by Carl Safina
The seething swarms of brine flies here along the shoreline—and at my feet—are matched by the seething swarms of Sooty Terns now in the air overhead. This is what something approaching a million birds begins to look like. Alfred Hitchcock got worked up over a few dozen gulls. It didn’t take much to scare him.
I come upon a Sooty Tern spread-winged and disabled on the beach. It makes no move while I bend, reach out, and pick it up. Its eves are bright, its bones are intact, but the keel bone in its breast is sharp with hunger. It has metabolized all its flight muscles as fuel to stay alive and is now emaciated. I place it down and it turns awkwardly tail to the wind, the breeze blowing up through its back feathers. I point it like a weather vane into the wind, to help it with a little comfort, and it manages to scold me—probably the last utterance of its long, wide-awake life. I leave this suffering creature behind, unwilling to do the one thing I could to end its misery.
IN 1896, HUGO SCHAUINSLAND, a young German scientist exploring the remote world with his young wife as his field assistant, spent three months here. One of the first scientists to see Laysan (his name is lent to the Hawaiian Monk Seal, Monachus schauinslandi) he captured the excitement of firstborn adventure in his journal.
A stay on the island offers a rare opportunity, seldom surpassed anywhere else on earth, to closely study its wildlife, and especially, the most intimate behaviors of its birds. In our homeland, which has been dominated for thousands of years by human culture, we are no longer able to observe animals in their natural state, because their original behaviors have become dominated by a justified shyness toward our presence; and therefore, we can only obtain the most superficial impressions of them. In contrast, the animals on Laysan behave as they really are, without any fear. They had not yet learned to consider us their enemy, and therefore, we were constantly in a position to study not only their objective behavior, but also and more specifically, their emotional life and their spiritual character. We were amazed to discover how much direct comparison to human characteristics we were able to observe in a creature which is generally considered, by the majority, to be a ‘lower’ form of life … . Mated pairs cling together in tender love. This is exemplified by the shearwaters, who are not only constantly side by side, but also face one another, gazing lovingly, for hours at a time, into one another’s eyes. From time to time, they will tenderly caress one another’s neck feathers, whereupon the fondled one will respond by contentedly lowering its head, visibly communicating its appreciation. They are often seen billing … which is comparable to our kissing. It is a sign of tenderness that, in the act, they do not wound or hurt each other with their needle-pointed, hooked bills. And yet, I have often experienced the very opposite: a single bite was quite enough to result in a heavily bleeding wound on my hands … . Male and female [Sooty Terns] fly tightly above one another, and together, they carry out each maneuver in such tight precision and with such uniform wing-beats, that it seems as if their two bodies were given life by one spirit, and directed by one will … . Would we not find this enraptured, coordinated veering through the air, this delightfully rocking, and stormy, wild flight, comparable to the fiery dance of a lovestruck human couple? And how much more affectionate, how much more graceful it seems when performed by the children of the air!
Though Hugo Schauinsland was a serious German scientist, and an obvious romantic, he had his lighter side. “When we felt unbearably hot, we found pleasure in elaborating upon the inhumane idea of how nice it must have been in the chilly halls of the Löenbräu Cellar in Munich,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he was deeply moved by his experiences here.
The esthetic impression which the island commands is quite sobering and really very grandiose, perhaps also magnified by the thought of the loneliness and solitude that is this tiny grain of sand island amidst the vast watery desert … . Here, we learned to understand anew the language of nature, which rarely rings in our ear amidst the noise of culture and civilization. Here we feel like we are back in our true home, withheld from so many of us during our peregrination through modern life. Everyone who, like me, enjoyed the good fortune of delving for a time in such a solitude … would agree that the impressions acquired here would last for a lifetime. The thoughts we had there were more serious, and even perhaps deeper; the pettiness of everyday life disappeared and the dissonances resolved themselves.
Years after leaving Laysan, Schauinsland wrote, “We still experience in our dreams those extraordinary times … . The feelings we have are of a longing, yearning desire to be on that tiny island amidst the imposing solitude of the ocean.”
