by Carl Safina
A dolphin or a whale? That sounds odd.
He leads me a couple of miles down the road bordering the marsh; then he turns onto a dirt track to the shore of the wide, shallow bay.
The animal is about fifty yards from shore and stranded in calf-deep shallows on a broad sand flat. It is, in fact, a very large dolphin—so large and dark that at first I think it might be a young pilot whale.
It thrashes. Seeing for sure that it’s alive, we’re on our cell phones right away, calling family reinforcements. “Bring bedsheets and buckets.” “Call the marine mammal rescue center.”
Family members arrive minutes later; the rescue crew is more than an hour away. We wade to the stricken creature, whose dark gray back and scratched flanks are out in the drying air as the sun is climbing. The tide is still dropping.
It’s a bottlenose dolphin and nearly twelve feet long. Much bigger than the bottlenoses usually seen along the beach and in bay channels. This is an Offshore Bottlenose, a different species. Its usual habitat is the edge of the continental shelf, which around here is about seventy-five miles from the beach.
I estimate its weight at around eight hundred pounds. No way can we move it, and there is nowhere, really, to move it to. The drill is to keep its skin wet until rescuers arrive. As we spread the first sheet over the dolphin, it thrashes out of fear, but only once. As soon as we start pouring water, it calms. Its eyes seem to convey understanding that we mean no harm, pose no threat. But that doesn’t mean it’s right on both points.
Patricia is here now, as well as Dennis’s family and in-laws. We haven’t seen these neighbors all winter and spring. Even on a tidal flat, tragedy brings out community. So here we are, getting caught up on news, maintaining this dolphin’s life while awaiting added help.
For more than an hour we keep the sheets and towels wet with gently poured buckets of water. The dolphin scarcely moves. It keeps its left eye closed; the sun is on its left. Its right eye slowly swivels and watches as we splash water on its head by hand. It is taking about three breaths per minute—plosive, gasping-sounding breaths. In between, it keeps its blowhole shut against the sea, which drains farther away as the tide drops.
Bottlenose dolphins are intelligent, highly social animals capable of communicating, cooperating during hunting, and forming social alliances. Did this smart, rugged animal of the open ocean simply make a mistake? Or had it been ailing? And if so, did it specifically seek the calm, protected waters of this shallow bay to find refuge from sharks and other potential tormentors who might exploit its distress?
The marine mammal rescue people arrive. We know these four women too, but haven’t seen them in months, either. They take one look at the animal and say we’ll need more people to lift the stretcher or we’ll never move the dolphin over the flat and into the rescue truck—a sort of animal ambulance—where it can get the aid it needs. So we start calling other friends and knocking on neighbors’ doors. Tommy and Bo come with a pickup that can drive out onto the wet tidal flat. Then Diane arrives. Rebecca. Someone wakes the bar bouncer who’s sleeping in a nearby beach house. Patricia recruits a guy who’d been fixing the road. We all get acquainted and figure out who knows whom.
What does the dolphin think of the commotion? Its eyes close slowly, seeming to declare a need to rest. Does it see its swift and sparkling life splashing before its eyes? It begins making barely audible clicking sounds. But whom is it calling out to, and with what message?
We’ve now gathered sufficient muscle power to move the dolphin. I’m feeling pretty good about this until the dolphin lifts its head from the sand for the first time, and opens its mouth. I see immediately that most of its normally sharp teeth are worn flat to the gum line. This dolphin is decades old.
My perspective of the dolphin shifts from unlucky victim to elder survivor at the end of a long and uncommonly successful life. How I wish it could share its stories from a long career of challenges, of dangers narrowly escaped, of borderless blues—of what it took to be so successful. How I would love to know its impressions of humanity, its perceptions of fishing boats, its encounters with nets or hooks—and to hear a few stories about those interesting scars. Did it come here sensing somehow that it is time to let go?
When the lead rescuer notices the tiniest bit of bloody froth at the dolphin’s blowhole, I suddenly know there can be no future for this old mariner. The best thing would be to euthanize it—now—without moving it from its resting place.
I also know that the rescuers won’t do this. Not in front of a crowd. Now that we’re assembled, we’re committed to moving it first to the pickup, then off the flats to shore, then into the rescue truck.
But whose pain are we sparing: the dolphin’s or ours? With much effort, we roll the animal enough to get the stretcher under it, then roll it the other way to position it on the stretcher. On the count of three we heave it up, then up again until it is even with the high tailgate; then we struggle as we attempt to load it into the truck. The animal starts thrashing. A whack from that tail could cause severe injury, so we let the stretcher down and step back, watching its pitiful efforts. On a second strenuous attempt, with much puffing and pushing, and pulling from people who’ve climbed into the truck bed, we succeed, barely.
We’ve rescued the dolphin.
But from what?
The next day I inquire. On the way to the rehabilitation center, the animal went into spasms. It was euthanized in the truck, and was dead on arrival.
We had reached across the species barrier with compassion in our hearts. But we’d gotten ourselves stranded in our commitment to do good, no matter what, and we’d carried that conviction too far.
There are worse ways to die than coming to a peaceful sand flat in a quiet bay in springtime and waiting for the tide to drain away.
When my time comes, I hope my gathered loved ones will remember that.
* * *
Solstice confers the longest day, the most northerly dawn—and true summer. Though the birds’ dawn chorus thins as summer thickens, it suffices to call forth consciousness. Kenzie and I step into the morning and head down the beach path. The water is so calm, it seems your breath could fog its surface. Being out on a June morning that’s this still requires either bug spray or a kayak. Bug spray will put the bugs at bay. The kayak will put me on the bay. Easy choice.
From under the kayak’s tarp, several tiny toads, just past tadpolehood and limbering up their new limbs and lungs, hop away into the beach grass. It’s so quiet that as I begin dragging the kayak toward the water, over the smooth beach pebbles, the sound—unnoticeable at midday—projects a resonant rumble.
I am concerned about our local colony of Least Terns. I’ve recently seen Great Black-backed Gulls landing in the tern colony and agitated groups of terns escorting them as they leave. Black-backs—the world’s largest gull—can effortlessly penetrate a cloud of defending Least Terns, shrugging off their dive-bombing protests while searching for eggs and chicks. At other times and places, Black-backs kill ducks and swallow puffins whole. I fear gulls may have largely wiped out the terns’ nesting efforts.
A few old-time fishermen still remember when Black-backs were new in these parts. Fishing boat discards and garbage keep the gulls subsidized and widespread, inflating their numbers and putting them in conflict with terns. Today I’ll take no fishing rod or clam sack, just my old binoculars. The plan: paddle around the Least Terns’ island and see what’s up.
My paddle’s blades enter silently. Along the hull gurgles the music of moving water. The alternating blades dip and pull, dip and pull, leaving whorled wakes and making the boat glide as if self-propelled. So meditative is the cadence, I almost forget I am the propelling self. The shore slides quickly by.
Kenzie is trotting along. She’ll follow until the shore bends away. Then she’ll finish her walk solo and work her way home. We’ve done this before, and I’ll find her resting on the doorstep later.
The sun has not yet gathered suff
icient determination to banish the mists that night has hung on the coastal hills like spiderwebs in dewy grass. On the water, the light remains glareless. The tide, briefly slack at low, sends no resisting current as I glide into the Cut. Roseate Terns wheel and dip over the shallows. The morning light shows their faintly peachy breast feathers.
The Least Terns nest on the sand-and-pebble island that lies just across the Cut. Through binoculars I scan the standing adults for signs of any chicks. Seeing none, I decide to land for a quick look. The terns are not pleased. They dive near my head, uttering warnings. I notice a lot of empty nest scrapes in the sand. That’s a bad sign. But I begin finding a few nests with eggs, and tiny chicks lying prone in nests lined with shell fragments, and slightly larger ones hidden in the vegetation. Responding to the adults’ alarm calls, the chicks freeze motionless. The number of juveniles seems reassuringly ample. The world just might go on, after all.
