“Thousands and thousands of burrow entrances stippled into the hillside like flecks in tweed. This was a puffin colony with maybe 2,000 burrows in it. You could have expected five or six thousand birds to be there. But this evening, there were none. I looked hard and then out to sea, and found with my binoculars about twenty puffins, circling forlornly in the ocean of air.”
One of the best things about birdwatching is that it’s a hobby that you can engage in virtually anywhere. Birds are found from jungle to desert to tundra to the hearts of our busiest cities. They are even found flying over or diving into the most desolate stretches of the open ocean. The seabirds are a diverse group of birds found across the world. They don’t represent a single taxonomic group – despite their similar appearances, gulls are not in the same order as the albatrosses, nor are puffins akin to cormorants. Instead, what binds them together is their ability to make a living on the margins, where the land meets the ocean.
In The Seabird’s Cry:
The Lives and Loves of the Planet’s Great Ocean Voyagers, author Adam
Nicolson recounts his experiences with a cross-sampling of the world’s
seabirds. In ten chapters, he skips from
island to island (mostly focusing on the North Atlantic), offering a peak into
the lives of these remarkable birds.
Seabirds have a long history with humanity, both as a source of legend
(Homer, Coleridge, and other authors are visited throughout the book) as well as
of more practical, earthly concerns, such as meat, oil, and egg. Sometimes the relationships have been
mutually beneficial, such as the Chinese fishermen who train cormorants to help
them catch fish. In other cases, it’s
been devastating for the birds – one chapter is devoted to the lost giant of
the seabirds, the now-extinct great auk.
For as long as we’ve had an association with seabirds, our
interactions have largely been largely limited to the land. Humans have visited them (and hunted) them on
the rocky cliffs where they have nested, but have had little idea of what
they’ve done once they’ve left the roost.
Where do they go? How far do they
travel? How on earth do they find their
way (and their food) across the endless, seemingly uniform oceans that they
traverse? Nicolson explores how
developments in science have allowed to us track seabirds over the ocean and
better understand where they go, what they do, and how they survive. Which is all very good to know, because that
survival can’t be taken for granted anymore.
All across the planet, populations of many seabirds are
plummeting. Some of the more adaptable
and omnivorous species are holding their own – even expanding their ranges – in
the face of humans. Others are finding
themselves in a world that is increasingly hostile to their survival, largely
because of us. Overfishing has depleted
food stocks around the globe. Global
climate change has raised the temperature of ocean waters, altering the very
first links of the food chain on which so many seabirds are dependent. Nesting sites are disturbed, with some years
passing without successful reproduction.
Birds become entangled and drown in fishing nets. Rats and other invasive species eat eggs and chicks.
Many of the seabirds are colonial breeders, nesting in great
numbers in a select few locations. Much
of Nicolson’s book describes the politics and romances, so to speak, or these
great assemblages of birds. Some of my
favorite zoo exhibits have been colonies of puffins and other colonial birds,
watching the constant action and interaction among the jostling birds. Some of the chapters make touching reading,
with passages of parents raising chicks in monogamous pairs. Other parts get a bit dark – we read about
murderous sociopathic “teenagers” that prey on their younger neighbors, as well
as parents who do the mental math, realize that they will not be able to feed
both themselves and their chicks that year, and opt to cut their losses. Nature is many things – forgiving it is not.
One group of seabirds that we are in little danger of losing
anytime soon are the gulls. These are
birds that many people consider to be a nuisance, something of a trash
bird. Even zookeepers aren’t immune for
the feeling. I’ve spent a lot of time
cursing under my breath (and, when there weren’t visitors around, over it as
well) as I tried to feed fish to a very shy flock of pelicans in their exhibit,
while ravenous, bold-as-brass gulls swooped down, sometimes catching the fish
mid-toss. Even so, it’s hard not to
admire their adaptability, capable of making a living in any environment. Perhaps it is because gulls are so common
that we don’t appreciate just how remarkable they are… that and the fact that
they are pretty obnoxious, to be fair.
For many of the seabirds (which, apart from puffins, don’t
have great representation in zoo collections), they are out of sight, out of
mind. We might see some gulls squabbling
over a bucket of French fries at the beach and assume that this is the life of
all seabirds. In truth, they are so much
more than awkward, noisy scavengers.
They are beautiful, canny survivors who are masters of an alien
environment that we are only just beginning to understand. The question remains, how long will many of
them survive as we come to understand the impact that we have on them?
The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers at Amazon.com
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