looking for, a compendium on migration by Scott Weidensaul called Living on the Wind. Returning to the couch, I read out loud a sentence that I underlined just yesterday: “Migration depends upon links—food, safe havens, quiet roost sites, clean water, and a host of other resources, strung out in due measure and regular occurrence along routes that may cross thousands of miles. But we are breaking those links with abandon.”3
He doesn’t say anything at first and I’m afraid I seem ridiculous—a liberal, book-quoting caricature—compared to my manly host. But he doesn’t laugh at me. He nods and seems to chew over what I have read.
“There is no bigger haven than this delta,” he says. “Think what we’re destroying. Millions of acres of wetlands. If we lose this we lose everything.”
Millions of other birds, not just blue-winged teal and ospreys but a hundred other species, will pour down this central corridor as they make their arduous journeys from points north to Central and South America. Migration is always a gambit: everything has to go right. It is a time of both stress and opportunity, but in this strange and oily year, I worry that the former will overwhelm the latter.
It’s late by the time Ryan heads back to his house, which is just a few hundred yards from the lodge. Holly and a couple of the others are still working on their computers, but I keep to myself, nursing a beer and chewing over my talk with Ryan.
I think of the thousands of ospreys that will be heading this way soon, when the weather changes. Ospreys have become no less than a way of organizing how I think about the world. A lot of nature lovers pay lip service to trying to imagine the world beyond the human—the biocentric as opposed to the anthropocentric—but by getting to know one animal well, I have, almost despite myself, done just that. My thinking, more specifically, has become ospreycentric. The birds are the one thing in the universe I pick up and find everything hitched to.
And so, when I think about the millions-plus gallons of chemical dispersants being dumped in the Gulf, my mind keeps returning to ospreys. We don’t yet know what the long-term results of Corexit 9500 will be on fish and birds, and we may not truly know for years, but we know that both the oil and the chemicals are already deep in the water column and may soon pervade the food chain. If this happens it will not be the first time ospreys have been impacted by human tinkering. In fact, if the birds were aware of what was happening in these waters, they would no doubt be thinking the osprey equivalent of “Jeez, not again.” This is a species, after all, that was all but eradicated by chemicals in the recent past.
It was from learning about DDT and ospreys that I first came to understand the concept of interconnectivity. The story begins in the late 1950s when DDT was sprayed on fields and marshes with the goal of eliminating diseasecarrying insects. But what the chemical proved, in a giant science experiment not so different from the one currently going on in the Gulf, was that “the web of life” is not some fanciful notion that a groovy ecologist invented. In fact, the way that DDT moved through that web—killing the insects but also moving up the food chain to vegetation and smaller fish, accumulating in larger quantities with every step up, eventually settling in lethal quantities in top predators like ospreys and eagles—was almost as miraculous as the web itself. Almost. But while the web created life, the chemical brought death. The way it killed was particularly cruel: it caused a thinning of the eggshells so that when parents sat atop their eggs to incubate them, their offspring were crushed. Before the chemical was banned, the birds were almost entirely wiped out in the Northeast.
And now we are at it again.
The people who made and sprayed DDT were not evil. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of mosquitoes? They weren’t evil, but they just believed that they could control things. They believed they could make things better than they are; that they could always fix what got broken; never considering that some of the things they were breaking had taken a million years or so to make.
As tragic and awful as the oil spill is, the use of dispersants could prove worse in the long term. You can at least argue that the first mistake, the spill itself, was an accident, an accident born of arrogance and greed and oversight, but still an accident. The second mistake grew out of opposites: conscious decision and panic. A friend who works with the BP administrators in Mobile told me that during those first weeks everyone’s eyes were wide from fear. Fear has quickly led to a desperate need for the illusion of control.
I don’t claim to know what Corexit or other dispersants will do, how exactly they will infiltrate and affect fish and birds. But I know that good science is born of skepticism, and that those who confidently claim that they do know are exhibiting the thinking of little boys. By this I mean a rambunctious, occasionally effective, headstrong, and insistent way of being. I mean a demented can-do philosophy that wants wants wants and so will find a way to get. I mean a way of being that most of us, boys and girls, eventually grow out of, a way that can actually lead to the building of some pretty neat-o things, but that also leads to pouring boiling water on ants. If you think I am exaggerating, if you think that this isn’t the kind of thinking running rampant down here, then consider this: last week a number of people started discussing the possibility of detonating a nuclear bomb to plug up the well.4
But forget nuclear weapons. Who needs them when you have Corexit? How do little boys deal with things they break? Sometimes they hide them. You break a lamp and don’t want Ma to see it so you put it in the closet. The ocean floor is now the closet. If the Gulf is our national sacrifice zone, then the ocean floor, where life starts and where the dispersants are sinking, will be the Gulf’s own double-secret sacrifice zone. Talk about sweeping something under a rug.
To a lot of fairly knowledgeable people, the spraying of dispersants seem as much a disguise as a solution. “A magic trick,” Ryan called it. And a good one. “Out of sight, out of mind” could be our national motto. We put so much energy into pretending, into avoiding, into not seeing what is. And what are dispersants if not a way to hide reality? A way to make a problem appear to be gone. In this regard they are an embodiment of both our belief in the importance of appearances and our own unwillingness to acknowledge oil—both oil in general and oil in the Gulf specifically—and its consequences. In other words the perfect solution, from a poetic if not practical point of view, for a society that doesn’t want to face its own reality.
The problem is that it’s hard to sweep things under the rug in nature. Things insist on being part of other things. Ospreys know this. What DDT taught is that the invisible can kill, and all our denials and disguises and PR moves don’t make a thing any less lethal.
Luckily my trip so far has been filled not just with osprey ideas, but with actual ospreys. On that first night in Fort Pickens, I camped next to a forest of dead trees. The trees, killed by the salt from Hurricane Ivan, twisted up into the sky like mushroom stems. The hurricane had created perfect homes for ospreys, leafless branches allowing panoramic views of the dunes and water. In their crowns sat many great shaggy nests.
On the beach beyond the dead forest I watched a single osprey as it hunted. It hovered above the crashing waves, its black and white wings semaphore flashing. I first came to bird-watching as a sports fan, craving contact, and that day didn’t disappoint. Soon enough the osprey dove, pulling its wings into a W shape and hurtling toward the water. Ospreys don’t twist and plop into the water like pelicans, or dart down in the manner of terns. They dive.
As it happened, the bird missed on the first attempt. 0 for 1. It shook off in the air like a wet dog, shivering, and then tried again, but pulled up
