On the Wing
8/4/22 – Navigating the joys and grief of watching birds in the Anthropocene
Hello everyone:
There was some surprising good policy news out of Washington last week in the Joe Manchin-tweaked version of Build Back Better, now called the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). There are some unconscionable gifts for the fossil fuel industry in it, and it remains to be seen whether it passes, but celebrate in the moment with a short note from Bill McKibben about how you made it happen.
Scroll down beyond the essay to read more about the IRA (and other important stuff) in this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
Heather and I have returned to mainland reality this week, reluctantly, after several days together in a quiet island cottage owned by some very generous friends. It’s hard not to mourn a little after being away from things – off-grid, unplugged, unhurried, happily isolated, focused on each other and other species, walking, swimming, and watching the sea – and feel in one’s bones that the current manifestation of the human world is unnecessarily noisy, harmful, hasty, and full of turmoil. The question, I suppose, is whether we’re spoiled vacationers resenting the working world, or temporarily sane for having entered and honored a quieter way of living.
Acknowledging the tremendous privilege of our opportunities to “get away” is important here, though it’s worth asking why we’ve built a world we want to get away from. It’s also important to note that for most of human history (the pre-Anthropocene history we don’t well understand or often discuss) it was possible to live quietly within healthy ecosystems, be well-fed without being destructive, and focus on the ordinary turmoil of human relations. One of the many reasons Heather and I live in coastal Maine is that there still exist vestiges, echoes, or at least shadows of that old reality here, as they do in other lovely rural or semi-wild places across the globe.
It was a good week to be among birds, especially. We watched from the porch, all week, as a pair of song sparrows worked from dawn to dusk to capture food for their young hidden in a nest in juniper bushes just a few feet above the high tide line. The young must have been close to fledging, because each time a parent pounced on a juicy caterpillar or moth they flew to the top of a small bush and chirped repeatedly, food dangling from their beaks, urging the chicks to leave the nest and begin feeding in the real world. To no avail: after a minute’s chirping, the parent sparrows dove into the juniper to fill gaping beaks and then fly out to hunt again.
Heather cheerfully reported that she was visited twice by ruby-throated hummingbirds as she sat with the door open in the brightly colored outhouse (as I said, there was no one else around…). I was reminded one afternoon that mourning doves, those small-headed squeaky-winged innocents that spend most of their time pecking nervously at the ground, can appear like falcons. One came out of nowhere, banking like a fighter jet at high speed around both corners of the screened-in porch before careening out across the cove and out of sight.
The usual cast of avian characters here – including chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, jays, crows, and goldfinches – called and fed in the spruce forest behind the cottage. Farther away, hermit thrushes sang their liquid tunes. Many of the birds were desperately busy as they worked to feed the fledged young who followed them like paparazzi from branch to branch.
Really, though, it was a time to find joy in the presence of coastal seabirds. Gulls soared by, osprey cried while circling overhead, loons haunted the night sea, and common terns plunged like arrows to their prey just offshore. A resident bald eagle descended from the treetops to perch on the ledge of a small island a few hundred feet away, and a resident osprey flew awkwardly by, carrying a six-foot-long branch to the nest.
One afternoon I stood on the dock watching a lone black guillemot contentedly paddle into our snug Little Harbor. Guillemots (pronounced “GEE-uh-maats”) look a bit like ducks but are part of the auk family along with auks, auklets, puffins, murres, murrelets, and dovekies. Breeding adult guillemots like this one are a dusky black except for white wing patches and bright red legs. Maine is at the southern end of the black guillemot’s range; they are mostly Arctic birds who dive for small fish and invertebrates. This one, though, was kin to Heather and me in that it preferred the cove for a vigorous bath. Just a few feet from a boat on its mooring the guillemot dunked and shimmied, fluttered and shook until all feathers were composed back into the beautiful tight mass that kept it warm as it propelled itself with powerful wings into the depths. For the moment, though, it floated high in the water, as perfect as its ancestors have been for untold millennia.
I was happily absorbed watching from the dock but could feel there was something else compelling me to watch this little football-shaped bird’s joyful bathing. And then I remembered.
