The Last Word On Nothing

I love to count, and as a student of ecology I have counted many things over the years: sandpipers, whales, ducks, deer mice, penguins, internodes on eelgrass rhizomes, to name just a few. In part I love counting’s essential mundanity. It is so central to any ecological question, but my god can it be boring. With the eelgrass, for instance, it was me, a professor, a couple of other conscripts, a mixing bowl overflowing with long green shoots, and nothing but time. In silence we fingered our way down slender kinked stems, measuring the delicate leaves attached to them, jotting numbers. It was probably as close to enlightenment as I’ll ever come.

Not that I mind more excitement, so a couple of weeks ago I met up with a pelagic seabird survey team for one of their fall counts off the Washington coast. The team were four: Kelly, the leader, who was suspiciously cheerful for the 4:45 a.m. wakeup call; Erin and Sarah, who were more taciturn; and Chad, who was monosyllabic. We all plodded down to the Monte Carlo, a 50-foot fishing charter moored at the Westport Marina. The sun was still hours away as the boat headed for open water, so the only thing I could see was the red light of a channel buoy. The light jumped around like a yo-yo, sometimes fifteen feet below me, sometimes fifteen feet above. The captain had told us the day might start out “a bit bumpy”; I curled up on a bench and closed my eyes.

Two hours later we reached the starting point for Transect P6, just north of the mouth of the Columbia River. From here we would sail west about forty miles, turn right and go north about thirteen miles, and then turn right again to sail back (east) about forty miles, sketching in effect a giant staple. Along this staple the team would count every seabird they could see, the aim being to document down to the GPS-determined meter who was where and in what quantities.

Chad and Erin and I headed up to the bow for the first shift, while Kelly and Sarah stayed in the cabin at the laptop, taking data. The Monte Carlo pitched and rolled, jostled by wind waves that were themselves abetted by a formidable swell. Erin and Chad started to call out birds—“two sooty shearwaters, flying, 7-6”, “four common murres, on the water, 1-3”—identifying species and the distance in meters they were from an imaginary line projecting out of the bow.

Before long we came upon dozens of sooty shearwaters and common murres, with a few stray Cassin’s and rhinoceros auklets, all of them feeding in a scrum. Here a dyad of a sort presented itself. Sooty shearwaters—sooties in shorthand—are slender birds, with long, thin wings. They are made for wind and use it well. They wheeled with it, turning into it to drop to the water and snap something up, and then sweeping off inches above the waves as if they were teasing them. The murres and auklets, being alcids, are stockier, heavier, with comparatively shorter wings. They were more water-bound, bobbing up and down like tugboats, sometimes sticking their heads into the sea to scout before lunging forward to dive after some morsel. When they did fly—usually to get out of the way of the Monte Carlo as it bore down on them—it seemed a reluctant toil.

The Monte Carlo motored past the throng, leaving me, in theory, in a state of elation. Spend too much time with seabirds on or near land and they can come to look comic or meek or hapless as they stumble about, squawk, stink. To be among them on the open ocean was to see them at their most authoritative, with their varied competences on full display. But I say “in theory” because the only thing I was counting by that point were the seconds until I would puke. Everyone else was suffering, too, I noted with queasy satisfaction, except for Kelly, who had an iron stomach. She sympathized with the rest of us. “This one time I was on a cruise in the Gulf of Alaska for a month, and it was super stormy,” she said. “I never got sick, but I felt lousy sometimes.”

(Thanks, Kelly.)

Eventually the inevitable happened (twice), and I stumbled down to the stern and took a quick nap. When I woke up I felt much better. The wind had calmed, too, and with it the waves. The Monte Carlo chugged on the northward leg, rolling in the gentler swell and the steady breeze. We were out over deeper waters near to the edge of the continental shelf. Save for a ruffle of clouds far off at the edge of the horizon, the world was entirely blue, top to bottom. The attending seabirds had changed as well to mostly shearwaters and their ilk. “You can see how the community shifts in space,” Kelly said. “Closer to shore it’s more mixed, but when you move farther out you start to lose a lot of the alcids, and get more shearwaters, albatrosses, jaegers, things like that—the true pelagics.”

By now I truly was in a state of elation. I love sooties, or for that matter any tubenose, as shearwaters and their petrel cousins are called. Most breed nowhere near the Pacific Northwest, and sooties especially are accomplished seafarers. The ones here had hatched on islands in the south Pacific before striking off on a 40,000-mile journey to the north Pacific and back, tracking waves of productivity in pursuit of what biologists call “an endless summer.” But marveling as the shearwaters winged past the boat with ease, whipping about the hemispheres, I thought too of the more geographically constrained alcids. Many of them breed on islands off the North American coast and basically stick around for their whole lives. Wallace Stegner had a framework for these lifestyles: boomers and stickers. Boomers, he wrote, “pillage and run,” while stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”

Now, never in a million years would I accuse a shearwater of being the kind of rapacious capitalist Stegner had in mind. (Jaegers, on the other hand…) Nor, having seen them at their colonies snapping at each other, would I hold up an auklet as an avian saint. But I liked the juxtaposition of that graceful wide-ranging and the squat local, and how such disparate natural histories could find themselves on an ocean that can accommodate them both, and others besides, at least for the time being.

We were still going north when Kelly called out, “Hey, look at that!” I followed her gaze, and saw, perched on a log, a rhinoceros auklet. Kelly had to check twice to be sure, and then she pronounced it for the database—“Rhino auklet, on-rock, 1-2-6.” The Monte Carlo churned towards it but it didn’t flee, instead watching us pass, gazing in that implacable way birds have, balancing atop the log that rocked in our wake. “We almost always see a few rhinos waaaaay out here like this,” Kelly said. “And I’m like, ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be closer to shore!’ But this one must like it, like it’s exploring or something. Maybe it likes the view!” She laughed and turned her attention back to the bow to see what she would see next, and the Monte Carlo motored on, leaving the boomer auklet to its own thoughts and aspirations.

Photo by the author.