THE BONIN PETRELS, which remain unseen all day beneath Laysan’s surface, are now in the air in the gathering sunset, fluttering like bats. A few quick flaps and a glide, flaps and a glide. They lilt and tilt back and forth, zigging their zags over the clumped grass. Everywhere you look you see their little forms: the light belly, the dark back with the light chevron mark. They’re most visible against the brighter part of the darkening sky, then lost to view beneath the dusk horizon.
About 50,000 to 75,000 Bonin Petrel pairs are breeding here. When walking, you try to step into the footsteps of the person ahead, to minimize the chances of going through the surface into one of their many sandy burrows. How they find their own nest among the honeycombed thousands, in the dark shadows—among the dense vegetation—can only leave us wondering. What map of their country they must have, to memorize the lay of every clump of grass. Or perhaps it is a scent that they are following. Or both; a navigation system that starts visually and switches to scent in final approach. They obviously know where they’re going—or there wouldn’t be so many of them. Short-distance homing in seabirds is extraordinarily accurate but poorly understood. Perhaps the most dumbfounding example of pinpoint accuracy is that of a tiny Antarctic albatross relative, the Dove Prion, which finds its exact nest site even when the entire surrounding area is obliterated by snowdrifts it must dig through.
I’m told that a Bonin Petrel can dig about a foot and a half of burrow per night, that it takes them about four or five days to complete one, and that they always make a grassy nest there, where they lay their single egg. Why dig? Who are they hiding from? Is it the desiccating sun they’re avoiding? The frigatebirds? In studies of a shearwater species in which some pairs nest underground and some don’t, the underground nesters raise more chicks, and it seems that shade is the main benefit. Christmas Shearwaters don’t make burrows and are far less abundant. Is the burrow-nesting tactic the winning ticket that makes the Bonins so numerous here? But if so, how do you explain a million surface-nesting Sooty Terns?
Zooming birds are everywhere. Petrels, terns, albatrosses, frigatebirds, noddies—. Often comes the whoosh of wings close by your ears. The middle distance is thickened with them, and toward the island’s far end the air simply swarms, seethes with birds. At this spot in so vast a sea, a deep, connecting peace arrives with these wings, the core-warming tranquillity of sharing the movement and sound of so many warm-blooded companions.
IT’S ALMOST DARK when we get back to the kitchen tent. Everyone else is inside, talking. Russ, who plays alto sax, has a Paul Desmond recording playing. Desmond’s light-as-a-feather tone is instantly recognizable. The next cut is Desmond playing Joni Mitchell’s “Song to a Seagull,” which seems to perfectly gift-wrap the evening.
I take a chair outside the cook tent, listening to the best of civilization and watching the best of nature. In addition to listening and seeing I’m also smelling—the ocean, plus supper cooking. When the breeze brushes my cheek, the sense-fest is complete.
It’s a good night to go to bed early. The petrels land among the tents squeaking and moaning, growling like two balloons rubbing. The albatrosses moo and clack. Sooty Terns deliver a collective white noise like a stadium full of high-pitched cheering fans. The sounds are continual, but uneven. They come in pulses and waves, arriving on gusts of wind. My mind simplified by tiredness, I lie on my cot, listening with my heart t
o classical music from nature. Like the work of a minimalist composer confined to a limited palette of notes, there are only a few kinds of sounds here: birds, wind, waves, a rare snort. Of these, the sound of birds is inescapable and eternal. The voices may change with the season, varying in intensity and pitch as different species swell and subside throughout the day and year. Yet for millions of years the chorus of bird voices here, day and night, has never ceased. Alternately all night, the voices bring me in and out of slumber—from my dreamy sleep to this sleepy dream, this world of sound and life.
AFTER A DEEP AZURE SLEEP I awaken in the blue light of a blue-eyed dawn. This morning seems like a good time for an orienting walk, before the sun gets too high and hot.
