entirely, the crabs’ recovery would require ten years or so. At recent trends, the Red Knot’s eastern North America population may not have that kind of time.

  The Red Knot is just the most imperiled, most studied shorebird reliant on horseshoe crabs. The Ruddy Turnstone, the little Sanderling, the littler Semipalmated Sandpiper, the Dunlin, and the rather long-billed Short-billed Dowitcher—they all depend on horseshoe crab eggs. And their numbers are down by more than half.

  New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia belatedly restricted the take of horseshoe crabs. New Jersey later banned it altogether. New Jersey also cleared debris from crab-nesting beaches and restricted access so birds could feed without constant disruption by people and their dogs.

  That’s all needed, but about 600,000 crabs are still killed annually for bait in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and New York. New York dropped the absurd “limit” of 500 per day to 200, then tightened it to 30 crabs per day—sometimes. At other times, it’s still an excessive 250 per person per day.

  Of course, those are just the rules. The law enforcement people tell me there’s been a lot of poaching here on Long Island and elsewhere as prices quadrupled to over a dollar per crab.

  Crabs and birds aren’t the only things at risk in this. Your health is, too. It turns out that nearly every batch of injectable and intravenous drugs, as well as prosthetic devices such as heart valves and hip replacements, must, before they can go to market, be screened for bacterial contamination using a protein from horseshoe crab blood. For this purpose, laboratory suppliers continually collect blood from wild horseshoe crabs, which are then returned to the water. The same test is used to diagnose diseases like spinal meningitis. The people who tap their blood release the animals alive on the premise that they’re too valuable to kill. Yet fishermen have lobbied successfully to keep killing hundreds of females annually for eel and whelk bait.

  Long Island baymen can still take the crabs and sell them out of state. And so each May and June, on the full moon, the high-beam headlights bounce off the ends of roads and turn onto particular stretches of sandy beach. The people behind the wheel say they can’t do without the income from the crabs. But when they take the last ones, they’ll have to.

  * * *

  On the next full moon, in June, I ventured alone back to the bay during the nighttime high tide. This is the crabs’ other peak month for breeding. But instead of the hundreds of animals of May, I counted seventeen males and just six females. The following night, I saw just three males, no females. One truck appeared briefly. The driver took a look and seemed to think it wasn’t worth his while. On that, we agree.

  JUNE

  It’s the time of spotted fawns, tiny cottontails, and fledglings. Already, newly fledged grackles loiter on lines at the edge of the marsh. When they move, their flight is sure and steady. The physical competence and mental acuity of three-week-old birds is surely one of the great inspirations of the world. And to them, all the world is new. Early rounds of robins are airborne too. The adults are back to singing, ready to do it again.

  Box turtles, sometimes two or even three at a time, are coming daily for the cubes of melon I leave for them under the bird feeder. Anything they don’t get by day, Raccoons scarf up by night.

  Each morning I hear turkeys gobbling, and I still find it odd to see the toms in the salt marshes at dawn, giving hens the full-courtship treatment, with fanned tails and heads all blushed, out there where egrets usually preside. Ospreys have now become hardworking parents. Their eggs hatched in just the last few days of May; that’s when I started noticing the adult offering food to chicks I can’t yet see.

  The toads’ sundown tenor remains strong; they’re still pumping out eggs. And even though the Garter and Hog-nosed Snakes stalk them, snakes, too, will depend on the success of a new toad generation. The future is always in the now. And because a predator relies on its prey, in the larger lens it is less an enemy than a dependent. The
Fowler’s Toads’ “song” sounds like a muffled, distant coffee grinder being turned on and off every few seconds: reeehhhhhh. Multiply that by dozens. You might think that if you’re going to be a toad, you’d at least get Pavarotti’s voice. But there’s no justice.

  And reappearing as though from some deep hibernaculum: humans. A few recreational boats have begun plying the water, joggers ply the sand, fishers plumb the depths, lovers walk hand in hand, and solitary beachcombers search for what they’ve dreamt—or never dreamt—of finding.

  The first weekend after millions of New York’s calendars, computers, and PDAs simultaneously displayed the word “June,” coastal solitudes morph into the crowded summer Hamptons. At the town beach, where city acquaintances want to catch up on what happened over the winter with everyone’s investments and candidates, the air smells of hot dogs and tanning lotion. Past the bikinis and up over the ocean an Osprey hovers, feints, hovers, then commits to a plummeting headfirst dive. In the last moment it swings those big feet out in front of its face, crashing a basket of claws through the ceiling of the surf. It latches a fish it cannot lift. This is pretty interesting. It struggles to get airborne—but succeeds only briefly; it’s got a Striper. Then, just floating exhausted in the surf swells with wings splayed and that fish yanking, it seems to consider rowing its catch ashore. When that doesn’t work, it decides that this is the big one it must let go.

  * * *

  In the morning when I round the bend where the pitch pines meet the tidelands, a pickup truck nearly cuts me off. The driver is honking and waving, and when I stop, he leaps out, and yes, it’s me he wants.

  As a marine biologist living in a small beach house, I sometimes feel a little like a country doctor; people I don’t always recognize occasionally seek me out. But, it turns out, this is Dennis, who lives about a mile from me, and—as he’s frantically telling me—from his porch he’d just noticed “a dolphin or whale, stranded on the bar.”