by John Hersey
S: If you don’t gag first.
F: Oh, look!
S: A storm of birds. What a sight. What’s going on?
F: The birds are working over one of those huge swarms of feeding blues I was telling you about. It’ll be almost too easy to catch them today. Every cast will hook a blue. I tell you what let’s do. Let’s catch supper and one or two throw-backs and then just watch the birds. Would that suit you?
S: It would indeed. I’ve cared more about birds—till lately—than about fishes; land birds, that is. Not that I’ve ever been an obsessed bird-watcher, but here on the Vineyard I’ve always put out bird food—especially thistle seed for goldfinches, whose brilliant colors and darting flight give me the same sort of lift Mozart’s music does. Birds climbing the sky seem to me a perfect picture of aspiration—“flights of the imagination,” we say.
F: Yes, birds do lift our imagination. Richard Wilbur has a haunting poem about how the bluefish, on the other hand, can pull our imagination “back and down…to the old darkness,” toward the deepest deeps of memory.
Out here, you know, we must think of birds as teachers.
I’m glad there aren’t any other boats around this afternoon. So often, inexperienced fishermen will get excited and charge into the heart of the feast and drive the fish down. You have to creep up to the verge of their frenzy, cut the engine, drift, and cast. Let me just get set up. Pencil Popper, I think. Here. Shoot. Don’t cast into the cauldron, cast to one edge.
S: You were right. I have one on, on the first cast. This feels bigger than the other ones we’ve caught.
F: It may well be. Here in Vineyard Sound these slaughters are often the work of roving schools of fish that are bigger than the usual run of the summer in this stretch of water. In fact, in a swarm as big as this there are probably schools of various sizes competing in their greed. I’ll gaff it in. There. What a beauty!
S: How much do you think it weighs?
F: I’d say seven or eight pounds. Not a monster, but a nice fish.
S: This is so exciting. May I take another shot?
F: Just let me change the lure.
S: …Yes! I have one….This one is logy. It feels heavy, but it doesn’t seem to fight.
F: Hold on, I’ll get the landing net out from the cuddy. Bring it alongside. Yes, just as I thought, it’s a smallish striped bass.
S: What a wizard sight—that banner of bold black lines on an olive and silver field.
F: I have to throw it right back. You said you’d heard that they’re a threatened species. That’s because their spawning grounds in Chesapeake Bay and in the Hudson have been so fouled by the poisonous effluents of our greed. I never take them ashore, even if I catch them above the legal limit, which in Massachusetts is now thirty inches. Stripers are sometimes mixed in with blues in these mass agitations. Over you go. Good luck! Propagate!
S: With the birds screaming and the water frothing and the gobbets of bait floating, it’s like some special circle of hell.
F: Yet you’re having a heavenly time, aren’t you?
S: I am. And it confirms what I’ve always thought—that heaven and hell occupy adjoining plots of real estate, with no fence between them.
F: Cast the lure on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find.
S: Oh, and I do. I have one….
F: One of our usual five-pounders. Today we make history: We throw back a smaller fish than we keep.
Are you satisfied that this is too easy? What say we just watch the birds now?
S: That would be wonderful. All that white falling: It’s a snowstorm on September first. I guess I see several kinds. What all are they?
F: The largest number are herring gulls and terns. There are a few laughing gulls. It’s a bit hard to point out the specific terns here while they’re working, but there should be three species, which are usual hereabouts—the common, the arctic, and the rarer roseate.
I have something to confess. I adore the race of terns, and I have a violent prejudice against herring gulls. Do you think I’m a racist?
S: Do you hate all gulls?
F: I rather like laughing gulls.
S: Then you’re not a racist. You’re a picker and chooser.
F: I hope so. Laughing gulls are very helpful; they point the way to particular fish—to snapper blues, as you’ve seen, and, when they wheel in a certain way out here on Middle Ground in late summer, to bonito, a delicious fish, but not easy to catch.
S: Why do you hate herring gulls?
