But now to return to the North Atlantic, the Eastham dunes, and the exchange of species I mentioned earlier in the chapter. As the smaller birds have flown south to their tropics, birds from the arctic north, following the same migrational impulse of the ebbing year, have moved south along the New England coast, and found in the open, deserted Cape a region which is to them a Florida. These birds are the arctic sea ducks, many of them big, heavy, powerful birds, all of them built to stand icy water and icy weather, all of them enclosed in a water-tight pack of feathers which is almost a kind of feather fur. These ducks belong to the subfamily Fuligulinæ, the people of the outermost waters, but there are still other arctic visitors, auks, murres, and even guillemots. The region which these birds prefer is the region south of Cape Cod, where the currents of warmer water swirl over the great south shoals. I have for neighbours the three varieties of “scoters,” or more familiarly and wrongly “coots,” the black-winged coot Oidemia americana, the white-winged coot Oidemia deglandi, the skunk coot, Oidemia perspicillata; I have scaups or blue-billed widgeons, Marila marila, dipper ducks, Charitonetta albeola, old squaws, Harelda hyemalis, eiders, Somateria dresseri, king eiders, Somateria spectabilis, and others. It is possible that, before the coming of the white man, the number of these winter outer-sea birds in the Cape Cod region exceeded that of the summer birds, but now, alas! the shotgun and the killer had their fun, the winter peoples have been wasted away, and some even exterminated. To-day, the summer birds outnumber their winter kin.
A new danger, moreover, now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible residue of crude oil, called by refiners “slop,” remains in stills after oil distillation, and this is pumped into southbound tankers and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large areas, and the birds alight in it and get it on their feathers. They inevitably die. Just how they perish is still something of a question. Some die of cold, for the gluey oil so mats and swabs the thick arctic feathering that creases open through it to the skin above the vitals; others die of hunger as well. Captain George Nickerson of Nauset tells me that he saw an oil-covered eider trying to dive for food off Monomoy, and that the bird was unable to plunge. I am glad to be able to write that the situation is better than it was. Five years ago, the shores of Monomoy peninsula were strewn with hundreds, even thousands, of dead sea fowl, for the tankers pumped out slop as they were passing the shoals—into the very waters, indeed, on which the birds have lived since time began! To-day oil is more the chance fate of the unfortunate individual. But let us hope that all such pollution will presently end.
My beach is empty, but not the ocean beyond. Between the coast guard station and Nauset Light, a “raft” of skunk coots is spending the winter. Patches of white on the forehead and the hind neck of the glossy black head of the male are responsible for this local name. The birds sit in the ocean, just seaward of the surf—the coast guardsmen say there is a shallow close by and shellfish—and the whole raft rises and falls unconcernedly as the swells roll under it. Sometimes a bird will dive through the oncoming ridge of a breaker and emerge casually on the other side; sometimes a bird will stand up in the water, flap its wings, and settle down again unconcernedly. There are perhaps thirty birds in this flock. In Thoreau’s time, these rafts of coots formed a flock which was practically continuous the whole length of the outer Cape, but to-day such rafts, though not at all rare, are but occasional.
Standing at the door of my house, I watch these winter birds pass and repass, flying well offshore. Now a company of a hundred or more old squaws pass, now a tribe of one of the scoter folk; now a pair of eiders come to rest in the ocean directly in front of the Fo’castle.
These birds practically never come ashore during the winter. They eat, sleep, live, and meet together at sea. When you see a sea duck on the beach, you can be sure something is the matter with him, so runs a saying of the Cape which I had from Captain Nickerson. The only way in which I can observe these winter folk is by using a good glass or by catching a specimen who has got into some kind of trouble and taken refuge on the beach. All these creatures are at a great disadvantage when ashore, and have a world of difficulty trying to launch themselves into the air; they make unwieldy jump after jump, the auks being practically unable to rise at all upon their wings. It was thrilling to walk the beach, and catch sight of a bird sitting solitary on the sands. What might it be? What had led it ashore? Could I possibly catch it and give it a careful looking over? The keynote of my strategy lay in the attempt to prevent the birds from getting back into the water, so between them and the surf I would rush—for the birds would begin to move down the slope to the surf the instant they saw or heard or felt me—and I soon learned that a brisk countercharge was worth all the ruse and the patient stalking in the world. Then began a furious game of tag, the alarmed bird skittering all over the beach, being gradually driven by me toward the dunes, till I manœuvred him into the angle between the beach and the sandy wall.
My first prisoners were three unhappy little auks, Alle alle, who had dipped themselves in oil somewhere on their way down from the arctic—odd little browny-black and white birds about the size of a pigeon, who stood up on queer little auk feet, faced me, and beat little bent wings with a penguin look to them; indeed, the bird has much of an Adelie penguin air. On the Cape, these auks are known as “pine knots”—a term said to be derived from the creature’s tough compactness—or as “dovekies.” They have always been “aukies” to me. At the Fo’castle I gave them a generous corner floored with newspaper and walled in with boards and a chair. I tried to clean off what I could of the oil; I gave them what I could find of sea victuals, but all in vain; they would not eat, and I let them go just as soon as I saw that I could not possibly help them and that Nature had best deal with the problem in her own way.
Razor-billed Auk
When they stood up almost perpendicularly and tried to walk about on their little legs set far aft—they are pygopodes—it was much as if an acrobat, standing on his head, were trying to patter about, using the length between his elbow and his finger tips as feet. These little birds used both wings and feet when trying to escape me on the beach. They ran and rowed the sand with their wings; the verb gives the precise motion. Moreover, what had taken place was beautifully marked upon the tabula rasa of the sand—little webbed feet running in a close chain, wing tips nicking the sand once in each stroke. Coming south from their distant arctic, these little auks do not fly above the ocean as do the more advanced birds; they “skitter” along just over the surface of the waves and keep well out to sea, even well out of sight of land.
One aukie I caught at night. I was on the beach walking north to meet the man coming south from Nauset, and, as I flashed my searchlight to see who the surfman might be, I saw an aukie coming toward me, fluttering along the very edge of surf, all sticky and a-glisten with fuel oil. Strange little fragment of life on the edge of that mysterious immensity! I picked him up; he struggled and then kept still, and I carried him back to the Fo’castle. The bird was small enough to be carried in one hand, and as I held him, his duck feet rested on my palm and his head and neck emerged from the fork between my thumb and index finger. At the Fo’castle he opened his beak, “chattered” with it (there is no word for that motion without sound), transformed his short neck into a surprisingly long one, and looked at me with a kind of “all is well but anything may be expected” expression in his eyes. Every now and then he rather solemnly winked, showing the delicate tan-coloured feathering on his lid. I put him in a corner by himself, and when I went to bed he had given up trying to pick himself free of the oil with his pointed, sparrowy bill, and was standing in his corner of shadow, facing the angle of the walls, for all the world like a small boy who has been naughty at school. The next morning I let him go at his own insistent request.