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

by Carl Safina

  * * *

  Yesterday afternoon, rain came with clouds so dark I switched on a light in my office at four P.M. But overnight a strong, cool wind cleared the air of moisture. Dawn came bell-clear, like an authentic breath of autumn.

  A cool and steady northwest wind like this lifts the tails of many migrants. Today it has Tree Swallows moving. They’re riding that breeze across the water, coming on, headed south. You don’t see them over the wide distances of the bays and the Sound—but they’re there. You see them materialize as if from the breeze itself as they get within a few hundred yards of the shore. Their constant trickle adds up to thousands upon thousands.

  My neighbor Georgia works in Manhattan and visits on weekends. She’s standing on the beach with me, admiring water and sky. I point out the swallows making landfall overhead. They’re crossing the threshold of shore at altitudes of thirty to fifty feet. Just the birds we can actually see are arriving at a rate of maybe twenty per minute. I have no reason to think this isn’t happening along miles of our shoreline. Impressed by all the birds coming off the bay, Georgia brings her mother, Lee, out to see. When the swallows reach our marshes they’ll mass up, feeding heavily on flying insects, then go to the ocean beach and turn right, down the coast. Occasionally, I’ve seen the beaches thronged with rivers of swallows, great snaking pulses of wings, in flocks of tens of thousands plus continuous volleys of smaller groups, actually taking hours to pass.

  At this time of year all the birds’ ranks are swollen by the season’s many young on their first migration, energetically making their bid for survival. With the odds stacked so heavily against them, I wonder if they feel anything like the appropriate terror. All I see is them giving it all they’ve got.

  Robins and jays are also crossing the marshes in visible flocks. Vireos, hummingbirds, tanagers, flycatchers; they’re all passing now in the southbound lane. Assorted warblers—American Redstarts, Northern Parulas, Magnolia, Pine, Chestnut-sided, Cerulean, Black-and-white, Prairie—their spring candy colors gone, slip by mostly unnoticed except by the most avid birders and the always avid hawks.

  Two dark dove-sized falcons—Merlins—zip-line the edges of the marsh and the pines. There’s much to hunt. I watch a few migrating dragonflies catch mosquitoes with deft precision and almost untrackable speed. The Merlins sport after the dragonflies, and harry small birds in quick sprints or high-spiraling chases up into open sky, or relentless pursuit over open water.

  Riding the skies from the Arctic tundra, Black-bellied Plovers are again with us, some already in winter feather, some still bearing the outlines of their handsome breeding plumage. They still have a long way to go. Also from up north, those cosmopolitan travelers the Ruddy Turnstones—who’ve met and greeted me from the high Arctic to the tropics, from Europe to Alaska to the Caribbean—continue filtering through. Along the same shores where the birds’ spring passage coincided with the sparse emerald shoots of new marsh plants, blooming Sea Lavender and Seaside Goldenrod now lace the luxuriant end-of-summer marshes with color and scent.

  * * *

  By the third week of September, the tern numbers have deflated from tens of thousands to a couple hundred. Some are gone; others have moved just a few miles to the Point, where the autumn scene is building as schools of anchovies are beginning to mass, and their predators are taking up their annual position for the autumn gauntlet known as “the blitz.”

  * * *

  Between the North and South Forks, which form the “tail” of Long Island’s vaguely fishy shape, the Peconic River enters saltwater at a place called Riverhead. There’s a public aquarium there. And I’ve received an invitation from a couple of their fish keepers to join them on an expedition to catch tropical reef fish for their coral reef and warm-water exhibits. But the location isn’t the Caribbean or the Coral Triangle of the western Pacific. I will board no aircraft. No palm trees will wave welcome. The collecting grounds are just a few miles from here, in the same bay system where I’ve often encountered a decidedly temperate contingent of sea robins, flounder, and squid. That’s what I mean about the magic in the fluidity of water; you can stare at the “same” bay all summer, but under the surface, worlds change.