F: They’re miserable scavengers. They’re the rodents of birddom. There are far more of them at the town dump than out here. They dote on carrion and gurry from draggers in the harbor. The terns are pure and devoted fisherbirds; they hover over bait and go down to it with the grace of Olympic high divers. The gulls don’t know how to dive; they just crash into the water with horrible bellywhops which scare the bait away half the time, so they just sit there looking bewildered. Then they fly off to follow the Islander, hoping that tourists will toss up peanut-butter Nabs for them to catch. They chase other birds off, as if they owned all air space. Ogden Nash got the idea:
Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;
He weeps because he’s not an ea-gull.
Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,
Could you explain it to your she-gull?
But I want you to notice something. In the area where the fish are boiling up to the surface—the way I saw them do in that tank at Sandy Hook—nothing, not even a tern, dares to dive. The ravening blues would devour anything, finned or feathered, that they found under the Saran Wrap of the surface. In those spots the birds—do you see?—skim along and without breaking their flight dip their beaks into the water to scoop up fish fragments or surfaced whitebait. The diving for bait and scraps goes on in places from which the school has vacated. I’ve heard it said that the only species in all the oceans that have taught birds not to land in their picnics are killer whales and bluefish. That puts bluefish in the company of the grimmest Mafia of the sea. Black-and-white killer whales, fifteen to thirty feet long, will attack a far larger whale and tear it to shreds, and sometimes in polar seas they’ll swim up under an ice floe and tip it to cause seals, resting on it, to slide off into their meat-grinder jaws.
S: I’m not really sure I can tell terns from gulls. I want to know which birds I’m supposed to like.
F: Be grateful for all of them. Birds know how to fish better than any of us ever will. Terns, herring gulls, laughing gulls, cormorants, ospreys, and gannets have led me to many a supper. Terns happen to be my favorites, but when the herring gulls show up out here, you can hate them all you want, but you can be pretty sure there are big blues down under on the rove.
Terns. They’re smaller than the gulls. With their deeply forked tails and dipping, swooping flight, they’re sometimes called sea swallows—though of course they’re much bigger than those darters over meadows. Grayish back, white front, little black cap. I love them. They’re on their active pinions almost all day long; they rarely loaf on the water, and if they rest at all, it is apt to be on sandbars or flotsam. They have stubby legs and dainty feet, quite unsuitable for strolling or paddling. Most of the ones we see live and breed sociably in very close quarters, as if in a colony of peaceable condominiums, on a sandy patch called Bird Island, across the way in Buzzards Bay. They have amazing vision, which seems to render air and water as transparent as a small boy’s lie, and they can hear tern cries from very great distances, as if they were constantly on the phone with each other. They range the length of the Middle Ground rip in twos, threes, and fours, searching, lollygagging along about twenty feet above the water, with their beaks pointing straight down so their photoelectric eyes can be on a steady scan for bait. There is always a leader, who keeps calling to the ot
hers. When there is a sighting, high-pitched cries of summons go out like chimes from a steeple, and, miraculously, where there had been two or three and no others as far as the eye could see, there is suddenly a blizzard of divers.
The tern population on the New England coast is declining at an alarming rate. And why? Because herring gulls and greater black-backed gulls—I’ll show you a pair of the latter that live on the Vineyard Haven breakwater when we go in—those robbers eat tern eggs and chicks. Gulls and terns both breed on sandy offshore islets where skunks, foxes, rats, and other predators can’t get at them. As it happens, the gulls, who don’t migrate, hatch their broods in the spring, before the terns arrive home from their travels only to find no-vacancy signs out in the best nesting areas. Then, when the terns do find a place to lay eggs, gulls raid their nests. Gulls have driven terns off the most favorable islands around here—from three places yonder in Buzzards Bay, for instance: Penikese, which used to be a leper colony, deserted now, off Cuttyhunk; the little cluster of the Weepeckets, just a few score yards across from a golden cove on lovely, wild Naushon, where we can anchor Spray for picnics with no sight of human habitation anywhere; and Ram Island, off Mattapoisett, on the far side of the bay. A couple of years ago the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that about two hundred thousand herring and black-backed gulls were nesting from Maine to Long Island, and that in the same reach there were fewer than thirty thousand nesting terns—whose number, furthermore, is falling all the time.
