One warm May night, around midnight, I drove out to an. Beginnings

Transcription

1 Beginnings One warm May night, around midnight, I drove out to an empty beach on Delaware Bay. The summerhouses nearby were dark and empty, the only light the full moon shining on the bay, and the only sound the waves gently lapping against the sand. Just before high tide, horseshoe crabs began emerging from the water. Their shells, some as large as dinner plates, were dark and scuffed. These prehistoric animals, emissaries from the deep sea, were coming in to lay their eggs in the sand. I d never seen anything quite like this. I used to go down to the edge of the creek near my home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to look for spawning horseshoe crabs, their unfailing arrival sign that a hard winter was turning to spring. There were never very many; at most I d find six or eight. Delaware Bay is home to the world s greatest concentration of horseshoe crabs. On this beach, they came by the thousands, gliding effortlessly through the water, then burrowing in the sand. When the tide turned, they surfaced, slid into the waves, and disappeared. If I d been at the beach an hour earlier or an hour later, I d have missed them. The next day more wildlife amassed on Delaware Bay beaches thousands upon thousands of migrating shorebirds, an avian Serengeti, one of the greatest concentrations of shorebirds on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The birds remained in the bay for only a few weeks: 1

2 2 beginnings for many years, ornithologists didn t seem to know they were passing through. They d come for the horseshoe crab eggs in flocks so thick I couldn t see the sand. Among them were a few thousand russet-colored sandpipers, red knots. They raced along the shore, frantically grabbing scattered horseshoe crab eggs. Where had the knots come from that they were so desperately hungry? And how could a diet of tiny eggs, each the size of a pinhead, take them where they were going? They wasted no time: they d flown more than 7,500 miles to get here, and in two weeks, they d be flying 2,000 more. And that was only half their journey. Each year knots fly from one end of the Earth to the other and back. Consumed by curiosity, I followed them to learn what it takes to go such great distances, where they chose to stop along the way and why, and what was so special about those horseshoe crab eggs. This book is the story of that journey. I begin where many red knots live during the northern winter, a virtually inaccessible beach on the Strait of Magellan. When they begin flying north, I move with them, traveling to a crowded resort in Argentina, a saltwater lagoon in Texas, a hunting preserve in South Carolina. To see where knots build their nests in summer, I go to a lonely camp on Southampton Island in the Arctic s Foxe Basin, home to large numbers of hungry polar bears. When the breeding season ends and knots begin their long return to South America, I see them off, from the boggy edge of Canada s James Bay, the foggy Mingan Islands, a low-lying Cape Cod beach whose nearby waters are increasingly visited by great white sharks, and finally, the bay behind my home. The journey is not easy. I accompany dedicated biologists and birders, tracking birds by foot, walking 10 or 12 miles every day through ice and snow. We sit for hours in the pouring rain, counting shorebirds. We hide on windy beaches hoping to catch them in nets. The knots are elusive. Fueled on fat, warmed by feathers, they can go anywhere, no matter how remote. We fly, too, watching for them from helicopters; listening for them in a small propeller plane equipped with a radio receiver; and following them onto the tundra with the help of bush pilots for whom a narrow strip of icy gravel constitutes a runway. We travel by boat, train, komatik, SUV, and ATV, on rides that range from exhilarating to hair-raising. I learn to load and fire, reasonably accurately, a 12-gauge shotgun, and find to my surprise on the next stopover that I miss it.

3 See Arctic map Mingan Islands See South Carolina and Georgia map Laguna Madre GULF OF MEXICO See Delaware Bay and Virginia map ATLANTIC OCEAN Guyana Suriname French Guiana Maranhão PACIFIC OCEAN Lagoa de Peixe National Park mi San Antonio Oeste km See Tierra del Fuego map Migration route of the red knot, Calidris canutus rufa (map by Bill Nelson; source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