I walk out of the colony. The adults are already resettling as I shove off. A Piping Plover watches from the shoreline. Its tiny chicks, like cottonballs on toothpicks, stand still.
Twirling the kayak around, I press farther along the channel between the island and the main shore. A few scattered Bluefish and perhaps a small Striped Bass or two are rising. How to tell: Blues burst; Stripers slurp. A well-placed cast could prove it, but without fish-taking gear I’m freed to watch, speculate—and keep moving.
Rounding the bend, I see about a hundred Double-crested Cormorants strung in a ragged line, swimming toward shore like a beach seine made of birds, driving fish before them. At intervals most slip underwater together. As the cormorants go down, small fishes rise, and terns fall among them. Completing a geometry of appetites and ambush, several egrets line the shore, awaiting the small fish that will soon be darting for cover into the marsh grass at their feet.
I’ve been afloat just half an hour, but there’s been life everywhere I turn my gaze. The rest of the world aside, this remains a remarkable place. It’s taken four billion years to paint this morning, and the canvas remains wet. It’s a work in progress, easily spoiled. I understand that there are smudges in the paint. Some neighbors remember when the bay was carpeted by lush eelgrass and at low tide you could walk out, plucking up scallop after scallop. They remember big oysters and skinny water bars thick with mussels. They remember—.
Suddenly filling my glasses—also silently, which astonishes me—a helicopter slides in low along the far shore. Only when it banks do I hear that ominous rotor chop. It is poisoning marsh mosquitoes. The county has fought mosquitoes since the 1930s. The main weapons have been cutting ditches into the salt marshes and spraying pesticides. The ditching was to drain the marshes where mosquitoes breed—to destroy the marshes, basically. The pesticides were quite hard on wildlife in the early days, when workers sprayed the DDT and other long-lasting stuff that, among many other things, wiped Ospreys clear out of the skies for decades.
The county’s new mosquito plan gives a sense of how successful its administrators feel their strategy has been since the days of the Model A Ford:
The Long-Term Plan contains a “no new ditching” policy, and a policy of ditch reversion as opposed to ditch maintenance.… The Long-Term Plan also seeks to restore approximately 4,000 acres of tidal wetlands that were grid-ditched in the 1930s, and which now require routine larvicide applications by air.… [This] will reduce or eliminate the need for larvicide.
In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, they now believe that everything they did was wrong. The “drainage” ditches they dug often clogged, creating nice, deep mosquito-breeding pools. And because they were breeding mosquitoes, they needed to spray. Compared to the era of DDT and other wide-spectrum poisons that got concentrated as they traveled up the food chain, the chemicals they’re using nowadays are greatly improved. But they still kill nontarget insects, including bees. The county itself doesn’t seem to like them. Their plan sets “an ambitious target of a 75 percent reduction in acres treated with larvicide … and seeks to further reduce use of adulticides.”
What I get from this is that the authorities and I have come to a meeting of the minds: it’s better to leave the marshes intact, and it’s also better not to spray. Since there are still plenty of mosquitoes despite decades of battling them, I believe the battleground is best relocated to where it’s needed: on my hat, cuffs, and neck. A little bug spray applied to those places seems to work best. Let the swallows swallow as many mosquitoes as the bats can’t, and keep the screen door closed.
The mosquito-fighting office is called Vector Control, and the rationale is that it protects the public health from mosquito-borne diseases. The county’s helicopters would better improve health if they landed on the expressways and slowed traffic; that’s our biggest killer. The county could save more human lives in a pen stroke by putting the speed limits back to where they were in the 1970s. Or, better, by banning cell-phone use while driving, because: 2 eleven-year-old boys who hadn’t left our county came down with malaria acquired locally (that was in the early 1990s; they survived); mosquito-borne West Nile virus kills about 30 people a year across the whole country; mosquito-vectored eastern equine encephalitis causes an average of 5 cases of symptomatic human infection per year, nationwide (one-third fatal); and cell-phone-distracted drivers cause 2,600 traffic deaths and 330,000 accidents involving moderate or severe injuries annually (a cell-phone-using driver’s likelihood of crashing equals that of a driver with a 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level, the legal threshold of intoxication).