Back in the Gay Nineties both gulls and terns were threatened, as the craze for feathers on ladies’ hats took hold. Winged hats became more and more ornate, until ladies could fly along over the sidewalk if they half tried. Some women balanced entire nests of feathers on their heads, in which stuffed birds seemed to be perpetually hatching more hats. Herring gulls brought a bounty of a dollar a piece. Educated marksmen shot them from Longfellow Bridge, close by Harvard College. It has been guessed that the gull and tern counts each fell then to something like twenty thousand.
Later, what with protective laws generated by the Audubon Society, and the offal strewn in harbors by the booming New England fishing industry, and the town dumps swelling like volcanic hills all along the coast, the gull population exploded. The single fishery of New Bedford handed out dinners to ten thousand gulls. Terns, too, made something of a comeback—until the gulls got at them, capturing island after island along the northeast coast, and extending their selfish breeding range all the way to North Carolina.
One kind of tern we can see diving here right now, the roseate, so-called because of a blush on its breast, is on the verge of being declared an endangered species. In the 1930s, there were thirteen thousand nesting pairs of these birds on the Massachusetts coastline alone; now in all North America there are fewer than four thousand pairs. More than fifteen hundred of these pairs are on little Bird Island, off Sippican Neck, on the other side of Buzzards Bay. That they are there at all is thanks to the passion of a handful of people who have been working devotedly ever since the spring of 1970 to protect the terns on their city of sand from gulls. After a plane crashed on takeoff from Boston’s Logan Airport, in October 1960, killing sixty-two passengers, because starlings had been sucked into the turboprop engines, a couple of these very people, with backing from the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the National Science Foundation, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, teamed up with others to experiment with various means of controlling bird populations. They later used a number of those methods on Bird Island. One way was to shoot a very few gulls, which frightened many others away. Gulls are opportunists, however, and they learned fast what a gun was; they would fly away from a man carrying one but not from an unarmed person. For a couple of years, the terns’ friends baited gulls’ nests with hunks of bread spread with margarine containing a poison, 3-chloro-4-methyl benzanamine hydrochloride, commonly called DRC 1339, which brought a painless, lethargic death caused by kidney failure. But amazingly, gulls that had never eaten the stuff learned to avoid it. The only effective control, in the end, was a systematic breaking of gull eggs, three times every season. This took hard work to do, year after year. There has not been a gull chick on Bird Island since 1969.
S: Isn’t that rather rough? Do we have any business going around poisoning seagulls and breaking their eggs? You keep talking about Nature’s balance. Should we be in the act at all?
F: The trouble is that we, with our gurry and garbage, were the ones who threw things out of balance. And if the outcome were to be left to Nature, under these circumstances, the northeast-coastal species of terns would soon be extinct. I, for one, would hate that. There have been plenty of citizens, to be sure, who’ve raised a howl about the poisoning of gulls in population-management programs on Bird Island and elsewhere—some concerned about the sanctity of life, some worried that the poisons might somehow affect their own or their children’s lives. I guess you could think of the breaking of eggs as birth control. Right-to-Lifers might argue that no one has leave to murder a fertilized gull egg—but on this issue I lean to an older, grimmer code: an eye for an eye, an egg for an egg. Long live the swallow of the sea!
S: You talked about some other birds that have led you to suppers. Are any of them out here now?
F: No. Besides terns, the birds that dive for food are ospreys, kingfishers, gannets, boobies, and pelicans. I’ve never seen boobies here; they work mainly over deeper waters. Pelicans, of course, never get this far north. I’ve seen kingfishers flying around, but they don’t seem to feed in Vineyard Sound.
