6 April (167 days on island)
Another week done. We are now closing in on the last month and a half here. What is left is at once a lot of time and none at all. I try to enjoy every day as much as I can, to be present, to feel, to remember, to learn.
This week’s entry will be a slightly shorter one than usual. It’s not that I don’t have much to say, but instead that my heart is heavy and my mind preoccupied. I do not have the same emotional energy as I normally would to write out a long entry. But I didn’t want to break my tradition of writing something on the Sunday and keeping you all informed.
We treated 55 acres this week. Again, this is the first week of the new rotation, so we go through large areas like the runway quickly, which add many acres to our treatment tally. Tlell, Jacob, Nadia and I really got through the GRAs this week and on one day even went through five of them. We are the little engines that could. We found lots more Cassytha patches with the lob dying back, and I got some allergic reactions on my arms and neck. Some other jobs accomplished this week include Jacob digging a new outdoor lua pit; Tlell and I painting the milk-room; and Nadia and Ryan reorganising the nursery. We had a few moments this week where the wind sort-of left us in peace: Tuesday afternoon and yesterday on the lagoon side. Other than that it has been all up in our face (and ears and hoods and hair and eyes etc) and this morning as I write I can feel it buffeting the bunk-house. The albatross love the wind though, so it makes for good flying, and I like to watch them fly.
In island news, we had our first monk seal pup this past week. It is very cute, all dark and sleek, with big eyes. The grey-backed terns have begun to lay. The sooties haven’t seemed to stick to the runway yet, and still rise in great dark clouds of exclamation several times a day. Many tropicbird chicks are now in the bushes either alone or still under the parent. They scream at you almost as loudly as the parent despite being so much smaller, which I find remarkable. The Bonin chicks are starting to sound like adults too. The large chicks, although still down-covered, no longer only peep, but emit high-pitched record-scratching sounds like the adults do. The Christmas shearwaters were flying so beautifully in the morning sun yesterday, some coupling up in flight, and emitting their soft little hiccupping, cooing calls. Their deep brown/black feathers caught the sun and shone like bronze in the golden light, their eyes and bills glinting.
Many albatross chicks have died this past week or so, starting roughly last weekend. We had some pretty nasty winds and last week some heavy rains, so I wonder if this has something to do with it. I will be curious to see how the number of fledglings this year compare to those of previous years. But every single decayed carcass I see, and every necropsy I conduct, produces plastic. 100% of the time. Each one of these birds has plastic inside them, and I find that difficult to cope with. It is a huge problem, one that will require world-wide cooperation to fix, and one I cannot emotionally afford to internalise; but when you’re out here and you’re exposed to it, it can really start to eat away at you. Seeing all the plastic these birds ingest puts a question mark above each dead chick for me. I fully understand that in a world with no humans, thousands of albatross chicks would still die every year. That is simply the reality of wild population dynamics. However, how many of the deaths that I am seeing might directly be due to plastics? This period in a chick’s life is already highly stressful, with them enduring long fasts in the face of bad weather waiting for the parents to come back with food. It would not take much for an external factor, for which the chick is not evolutionarily adapted, to push the chick over the edge. They need all the energy they can get – how many of them for example would have made it, were it not for some plastic blockage, contaminants, or even internal puncture?
Dishy, the small, late-hatch mōlī (Laysan albatross) chick who lived behind our dish-washing station, died yesterday. I knew it was coming – I’d anxiously awaited the return of his parents for over a week, but they did not come. Who knows why he died – I did not have the heart to necropsy this one. I imagine he too was riddled with small plastics. The lateness of his hatching made me think his parents might have been first-time breeders and inexperienced. But the question mark of the human role in this death remains for me, like it remains for all the dead chicks I see. I watched Dishy die yesterday. When you watch someone die, your own days flash in front of you, and you wonder who would be with you, by your side, when death one day comes for you. We buried Dishy together as a crew last night. Burial is a human thing, and I know that chicks do not need to be buried. But it helps to process the pain of their passing, and for me, in the few chicks I bury, I see represented all the ones I see die, and gives me a chance to send up an apology for the ones who died as a result of human impacts.
The thing is, humans live so divorced from the natural rhythms of life, of natural selection, of death – we are not, any of us animals on earth, entitled to a long, healthy life. Humans are not special in that sense, though we tend to think that we are, and that with our hospitals and drugs we can cheat death and disease. Death is just another part of life, one that we all must take. But we – and by we, I mean humans along with all other animals on earth – should be entitled to living whatever length of life, a short or long one, free from the impacts of pollution, greed, and cruelty.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin