Death, Man Made
Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of death, as well as a natural ferocity—it is what is left of the animal predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention, abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder and pollution. In our power we are weak.
I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters, loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush, wielded at random.
Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood. When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive, out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying. Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown, are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a heavy coating of oil.
Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water. I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation, and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers. Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it.
This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone. It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area.
Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk, having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth a thousand ships.
“Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise. Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.