Ospreys, which were nearly wiped out by DDT some years ago, are making a dramatic comeback on the Vineyard. Ten years ago there were only two or three nests on the island; by last summer there were thirty-six breeding pairs here. These huge hawks fish in the evenings near the Vineyard Haven breakwater, and it’s a thrilling sight. They hover as if stalled, beating their great fans, fifty feet up, then suddenly fold and fall straight down, and at the last moment before striking the water they reach out their legs below them, toward the prey, talons spread out like the terrible grasping fingers of a scrap-steel crane. They crash into the water, barely submerge, and at once rise with a greater fluster of wings, holding a pogy or young blue in those claws. Twenty feet up they shudder, to shake the water from their feathers, and they rearrange the prey in their feet so it is streamlined for their flight back to the nest.
When I am very, very lucky, I see gannets fishing here. The first sight is of a half dozen of these magnificent birds paddling across the sky with their stiffish wingbeats, pausing to glide now and then, over toward the Elizabeth Islands, about a hundred feet above the water. They are powerful fliers—immature gannets summer on our east coast and winter off West Africa. They are all white, save for the black tips of their pointed wings. Their Brancusi bodies are two and a half feet long, and their wingspreads reach nearly six feet. They are double-ended, with a pointed tail to cut wind drag at high speeds, and with a beak and head shaped like the nose of a slightly overweight Concorde. They wheel toward Middle Ground shoal, where I’ll be trolling. Over the deeper water on the Vineyard side of the shoal, they suddenly tip over from their apparent weightlessness, all at the same time—for they seem to know that if they work together they will confuse the school below and have a better feast than if they fished alone—and, with their wings hunched to half their reach, they plummet from that great height at enormous speed. At the moment of crashing through the water barrier, their wings, enabled by special arrangements of skeleton and muscle, drape directly backwards, enfolding their streamlined bodies, and air sacs under the skin cushion the shock of the impact. They shoot deep down, often to thirty feet. I wonder whether they can swim down there, perhaps using their wings, as shearwaters and diving petrels and cormorants do. Once, fishermen in a dragger pulled in a net that had been set at ninety feet and found a live gannet in it, dizzy, no doubt, with the rapture of the deeps. The sight of the gannets at work takes my br
eath away. I think about them, diving in a few moments from the airy zone of dreams and limitlessness down, down to a place rich with memory of the sweet fluid and enclosure of the egg.
S: How impressive and moving that must be. Even this, right here, that we ve seen—this picture of all the gray and white wings swirling up and down—the skill—always something to swallow in the beaks when the birds break up from the water—all this has been amazing to me. I see it as the reciprocal of the wild savagery of the blues that you watched that time in the tank in the movie.
F: Yes, that’s true. It’s as if the skin of the water stood for the equals sign of an equation of survival….
[Swinging in at the north opening of the breakwater:] Look, that pair circling in to land on the breakwater—those are the greater black-backed gulls I was telling you about.
S: They’re huge.
F: Yes, they have wingspans of nearly four feet. They’re the hawks of gulldom: they eat small animals and eggs and chicks. It’s a pity such crooks are so handsome.
[In the kitchen:] Tonight I’m going to use a recipe of Nat Benchley’s. First I skin one of the fillets. I’ll place it in an oven-proof casserole and pour the juice of a lime over it, scatter a finely minced onion on it, add some pepper, and pour four melted tablespoons of butter on top. We’ll leave it to marinate for half an hour while we tell Barbara about the birds….
Now. I’ll heat the broiler and put the fish in, close to the flame, for about seven or eight minutes, when it should brown a bit on top. During that time I’ll melt two more tablespoons of butter in a saucepan, add the juice of another lime and four ounces of gin. Then I bring this mixture to a boil. At the proper time, I’ll pour it over the fish and return it to the broiler. Don’t be alarmed: the gin catches fire. I’ll baste the fillet once after the flame dies down and cook three minutes and test with a fork. One more minute….Let’s go.