4 4 beginnings The knots seem at home in hurricane winds that ground us and in bug-infested, alligator-ridden swamps. I live in a mosquito-filled marsh but on this trip am subjected to the worst concentrations of biting insects I have ever seen. The birds forage for all their meals. Eating tiny clams and horseshoe crab eggs, they double their weight before each major flight. I taste their food, supplementing it with wild game, gourmet meals, dried crackers, and peanut butter and lose weight. Slogging through isolated, remote areas looking for birds, I have a compass, GPS, and radio to keep track of myself. The birds have what? By the end of this journey I am more in awe than when I began. The route isn t quite what I thought it d be. A few scraps of beach crowded with laughing gulls and shorebirds are a world-renowned hotspot for avian flu. One researcher there is funded by the Department of Homeland Security. In another state, I spend a morning not on a beach, but in a courtroom. Detouring off the well-marked path, I explore less recognized twists and turns that prove important, accompanying scientists as they uncover two previously unrecognized winter homes of young knots. Their work comes at a critical time. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the red knot, Calidris canutus rufa, as threatened under the Endangered Species Act; it is likely to become in danger of extinction in the foreseeable future. Along the route, I see why. Horseshoe crabs, I learn, matter as much to our own well-being as they do to shorebirds. I follow horseshoe crabs to a gleaming oyster bank in South Carolina, to a biomedical company in Charleston, and then to Massachusetts General Hospital to find out how and why my life depends on an animal that comes ashore but once a year. The red knot whose migration I follow, Calidris canutus rufa, is one of six lineages of red knots worldwide. Rufa, the youngest of all the knots, flies the greatest distances. The birds have many homes, each a critical way station, a rung on a ladder between Tierra del Fuego and the Arctic. If only a few footholds break, the entire journey is compromised. Some are already broken. Some are being repaired, with hopeful result. Others are in danger of breaking. The story and struggle of rufa red knots is the story and struggle of all knots, and of millions of shorebirds. What would it mean if we lost them? Migrating shorebirds speak to us. In the long arc of their journeys, in the soft, lilting calls of black-bellied plovers across a vast mudflat, in the

5 beginnings 5 hurried dash of sandpipers along the shore, they tell us of our world what is, what is becoming, and what could be. In the quiet solitude to be found in the company of birds on a marshy island swept by an incoming tide, on a moonlit beach, in the cold, clear light of the Arctic summer wherever we are relieved of the press of our busy lives we can hear them and consider who we are and who we wish to be. Along a meridian that runs the length of the globe, I watch knots in their many homes, seeing firsthand how they live from day to day and how, as increasingly large numbers of people inhabit the narrow edge between land and sea, our lives are intertwined with theirs. Along the way, the story upends my ideas about guns, hunters, and hunting; about how humans and wildlife can share an increasingly crowded and redesigned shore; and, at a time when the edge between the human and natural world has dissolved, about what being wild now means. I have always loved the many and exquisite ways science illuminates our world. With beauty and clarity, it offers insight into the lives of shorebirds and horseshoe crabs, and into our evolving shoreline. Science can suggest a direction, but science alone cannot repair our torn world. We make our choices from another plane. Following knots, I meet many dedicated people who year after year, season after season, are looking out for knots, striving to keep their homes at the edge of the sea safe and intact: scientists, birders, and people who love birds but don t call themselves birders; high school students, graduate students, rising biology stars, and those who ve given their time to shorebirds for 30 or 40 years and continue even when they theoretically have retired. They work long days along a flyway that encompasses at least 12 countries, where people speak at least five languages, where the knot is known by many names, and where in one place, it has no name. They share a common dream, to restore to abundance a bird whose numbers have precipitously declined. Their service, rooted in science, springs from and is held by love. In Delaware Bay I hold in my hand a knot that s flown the length of the Earth not once, but many times. This tiny bird has an unerring instinct to locate, over miles of coastline, individual beaches with the most plentiful food. It has developed astonishing ways to undertake, again and again, exhausting nonstop flights. It can bring forth a new generation in the harsh Arctic summer. Our human politics may vary, our needs and desires may conflict, and our values may differ, but this bird unites us along the shore of two entire

6 6 beginnings continents, following a route that doesn t recognize our boundaries. I release the red knot, watching it take flight, praying it may continue to find shelter and refuge along its way, season after season and year after year. Hard questions lie before us, questions of how or whether humans and wildlife will share our increasingly fragile shore. Traveling through almost 120 degrees of latitude from the bottom of one continent to the top of another looking at those questions, I began to feel that, in the words of the Persian poet Hafiz, All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your heart where, perhaps, it is possible to see what is before us, hidden in plain sight.