Auklets and islands
Since I’m still a newbie around here, I jumped at the opportunity to get to know one of my fellow LWONers a little better by interviewing Eric Wagner about his latest book Seabirds as Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, and the View from Destruction Island. I took my cue from Jennifer Holland’s great recent interview with Neil Shea about his new book Frostlines.
In his book, Eric weaves together science and stories centered on seabirds to explore the effects of climate change on the ecology of the North Pacific. Things are changing fast, and on a huge scale that is difficult to comprehend. But Eric skillfully gets at this big, dynamic picture by going deep on smaller pieces, including birds, people, fish, currents, islands, and lighthouses.
It’s a fun read, with lots of surprising and interesting elements. I was most intrigued by one of the central characters of the book, the rhinoceros auklet. The name comes from an actual horn these birds grow at the base of their beaks during the breeding season and then shed every year. They are smaller relatives of the puffin, and make the most ridiculously fun sounds.
Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length (and for the annoying number of questions I asked about auklets).
Betsy: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself. I take it you’re a biologist who also does some writing?
Eric: So right now I’m a research scientist at the University of Washington. I work in a place called The Center for Ecosystem Sentinels in the Department of Biology. I study penguins, and I work primarily down in Argentina. I’m head of a field program down there, a long term research project, which is where I did my PhD. So that’s my kind of professional calling card these days.
Writing wise, my undergrad work was in English, in literature, and so I’d originally gone to graduate school to do English. But then I’ve always worn two hats as somebody who likes books and somebody who likes birds. And I have always had a hard time choosing which one to do.
Betsy: And now you found a way not to choose.
Eric: Now I found a way to kind of do neither and both. Writing wise, I don’t know. I just always liked it.
Betsy: So, wait. You actually enjoy writing?
Eric: Well, I did. I don’t anymore.
Betsy: OK, now you’re a writer.
Eric: Yeah, now I’m a writer. Now it’s officially become a habit that I can’t break.
Betsy: And a miserable one at that.
Eric: And a miserable one at that. It’s amazing. And yet we keep coming back for more.
So this particular book actually started as an assignment for a small magazine called Earth Island Journal in 2017. That same year, I had run into two of the two fellows of the main trio that I wrote around in the book at a seabird meeting. I was just kind of like, “Hey, what are you up to?”
This book really is what got me back into science. Because I went with them to see the birds on Destruction Island, and just thought, this is so amazing. It’s so beautiful. And I just knew I had to get back here somehow. So at the end of the trip they were like, “Okay, see you.” And I asked, “When do you go out there next?” And they said, “In a couple of weeks.” So I said, “I’ll come, too!” And they were too nice to say no.
And then the next year, I told them I’d be interested in doing a book, but they also had like, 10 years of data they hadn’t analyzed. So I offered to look at the data, too. And I ended up writing a paper based on those data. And so it was sort of like, I wanted to write about it, but to write about it, I had to pretend to be a scientist.
So, it started as a book about auklets, and then it became kind of a book about this island, and where the island sat in these different systems, like social systems, or ecological systems, oceanographic regimes.
Betsy: You are clearly fascinated with rhinoceros auklets. What is it about them?
The first night I was out there, watching them all fly in, in the dark — it’s really amazing, just the sensation of like, Holy God, they just don’t stop. The island’s been quiet all day, and then suddenly, 10,000 auklets show up. So, because they come in at night, because they feel safe on the island, you can just sit in the middle of them and they will stare at you like, “What the hell is this thing?” But they won’t run, you know, they walk over you. They kind of look at you like, “I don’t like it. I just don’t like it.”
And there’s just something about that, that sense of— and this will sound corny — that they will let me be at peace. If I can just sit there and feel still, they will absorb you into their world. And as long as you don’t, you know, grab them — which sometimes I’m obliged to do, and then they take off, and they scratch and bite — but if you’re willing to just be quiet, they will go about their business. And that isn’t true with, like, puffins. The puffins all take off.
The second time I visited the island, [the scientists] stashed me on top of this bluff that was very, very hard to reach, and I was sitting there feeling sick at the thought of having to somehow get back down. But I was like, well, if this is going to be my last night on Earth, might as well soak it up. And the sun was sinking, and the auklets are flying around and there are puffins out there. And I was like…ooh… it was just too much, you know. And so that something so outwardly modest can lead to the too much is just something that’s very appealing to me when it comes to the auklets.