I realize that’s apples and oranges, but it’s part of how we see the world. Age-old threats from nature, even minor threats, we are geared to tackle. New, enormous dangers, we can’t even decide if they’re a matter of public safety or individual freedom. It took us decades to decide that driving drunk is a serious public health hazard, and now that we have cell phone technology as dangerous, we still haven’t transferred the general lesson that it’s okay for the government to require safer behavior if it affects the greater public good. Though I often use a hands-free phone while driving, and am careful to be careful, the distraction and increased risk are obvious. I would rather know that the government is trying to protect me from teenage drivers sending text messages than hyping the risks from annoying insects that I can better deal with myself. We so easily change what we do—suddenly everyone started using cell phones while driving—but we can’t seem to change how we perceive where danger really lies. We engulf new gadgets wholesale, but seem incapable of updating our concept of what does and does not actually threaten us. We act new and think old. Virtually no one questions spending millions fighting mosquitoes because the impulse comes naturally. Our main public policy toward mosquitoes is that they’re dangerous rather than merely inconvenient, while the policy toward driving with cell phones is that they’re more convenient than dangerous. We’ll wage war on mosquitoes and in the process kill the birds and the bees, and wonder if it’s saved any human lives. But virtually no one demands that we ban cell-phone use while driving (though most of us drove for years without phones) because we don’t perceive the risks viscerally and we think it would be simply too inconvenient to stop causing 2,600 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries. In practice the national policy is to ignore those safety statistics. Anyway, back to the main topic: it is with gratitude and surprise, indeed—seasoned with a dash of cynicism—that I applaud the county for coming up with a more thoughtful mosquito plan. For that, at least, it’s about time.
* * *
My paddle dips and pulls, dips, pulls, and the soothing rhythm returns in the stroke and glide. I slide through the narrow, knee-deep passage on the island’s east side—my kayak could almost form a bridge across it—and am out in the Sound again. The shore here forms a right angle between a sandy peninsula to my right and the island’s north side to my left. So I’m floating on a broad triangle of water.
The first school of baby Menhaden I’ve seen this year is right in the glas
sy surface, dimpling like rain. (Everyone here calls them bunkers, and these babies are “peanut bunkers.”) A fish-processing factory whose chimney still stands on this little island is gone, and with it the vast Menhaden schools that supported it and others like it. But there must be some adults, because these crowds of babies appear in most years.
Two usually nocturnal Black Skimmers are still at work. Skimmers are the only birds whose lower bill extends past the upper. They precision-fly with that knife-blade bill slicing through the water, snapping up—instantly—any fish they contact. I’ve studied them at their nesting sites, but I’ve never been in the middle of a school of fish with a couple of orbiting skimmers slitting the water around me. And for the first time, I can hear the hiss of their bills as they shred water like shears cutting fabric.
Amazingly, they make many passes through the dimples without striking a fish. The birds usually hunt at night, remember; now their shadows are spooking these dense schools. The fish move and darken the water just ahead of the oncoming birds. The skimmers run the length of the fish-dimpled patch, turn, run again. Finally one snaps its bill onto wriggling silver, and I hear their nasal nyak, nyak as they depart to a distant island across the Sound, retiring for the day. A sizable fish swirls. There is so much prey here now, the predators are camped out, lingering like herders monitoring their flocks.
The water is clear and I drift, scanning the bottom, prospecting for clams. I see several in the sand and stones, the rims of their partially buried shells showing among the seaweed here and there. This means there must be quite a few here, actually. I’m glad to know of another patch.
I strike out toward the open Sound where there is no horizon, only the mirror and the sky reflected—an Escher drawing with no end, enveloping yet dimensionless. The beauty of this morning has me feeling, in less than an hour’s time, nourished and full, as though I’ve just had a good breakfast.