Some shrubs grow here, including the native Beach Naupaka, which has rosettes of bright green leaves and is favored by frigatebirds and Red-footed Boobies for nesting. As one frigatebird is taking an unwieldy large stick to its nest, a booby tries ripping it away. The frigate hangs on resolutely, and in the war-tug they both lose altitude. The frigate lets go just in time to crash into a bush, and the booby plops on the ground with its prize. The turnabout seems fair play for all the food stealing frigates inflict on boobies. Robbed hit-and-run, the frigate lies spread-eagled in the bush, leveled by larceny. He is having a difficult time recovering even his footing with his nearly useless feet, much less chasing after the booby, who has long since left with his valuable branch. Not to be defeated, the frigate departs, soon returning with an even better piece of vine to line his nest.
Heliotrope grows along the beach near camp. Tropicbirds like nesting under its umbrella-like canopy. Indigenous to most of the Pacific, it has been introduced here. Two vines resembling pumpkin or cucumber grow thickly around the lake. Both are native. The Seaside Morning Glory, Pohuehue in Hawaiian (“po-hooey-hooey”), commonly creeps the beaches and sandy spots. Another native morning glory, Kolai ‘Awa, has no English name. Various other plants have hitchhiked or been escorted here, including Glossy Nightshade, an introduced weed that looks like a tomato plant, and tobacco, introduced for the pleasure of nineteenth-century workers. Then there are the succulents, some with attractive flowers. One Hawaiian native succulent called Nama is plentiful here, yet rare elsewhere. The work manual entreats, “This island is special for many forms of life that are not common elsewhere … try not to step on them.” Laysan is mostly grassy. About grasses and sedges, the work manual says this:
Grasses are always hard but Laysan’s species are easy. They are either everywhere or localized. Sometimes one can conveniently forget about identifying grasses but since you are probably on Laysan to help eradicate Cenchrus it is very important that you can at least distinguish between Cenchrus and Eragrostis. This is easy when they are large but a different matter when they are tiny. Wait until you run across six hundred Eragrostis seedlings one-half inch high that have three Cenchrus of equal size mixed into the patch! It is also a good idea to know the difference between Cenchrus and Sporobolus so you don’t pull all the indigenous Sporobolus! Eragrostis and Cenchrus in their tiny stages at Laysan could also be confused with a similar sized sprout of Fimbristylis. The extremely rare endemic sedge Mariscus also looks almost exactly the same as the grass Eragrostis when not flowering. Check for mid rib in the leaves, not present in Eragrostis.
Got that? Not to mention introduced Bermuda grass, native Seashore Rush Grass, a grass called Lepturus that has no common name, and the native sedge Makaloa. Now you know why the weed pullers are called “restoration ecologists”—there’s a lot they need to know. And ironically, the problem now is that there’s so little sandbur left that it’s hard to train people about what to look for. It seems likely that soon it will be eradicated from Laysan.
FROM NEAR THE TIDE LINE several seals utter uncouth snorts. They lie like slumbering lumber at the terminus of their heavy tracks in the sand. Once hunted on these same beaches, now they again can haul out from the sea and sleep in peace.
Little holes like tiny volcanoes pock the beach, each with a pile of excavated sand outside—crab burrows. These crabs are interesting little packages. Their inch-square bodies are gray-and-purplish. The corners of their stalked eyes have a little elongated art deco projection, like the corners of eyeglass frames that were popular in the 1950s, when automobile fins were “in.” Their eyes fold into slots on their faces, making the crabs look like space aliens. They emerge at night to dismember anything formerly living that has been cast up, or chicks that have died. Nocturnal and subterranean, they’re the perfect undertakers.
Two pairs of Christmas Shearwaters are sitting on the sand. They seem disinclined to walk. When they do, they appear to be too heavy for their legs. They sit down after only a few steps and moan a long deep Oooh.
Just a few yards farther on, fully five little Fairy Terns suddenly hover before me like luminous visiting angels, looking into my face with those huge black eyes. In the air they have an almost intangible quality. Their buzzy, resonant little calls sound somehow electronic, or like the plucking of a jaw harp. Why would Fairy Terns come and hover in my face, and noddies not? What in evolution has produced such personality differences between species? We understand so little.