  The winds of summer push warm surface water up the coast. Eddies break off the Gulf Stream and come whirling over the shelf and occasionally hit the beaches and inlets with startlingly blue, clear water. In that water ride the eggs and larvae of reef fishes from a thousand miles south. Thus do juveniles of tropical fishes of many kinds come to us in streaming tongues of warm water to live bathed in the solar-heated shallows of our late-summer bays. But: they’re not equipped to migrate south. Having made a wrong turn or been caught in currents bound too far north, the tropicals, here by accident, are stranded. And soon, when the breath of autumn swings northerly and the frost is on the pumpkins, they’ll have nothing to do but chill out and die. So rather than mount expensive expeditions to warm places to take fishes that could survive to adulthood and reproduce within their normal range, the aquarium guys—and some of their colleagues from other aquariums in the Northeast, inland as far as Wisconsin, and even from the South—now come here to grant doomed juveniles a long life in comfortable captivity. It’s probably the only win-win in fishing.

  We park on a dead end on the bay. Today the leader of our small band of hunter-gatherers is Todd Gardner. A local newspaper recently described him as having his “golden locks corralled into a ponytail,” and it’s obvious his coworkers aren’t about to let him forget that description anytime soon.

  We unload the buckets and coolers and battery-operated aerators. A T-shirt, swim trunks, and a pair of sneakers complete our uniform. Our main area today is a point about half a mile away. Most of the skill in this—as in all fishing—is knowing the best spots. For some reason, only a few places in this region seem to concentrate tropical fish near the shore. This is the best-known bay for it. I’ve heard about this for years and have seen the odd stray tropical, but I was never sure where most of them congregated. Todd knows particular spots that consistently produce.

  Our main tool is a beach seine fifty feet long and maybe five feet high, with quarter-inch mesh. One person walks the net straight off the beach, while another holds the other end in the shallows. They drag it parallel to shore for a minute or two; then the person near the shore stops and the person on the deep side pivots the far end of the stretched net back to shore, whereupon the whole thing is pulled onto the sand. It basically sweeps fish onto the beach.

  The water feels warm, all right, but it’s anything except clear. Opaque with plankton, it’s the forest green of late-summer baywater. Standing chest-deep, you can’t see your feet. The murk makes it seem unlikely that we’ll be seeing multicolored fishes of air-clear waters and crystalline reefs. Then again, the whole point is that they’re misplaced here, out of their element.

  The first pull brings the usual local grass shrimp, silversides, and killifish, half-buried in sea lettuce. We quickly rake through with our fingertips, as if panning for gold. What’s this little yellow-and-blue thing? I wipe away some weed. It’s a Bicolor Damselfish half the size of my thumb! Todd splatters over and opens his palm to reveal the black-and-yellow barring of a baby Sergeant Major. A few crabs abscond seaward and we quickly invert and rinse the net to release everything we don’t want. One round bucket is now a little bit of the Caribbean Sea, circumnavigated by these tiny swimming jewels. It seems like a magic trick. The next pull brings a six-inch Blue-spotted Cornetfish that I can hardly believe and a crimson Short Bigeye. And soon our population of miniatures includes two Snowy Groupers, two Spotfin Butterflyfish, a Redfin Parrotfish, and a Pearly Razorfish. I find all this utterly delightful. Todd is pretty excited because the parrotfish are rare here and he’s seen the razorfish up here only once, about ten years ago—and there are no other local records of its occurrence.

  When I ask what else he’s seen here, Todd says, “Scamp; Gag Grouper; Foureye, Spotfin, and Reef Butterflyfish; Blue
Angelfish; Dwarf Goatfish; Planehead and Orange Filefish—. Lotsa other stuff.” He adds, “Although, I have to say the most exciting thing for me is the night before a collecting trip, dreaming about what I might catch, and looking at maps and trying to find new, undiscovered spots and thinking up new techniques. It’s hard to beat the excitement of pulling up something I’ve never seen before.”

  Todd adds, “We see a pretty big variation in species and abundance from year to year. We have great years and terrible years, but I don’t see any long-term trend. I think the variation we see results mainly from spawning success of the populations in their native waters, how much Gulf Stream water actually reaches our area from wind and eddies, and how the timing of spawning coincides with a mass of water destined for our area.” I would have found it interesting if he’d said he’d been finding more tropicals here, maybe linked to warming waters. But the lack of a trend comes as a bit of a relief, actually. It’s comforting to hear that there are some ways in which the world isn’t changing.

