Book Review: The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet’s Great Ocean Voyagers

 “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