Betsy: Was there anything that really surprised you in the research and writing of this book?
Eric: The thing that surprised me is that the auklets were doing all right. One of the things that we hear a lot with sea birds is that they’re living on the edge all the time. And that’s true. And it’s not like the auklets aren’t. But it was interesting to see that each seabird has a strategy, a way of interacting with the ocean, of living with the ocean. I will eat this food. I will deliver food to my chicks in this way. I will nest in this place. I will move through time and space like this. And it was interesting to see that with the auklets, whatever sort of strategies they had seemed to be working out all right in this place, in this time, when a lot of other species were struggling.
Betsy: One thing I noticed in the book is that you spend time thinking about auklets, and some other birds, but usually auklets, as individuals, and wondering about this auklet. Is this auklet, one of the birds that we met before? Will I come across this auklet again? What is this auklet thinking? And I think that that’s something that people fail to do a lot of times.
Eric: One hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a takeaway: Animals are individuals. That sense of each auklet is busy being an auklet, doing auklet things, thinking a different thing from that other auklet.
Betsy: Is there an auklet that you remember? a specific auklet that comes to mind sometimes?
Eric: Yeah, so there was one time, I talk about it in the lighthouse chapter, where I’m out one night, and there’s a catwalk that goes over where we camp, and there’s this large pole that sticks out from it. And an Auklet flew into [the pole] and fell down at my feet. Every so often, will hear auklets kind of bounce off it, like you hear this kind of twang as they hit it. Most of them don’t, I think it must happen just a few times every year. But that one just must have run headlong into it and just, thunk, dropped. And it was flailing, and I was worried that it was grievously injured, and I’d be obliged to try to euthanize it, and I had no idea how I would do that.
But the auklet seemed to be okay, but it was clearly stunned. And so I just kind of took it, and it just let me pick it up, because it was stunned, because it was basically helpless. And we walked over to this area under some trees, and we just kind of sat close to the water. I thought, well, maybe with the sound of the waves coming in, it’ll know where to go when it revives. Because it can’t really run and take off, it’ll have to swim out. And so I wanted to be close to the water if it suddenly came to and was like, “What the hell?” and ran off.
But it just sat there next to me, kind of pressed up against my leg. And we were just sitting there, and I was talking to it. And all the other auklets are calling, and there’s this one auklet that’s sitting there. And I think it’s going to be okay, I can see it’s looking around, it’s moving. And we just sat together for about an hour. But it was getting really late, and we had to be up early. So, I kind of tucked it under a rock — there was a little recess, and I put it in there, and it just kind of settled in and sat.
The first thing I did the next morning was go check and see if it was there, if it was dead. If it had been caught by an eagle, you can really tell, because there’d be lots of little bits of it lying around. But it was gone. We don’t mark the birds out there, or band them in any way, so we don’t know individuals. We know they reuse burrows, so you have a sense of when you’re visiting them for a few years, you can be reasonably confident that you’re seeing the same auklet. But I think about that auklet a lot, of you know it just wants to be an auklet, but it ran into a pole. But it’s a tough bird, and it’ll be okay. At least, I think it’ll be okay. It seemed like it would be okay. That’s the auklet I think about.
Betsy: What’s the message you want readers to take away from the book?
Eric: I feel like the environmental movement and conservation right now is having a difficult relationship with the word hope. What we’re mostly seeing in sort of larger, sort of policy slash nonprofit, policy management circles, is that they lean too heavily into despair. And so they were too successful convincing us that the world was doomed. So now people have stopped caring, and they’re trying to turn it around by telling them, actually, it’s okay. There are these levers that we can work to make things better. You don’t have to stop caring. You can still have hope.
In the systems in which I work, if you’re looking at the data, there isn’t a ton of hope. I mean, things are declining. If something is doing well, it’s usually despite us, not because of us. Where a lot of large scale interventions occur, it’s usually because the species is functionally extinct, etc, etc. So that was a real struggle for me, because you’re supposed to end a book on a high note. And I was like, I can’t do that. That’s a lie. You know? You can end on a pretty note. You can end on a true note. And I think that’s it.
I feel like most of the things that I write, the thing that I want people to take away with is look. You know, it’s hard to look. I think we’re offered up many opportunities not to look.
More about auklets from Eric:
Why I Will Never Be a Good Photographer
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