  On the way back Todd decides to stop at some standing pilings he says are good for Lookdowns. Again, the intimate knowledge of local hunters pays off. Like pieces of pirate silver, the Lookdowns and several Permit go into our aerated plastic treasure chest. And Lookdowns like this cove because—? “That’s one of the mysteries,” Todd answers. “Why do we always find Flying Gurnards on one small stretch of beach but almost nowhere else, not even identical-looking habitats nearby? African Pompano—one tiny stretch of beach, year after year. Why do we find angelfish only at one dock, not at any of the other docks in the area?”

  The net sodden, and the buckets and coolers heavy with water, we trudge to the truck bearing tropical treasure. These little fish, doomed until we caught them, will grow rapidly in captivity. Tens of thousands of aquarium-visiting families will enjoy the sight and motion of them. Parents will naturally explain to their kids that maybe someday they’ll be lucky enough to go all the way to the tropics, to see these fish in the wild. Little will they suspect, but the local is always the exotic.

  * * *

  I’m scheduled to meet some acquaintances for a seventy-five-mile ride to the edge of the continental shelf. We’re going to look for Yellowfin and Albacore Tuna, and that’s how far you have to go, nowadays, to catch a few. I find the boat—my own boat doesn’t have that kind of range—greet the people I know, meet those I don’t, and climb aboard. Even with a trip to the edge like we’re planning, nothing’s guaranteed. There are a lot more Mahimahi this far north than ever before (partly because tuna aren’t there to eat them when they’re small). But as far as tuna, some boats return fishless.

  The four-hour ride exhausts most conversation, and there is plenty of time to stare at water.

  In 1985, my friends and I ventured my little eighteen-foot outboard boat fifteen miles south of Montauk to an area called the Butterfish Hole and anchored in 150 feet of water. When I was sure the anchor had caught, I secured the line and glanced at my watch. Six A.M.

  My longtime friend John started throwing pieces of fish into the tide. I put a piece on a hook and instructed John’s wife, Nancy, to strip sixteen arm lengths of line from the reel, letting the bait drift out of sight, before engaging the reel’s friction brake. I began baiting a second line. At the instant I heard her click the brake into position, the rod bent double and line started shrieking off the reel while Nancy gamely hung on. We all looked wild-eyed into one another’s youthful faces. Could there really be that many tuna here?

  Yes, there could.

  By eight A.M., nine tuna ranging from thirty to a hundred pounds jammed our big coolers. Other tuna were coursing powerfully through the blue water behind the boat, eating every piece of fish we threw. We were now just hand-feeding wild Yellowfins, Albacore, and juvenile Bluefins. Having caught enough to make—as I now realize—a lifetime memory, we decided to haul anchor hours early, getting back to the dock in time for a late breakfast. By midafternoon my kitchen table was piled high with tuna steaks. Friends’ cars were pulling up to the house as my outdoor grill heated up. We ate seared Yellowfin and raw Bluefin Tuna until we couldn’t pop one more bite of sashimi.

  As the submarginal size of my little boat for open-ocean fishing implies, we—not quite out of our twenties—were pretty new at tuna fishing. No matter. We went where everyone else went, and back then it never occurred to us that we’d ever need to go more than fifteen miles from shore. We thought that’s where tuna lived because, well, that’s where they lived. We had no way to foresee how much the world would change.

  A year or two later, Japanese buyers arrived on the docks, and things indeed changed as the globalized market hit home and began eating our ocean empty. One morning offshore amid a dense fleet of boats slaughtering large numbers of Bluefin Tuna, I heard someone get on the radio to suggest that maybe we should all leave a few for tomorrow. Crackling through the speaker came this reply from a sport fisherman: “Hey, nobody left any buffalo for me.”

  In 1995, with a new and bigger boat, I slowed not fifteen miles but fifty miles from shore. Bluefin Tuna had become scarce, but word was of large numbers of Yellowfins. We stopped to drift at the edge of a wide group of boats, and I set out two baited lines while my friends started throwing into the sea handfuls of fresh silversides we’d seine-netted the night before. As I was setting out a third line, we suddenly hooked three tuna. Again I stacked my table with delicious fresh tuna steaks, friends converged, and the grill worked overtime.