Writing this Field Guide has put me square in the bad-news business. Nearly every natural system that governs life on Earth is under severe pressure from our triple-threat of unsustainable resource use, out-of-control production of toxins and unwanted nutrients, and excess population growth. The Ukrainians living under constant random shelling is a pretty good metaphor-of-the-moment for innumerable species who are struggling to weather our behavior. The Anthropocene is as much an existential threat to life as it is a geologic time period. Climate change due to our supervolcanic production of greenhouse gases dominates the save-the-Earth conversation, but really it is only one aspect of the larger threat we pose to all of life in its current astonishing array.
So I read a lot of difficult news and process it through my writing to say small and large things about the state of the world, how we got here, and where we might be going. I thread some hope through my sentences and point to both the beauty of the world and the wonderful work being done to protect it by policy-makers, scientists, activists, journalists, artists, students, and you and me. Even so, the stories often run dark because that’s the reality. The burden of consciousness in this age is in part the burden of inhabiting this untenable civilization. There’s nowhere else to go.
Even so, an article I’d read a few days before watching the guillemot bathe in Little Harbor felt like a hammer blow. Not because it spoke of some breached climate threshold or other great dark cloud, but because it spoke of so much beauty lost so quickly and for no good reason.
The reliably attentive Guardian, in its excellent Age of Extinction series, published a stark article a couple weeks ago titled “’The scale is hard to grasp’: avian flu wreaks devastation on seabirds”, and it was a doozy for me. Avian flu has been in the news here in the U.S. this year because of its presence in songbirds and poultry farms, but seabirds, especially those which nest close together in colonies, are proving highly susceptible.
The story is a hard one. Here’s a sample:
The Farne Islands are home to 200,000 seabirds, including Arctic terns, Atlantic puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes and razorbills. Potter is one of many conservationists swapping binoculars for a hazmat suit, picking up the bodies of birds she has spent her career trying to protect. Birds will sit on the ground, unable to move, twisting into unnatural positions, before dying. It is happening with chicks, too, still gently trying to flap as they die. “It sweeps through, takes everything in its path. It doesn’t seem to spare anything, really … We’ve collected thousands of dead birds, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s just the scale of it which is hard to grasp,” she says.
The article is focused on the UK, but this highly contagious and deadly avian flu has been sweeping the globe for a while now. Here in Maine, this spring and early summer brought reports of dead terns infected with H5N1 for the first time. I talked with the executive director of Avian Haven, a bird rehabilitation facility in Maine, who said that common eiders were “washing up dead and dying on the beaches,” but they didn’t have good data yet on the impact to the species. Eagles and other animals (including mammals: foxes, seals, etc.) have been dying after eating the sick or dead birds.
The current strain of avian flu, known also as H5N1 or more generally as HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza), has been years in the making. In general, all influenzas come from a natural set of viruses, of course, and are merely one commonly known pathogen on a planet brimming with them. Every manifestation of life has pathogens that haunt it, sometimes fatally for individuals, and occasionally fatally for much of the species. It’s the normal evolutionary tussle between host and parasite.
But H5N1 is not normal in the evolutionary sense. It’s an Anthropocene byproduct of our reliance on industrial poultry over the last several decades. The biomass of all wild birds on Earth is only a third of the biomass of the poultry we raise everywhere, in vast numbers, so that we can eat about 65 billion of them each year. A 2018 Times article explores the idea that really, from a certain angle, we live not in the Anthropocene but in the Age of the Chicken.
The H5N1 strain was first detected in commercially raised geese in Asia back in 1996. By 2005, as the Guardian piece notes, “wild birds started dying en masse.” It has surged in waves ever since, with this new wave wiping out at least hundreds of thousands of wild birds and causing poultry farms to cull nearly 80 million domestic birds.
To be clear, then, this devastation being wrought through seabird colonies (and other wild bird populations) around the world is a manmade dilemma. It’s another artillery shell lobbed into the web of life, and another form of pollution seeping out from the vast, cruel network of chicken factories that feed us. And it’s inevitable. We cannot keep 23 billion chickens in grossly crowded “colonies” at any given moment and not expect viruses and other pathogens to evolve like well-fed mice in a maze.