Laysan’s Laysan Albatrosses line this island’s interior with about 120,000 nests, while 20,000 pairs of Black-footeds concentrate mostly along the shore. As I’ve been sitting watching an adult tenderly tending a chick, another Laysan Albatross has approached me quite closely. I feel immediately soothed by the company. I extend my fingers. The bird hesitates, then on its first attempt touches me, giving a tentative nibble. Apparently convinced that I will not harm it and perhaps enthralled itself by the novelty (it has seen far fewer humans than I have seen albatrosses), it begins nibbling my fingers in a way that seems almost affectionate. Anyone who knows anything about courtship can understand a nibble like this.
An albatross chick is sitting on a golf ball—as though it’s an egg! It’s the closest nonhuman thing I’ve ever seen to a child with a doll. The little chick nuzzles the golf ball with its bill, then sits on it. Astonishingly, it uses the same motions an adult would use. Who would have thought that these behaviors are already this developed in a chick that will not breed for seven years? More mimicking of grown-ups: two juvenile Black-footed Albatrosses—several years old but not in adult plumage—are courting energetically. One of them makes much ado about a nearby chick as though playing house, pointing down at it with its bill, nuzzling it gently.
The behavior of adult albatrosses toward chicks ranges widely. Some adults seem quite tender. Others, for no discernible reason, attack chicks viciously, leaving them bloodied. Sometimes fatally. One adult Laysan Albatross steps away from the chick it is feeding to vigorously peck and shake the neck of a nearby chick that is already injured. That chick looks as if it’s going to die. The adult draws its head skyward, wails a high scream, and pecks again. One large albatross—likely male—has a darkly bloodied bill. The chick on the receiving end must have been savaged indeed, almost certainly suffering injury enough to kill it. Humans sometimes abuse even their own children, but what drives such behavior here? The attacks tend to follow a pattern: an adult will often walk from its own chick to an unrelated chick, call, then attack. Possibly they beat up nearby chicks to teach those chicks to be afraid and stay away when they hear their voice—“Don’t approach for food.” This could reduce the adults’ chances of mistakenly feeding precious food to a chick that is not their own, when they return to their nest after two weeks at sea and all the rapidly growing chicks look different. But many chicks continue begging from strangers, and many albatrosses don’t seem to attack chicks at all. So it’s not clear what’s going on. One thing is certain: it’s disturbing to watch.
Many of the chicks are so fat that between their footprints you see the tracks of their bellies dragging through the sand. Others seem shaky, small, desiccated, quiet—still hoping to be fed sometime soon. There is no knowing where their parents are, what might have happ
ened, or what a chick’s fate is. If a parent is merely late, the chick may live. If one parent is too late, the chick may die. If one parent has been killed, the chick sits awaiting only death. One chick lies on its side, breathing hard, gasping. Its swaying head has made a shallow track in the sand, marking the limits of the final distance this chick will travel. The contour of its upturned belly is a planetary surface to orbiting flies. They buzz with buzzardly patience, understanding somehow that this chick is dying. It’s an ineffably sad sight.
One of the interns had told me that when she sees a dying chick, “I kneel down, get a finger behind their head where they can’t see me, and just scratch them like a parent may do.” One way of seeing her action is as silly sentimentalism, pointless and unprofessional. Another way to view it is as the exercise of the most important component of the collective human genius: compassion. The way I see it, there is room in the world for more of it. Especially if you know the human history of this island.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, several waves of commercial exploiters intent on birds came ashore at Laysan. First, egg gatherers. Then feather hunters. The eggers collected albatross eggs in ore cars for the photographic industry, which used them to make albumen prints. This was a popular process in the mid- to late 1800s. From albatrosses that lay one egg per year and cannot breed every year, they took many thousands of eggs.
But Brenda and Russ tell me that the eggers were here mainly for bird guano. They say that in the 1890s and the first few years of the 1900s, as many as forty resident Japanese hand laborers mined Laysan’s guano. They say the miners took off thousands and thousands of years’ worth of accumulated bird droppings. They say it was so accumulated, it had formed a kind of rock layer.