  But there’s a big difference between having to go fifteen or fifty miles across open ocean. For that distance, my newer, bigger boat was as barely adequate as my older, smaller boat had been. The trend was clear. And there weren’t many more days with so many fish. Soon the fish—scarcer, smaller—were mainly out of my new boat’s range. It wasn’t worth investing in yet a bigger boat to chase them. And so a thing that I had loved most in my life became a thing mainly of the past, the heart pounding and adrenaline reduced to memory, as if the road traveled was visible mainly in the rearview mirror. In the billion-year-plus history of life in the seas, two decades is a millisecond, but wow, how the world has changed.

  Now the great tuna runs of the South Shore of Long Island are in the past. Autumn’s “tuna fever” has broken, only no one feels better. You can still catch fish. But tuna fishing now is a long offshore shot, usually the seventy-five miles to the edge of the shelf or to even more distant canyons notched into the continental slope. It’s about big boats, astronomical fuel budgets, long hours, and fewer, smaller fish.

  Far from land and far from the days of plenty, the captain slows the boat. The lures go overboard and begin scratching across the ocean like a cat’s claws.

  OCTOBER

  Early October brings new waves of migrants. But the southbound summer songbirds are now augmented by those who’ll linger late with us, even through winter, like Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Cedar Waxwings, White-throated and Swamp Sparrows, chickadees, Tufted Titmice, and trunk-running Red-breasted Nuthatches and Brown Creepers. Troops of flickers also bound across the marsh and down the beach. Yellow-rumped Warblers have come in such droves for the waxy berries now festooning the Bayberry bushes that it can be hard to notice other small birds among them. These movements aren’t just local; the birds move on a vast regional swath, embedded in the weather, and waves of songbirds in clear northwest winds can get noticed all the way west to Brooklyn. Another autumn first comes along with those cool Canadian winds: I can see my breath. Kenzie takes such momentous details in stride.

  * * *

  The Peregrine Falcon migration peaks now, the first week of October. For a rare falcon, “peak” is a relative term compared to, say, ten thousand swallows passing. Nearly wiped out by hard pesticides and for decades endangered, the Peregrine, triumphal and resurgent, is now quite evident—if you have the eye for them. And I do. For several days, I spot them three or four times a day. I see them along the bay, and while walking on the south side, and at the Point. I see them
from the road. I see them from the ocean. I see one chasing starlings over the Long Island Expressway while I’m driving to New York City.

  As a kid, I was infatuated with hawks for their looks and boldness, their rarity and mystique. I thrilled to anything written about falconry. And in my teens, I taught myself how to trap and train hawks. “All in all, falconry is the perfect hobby,” wrote Aldo Leopold in his great conservation classic. I agreed. And I disagreed with the law—which said I couldn’t keep hawks. The birds’ main problems were pesticides that caused their eggs to break—not teenagers. These same pesticides ran an Osprey eraser across most of the coast. It left Peregrine cliffs silent across the United States and Europe, their passage marked by chips of eggshell in the dirt of inaccessible ledges.

  I had an innocent’s hope that I could help. DDT and the other hard chemicals were banned when I was in high school, and an organization called the Peregrine Fund began breeding captive falcons to repopulate the wild. At twenty I got my dream job: summer assistant in the first releases of young captive-bred falcons. I’d be caretaker to a brood of three chicks as they grew. I’d take detailed notes as they learned to fly and taught themselves to hunt. To be plain, caretaker meant feeding them. Feeding growing falcons meant tending chickens, and killing a couple of chickens every day. But the setting! In a little shack on stilts on a private little salt-marsh island lost along the wilds of the southern Jersey shore, in a seldom-visited bay full of clams and sweet Blue Crabs, I was helping the recovery of my most passionately loved endangered creature (and, my nineteen-year-old girlfriend could come stay). Heaven.

  Not long after that, I helped “monitor the recovery” of Arctic Peregrines. Alas, this did not involve traveling to the Arctic, as I longed to do (that would come later), but, rather, meant spending a month each fall catching and tagging with numbered leg bands the rare and occasional migrants bombing along the Long Island coast. Not a bad consolation prize. But Peregrines were still quite rare—still at their low point—when I started. Many days during the height of migration I’d sit tending my net, scanning the skies, seeing none. Sometimes I felt that people looking for UFOs might have better luck. On consecutive days, my notebook often showed a series of zeroes in the column titled “Peregrines.”