Bird flu may yet pose a similarly catastrophic threat to people, but for now it’s the astonishingly beautiful and marvelous seabirds that are being wiped out. (If you’re on Twitter, brace yourself and explore the sad #avianflu hashtag.) No one knows what will be left when this HPAI finally ends its rampage. Just this year a small colony of terns in the Netherlands was erased. Colonies around Europe and the UK are losing 25%, 30%, 86% in no time at all. 10% of France’s entire population of sandwich terns died in a week. One conservation biologist interviewed by the Guardian worried that in the long term there would be nearly 100% mortality rates for some of these species. Seabirds are long-lived and slow to reproduce. The chicks are dying of HPAI too. Recovery for these species will be difficult and very slow.
And this is taking place in an era of other Anthropocene threats: warming oceans, overfishing, microplastics in the food chain, and others, all of which pose a constant and unnecessary strain on the health of seabird populations.
Why do I hold seabirds in such high esteem? In part, because I’ve read The Seabird’s Cry, by Adam Nicolson, which I highly recommend. The stories these birds inhabit are fascinating, and Nicolson’s writing is elegant and beautiful. Seabirds, he says, are “the rarest form of creation, the only animals at home on the sea, in the sea, in the air, and on land,” and
creatures whose lives have stepped beyond the ordinary into environments of such difficulty that they can respond only with a slow, cumulative mastery which amounts in the end to genius… They are one of the enormous facts of life from which most of us, most of the time, are kept away.
And in part because all of nature is astonishing, from parasitic wasps to lichen and lampreys, from krill to orchids and orcas. But birds, gifted with a life on high, have colonized the air, and so amaze us while providing metaphors for freedom and “getting away.” They are also living links to the dinosaurs and elegant reminders of the deep time we are both ignorant of and erasing. I’ve held a house-trapped hummingbird draped across two fingers and could not feel its weight, though it had the intelligence and endurance to navigate the Americas. I’ve marveled at each window-dazed warbler, thrush, and kingfisher perching on my hand as it regained its wild consciousness before flying off.
Yet even if songbirds are symbols of joy and hope, and if hawks or ravens seem to have the kinds of discerning minds we attribute to ourselves, then seabirds are something else entirely. In their globe-ranging freedom over our oceanic planet they are something akin to astronauts, if not aliens. Many spend most of their lives away from land, navigating wild oceans by scent and a feel for the Earth’s magnetic fields.
That these ancient, highly-evolved wonders should be brought closer to extinction by a virus crawling out of the panting mouths of billions of factory-farmed chickens and geese should be a source of shame. Certainly we didn’t intend it – not even the factory owners and the fast food joints selling the meat – but they and we have to stare clear-eyed at the dark horizon we’ve drawn across the miraculous lives of these creatures.
And we need to help them. On the HPAI front we can only make policy decisions in the short term which reduce exposure of wild birds to domestic flocks, and in the long term which reduce future epidemics emerging from our industrial poultry addiction. And we can use our love of seabirds to motivate us to finally reduce CO2 production, eliminate the flood of ocean plastics, protect the islands and seas where these birds raise their young, and hasten the trend toward sustainable fisheries which don’t kill or starve these birds. Locally, we can support the animal rehabilitators who live among us and quietly care for sick and injured species.
The executive director of Avian Haven was kind enough to take the time to write to me at length, and in gratitude I’ve sent a donation to support their work. Find the rehabilitators in your area and help them however we can. I’ve long noted that it’s hard to find reliable and updated lists of rehab facilities, but in the U.S. here’s a good place to start from the Humane Society. Caring for individual birds is not necessarily saving species, but without doing one we can’t do the other.
Standing on the dock and watching the black guillemot bathe alone, I couldn’t help but realize that it’s the virus that’s on the wing now, sweeping the globe like the seabirds’ shadow. It is a wildly successful opportunist species, like us and like so many of our camp followers: rats, chickens, cows, and thousands of other invasive species scattered by us across the continents in our ongoing betrayal of the evolved sanctity of each place. Our shallow sense of time and rapid destruction have made us largely ignorant of how much has been lost as we’ve stitched together the continents by the ships and planes of global trade. It’s as if we’ve rebuilt Pangaea.
And yet there’s so much beauty in these birds to save and protect. Next time you’re on or off the coast, spend time imagining the lives of the birds soaring effortlessly by, shifting between ethereal and watery worlds, or simply swimming contentedly through a world we cannot naturally inhabit. And read The Seabird’s Cry.
Finally, if I had the time there’s a story I meant to tell here about a sick loon Heather and I observed all week. It was heartbreaking, but only in the ordinary sense of life and death in the wild. We learned from Avian Haven that it couldn’t have H5N1, which kills in a couple days. I had hoped they would arrange for a pick-up of the bird and take it to be healed, but as their director wrote, “Loons are large but delicate creatures. They also tend to fiercely resist capture. It can be very difficult to decide when/how to intervene.”
So we didn’t. The loon has died, and I’m arranging to deliver the body to state biologists who, in their quest to protect the species, study dead loons to determine what’s killing them. That effort is as important as the loons are beautiful, and that’s the message here this week: do important things to protect the beauty of the world.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
As promised, here are some good resources to understand the Inflation Reduction Act which, with nearly $370 billion for climate and clean energy action, would be by far the largest U.S. investment in the climate battle so far. From the Progressive Caucus Center, a comprehensive summary of the IRA’s climate and energy provisions; from the Committee for a Responsible Budget, an economic analysis; and from Vox, a general explainer article that also includes the bill’s hefty non-climate provisions on health care, prescription drugs, taxes, and more.
From the Times, a fascinating article on the “anthropause,” the break in global human activity created by pandemic lockdowns. Ecologists and other scientists have been able to study the benefits (and occasional costs) to wildlife when we stayed home for several months. Now they’re studying the impacts as we’ve ramped activity back up in what some are calling (a little too cutely) the “anthropulse.”
From Grist, the unnerving and sorry tale of the fossil fuel industry, especially the Saudis, betting heavily on plastics: “The fossil-fuel industry is moving toward plastic because they’re losing market share in transportation and energy generation,” says an advocate for Beyond Plastics. Petrochemical toxicity is a constant in our lives, and will be for many more generations if we don’t rid civilization of the fuels, fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals forced upon us by these companies. Of course there’s an environmental justice component to this story too: “The people who live in these frontline communities face a cocktail of pollutants due to their proximity to the [plastics] facility.”
From the Times, an interview with Herman Daly, the pioneering “steady-state” economist, on the lunacy of constant-growth economics: “Does growth, as currently practiced and measured, really increase wealth? Is it making us richer in any aggregate sense, or might it be increasing costs faster than benefits and making us poorer? Mainstream economists don’t have any answer to that. The reason they don’t have any answer to that is that they don’t measure costs. They only measure benefits. That’s what G.D.P. is…. Earth is not expanding. We don’t get new materials, and we don’t export stuff to space. So you have a steady-state Earth, and if you don’t recognize that, well, there’s an education problem.”
From The Overpopulation Project, an article on the links between overpopulation and biodiversity loss. “Successfully protecting Earth’s remaining biodiversity requires challenging growth and reducing the excessive size of human populations and human economies, which are intimately connected.”
There is always a gem to find in your writing Jason. This week's "Our shallow sense of time and rapid destruction have made us largely ignorant of how much has been lost as we’ve stitched together the continents by the ships and planes of global trade. It’s as if we’ve rebuilt Pangaea." jumped out at me. I spent way too much time with geologists back in the day. Our marsh, so alive this spring, seems strangely quiet here in mid-summer and that's an unsettling backdrop for reading this week's essay.
"Do important things to protect the beauty of the world."
Like write this deeply personal, well researched, lyrical blog in which you courageously share your grief and your deep love and joy in living here in Maine amidst the songbirds and the loons and the diving terns. I read that piece last week in the Guardian about the shorebirds dying in Europe and was distraught. I hadn't read it carefully enough to understand the connection between those deaths and factory raised chickens! Chicken nuggets, chicken cutlets, cheap chicken meat everywhere! I hereby resolve never to eat a mouthful of that ruinous flesh again. But a local chicken, born and raised in Brunswick and sold at the Farmers Market: there are still choices.
Thank you, Jason for your courage in continuing to track the particulars of grief in the Anthropocene. Unless we truly embody that grief and that love we will not be moved enough to do all we have to do to reduce carbon and prevent the kind of mass extinctions we are blindly headed towards.