This text is adapted from a talk given by BAX co-director Monte Merrick at the 2007 Effects of Oil on Wildlife Conference.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicate artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified andthe whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow beings of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
—Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
Using my own experiences as a rehabilitator, as an oil spill responder, and speaking of my own affections and aspirations, I will both plea that experience in day-to-day wildlife rehabilitation is indispensable if we are to provide the “best achievable care” during an oil spill, and that rehabilitators and our patients are served immeasurably by intimate and immediate witness of the various species for which we care in their autonomous and wild lives. I will start with a short glance at the idea of husbandry.
Husbandry, as I found in a brief Google search, may be defined any number of ways. From the perspective of raising livestock and crops, to the care and maintenance of captive animals, to general stewardship of resources, whether those are household finances or the system of natural parks. Generally, however, good husbandry means that what is in our care shall thrive. In wildlife rehabilitation, and specifically in a spill situation, husbandry can mean keeping alive three hundred baby Brown Pelicans through the process of getting them clean, or 20,000 African Penguins, or forty-three Mallards and Canada Geese.
Good husbandry needs no defense. A clean environment, an appropriate diet, and housing that acknowledges the needs of the species being housed, with as many of the inherent stressors of both injury and recovery as reduced as possible, are critical to the rehabilitation and eventual release of our patients. While not my point, I think it is very hard to overstate the importance of husbandry in this process. Good husbandry is nearly identical to good wildlife rehabilitation; we must always refine our methods, always be ready to accommodate our latest observations, and always look for new ways to increase the quality of the care that we provide during oil spills and other catastrophic events that impact wildlife so adversely.
Husbandry of wildlife brings its own questions, both of theory and practice—and we learn, of course, from our patients in these matters. We capture and we care for them because we believe that we must, though the theory remains unproved. We capture and we try to keep them alive when the ways of the world had agreed they were dead, as dead as the many more we never get to treat. To keep them alive until they are strong enough to wash, strong enough to decide that they will live after all—and it is always the hardest to lay to rest the victims whose fierce gaze is only strengthened by their ordeals though their bodies are utterly broken.
To rehabilitate an oiled bird is something we decide to do before we know how to do it. We learn on the job. Some of us started learning on the job twenty or even forty years ago, some of us are just beginning.
One of the joys of caring for injured wildlife is the kinship it has to those things that are very old and very common—cooking, child-rearing, hunting, art, craft. These human engagements, although varied, are similar in that all are simple and accessible and require a lifetime to master.
Any of us can follow the protocols that have been established through what is now decades of trial and error in the effort to rehabilitate oiled wildlife. We have a body of knowledge to lean on, documented and accessible. But who it is that can really make that body of knowledge come to life is the rehabilitator who brings a set of experiences, especially those coveted moments of inspiration, in which sudden and permanent learning occur.
Ask any rehabilitator and they will tell you that these moments happen daily. Each day we are schooled in what a sick or injured seabird needs.
Surely a Western Grebe and a Common Loon have similar lives and therefore quite similar needs— neither can tolerate a long period of time off their water home—keel and hock and foot lesions will develop quickly as we all know—but what does it mean when a Common Loon stops evading the net? Anyone who has treated a few loons will know at least this: it isn’t anything good.
What we learn as rehabilitators is incredibly specific—to the species, and to the individual. Think of a Common Loon, say, a big one, in breeding plumage, who nearly takes off your finger in one lunging bite and you know that this bird needs only a few days and out she’ll go—yet a gull might do the same, flapping his left wing while his right wing is shredded. Consider how all cormorants will bite but a Brant’s Cormorant who seems more aggressive than usual probably has a fish hook somewhere in his guts,—just as a Western Grebe who cries in his hospital pool all day should be radiographed or palpated for a GI impaction. These are the things you learn when you do this work daily. What any particular bird needs is learned, and in a manner that endures, from daily care for birds in general.
And there is no limit to the intricacies one might learn.
Each day hundreds if not thousands of people around the world are engaged in the work of nursing wildlife back to health. In the day to day care of the animals routinely injured or sickened by their contact with the machinery of humanity we learn to care for the large numbers of wildlife affected during a oil spill. And as the oceans deteriorate, and more species become threatened with decline and extinction, and saving as many individuals as we can becomes the world’s work, wildlife rehabilitators will be there, with skills and knowledge to help ensure that the victims of the altered environment are given the best possible care.
Like many rehabilitators, I came into this work with a desire to help wildlife which had been whetted by some reading. I was anxious to be of use, and hungry for something elemental, un-mediated—what we may call reality. I became a volunteer before I became a true student of natural history. I held baby house sparrows and fed them baby bird slurry long before I understood the life of a sparrow who is no orphan, if I ever have.
I became one of the relatively small number of people in this world who knows a Mallard’s tongue the way a child knows a cat’s. It was another year before I saw truly wild Mallards living in open seclusion, on a pond high in the Cascades, and began to understand how the integrity a sick duck presents in care is but a shadow of their true nature. If I hadn’t become a volunteer at a local wildlife rehabilitation center I may have not seen them at all.
Every Steller’s Jay I see today is the gift of the first cat-mauled jay whose bandage I changed—every nest I’ve searched for depends from the first baby bird basket I cleaned. And this is true for every species—even those who are with us each day—robins and crows, gulls and pigeons. An interest in animals, which is so common, leads us to wildlife rehabilitation and that leads us back to the literature of nature, which leads us to nature itself.
Natural history can lead us everywhere. The short history of the Common Murre that is found in the guide book will tell us where we might find him or her, and at what time of year, what sort of plumage we might expect either to wear—maybe how their voice might sound were we to try to transcribe the song into words. Another text may explain discovered facts about how alcids breed, and where they feed, and what any of us have seen—and so on, until at last we are driven from our house to the field, from the book to the sea.
And here I plead that we plunge into this sea. What is true about the world, about life, about our lives is manifest in the lives of our patients. We are in the unparalleled position of holding wildness in our hands and restoring its autonomy. We muck around in oil a foot deep, pulling dead loons, mergansers, otters, muskrats from its clutches—we see wings blasted at the shoulder and ravens shot from the skies by children who are ignorant of their meaning and their worth. What I am trying to say is that the reasons for getting out to where our patients are at home are manifold—we learn who they truly are—we restore our own sensibilities—we give our affections a chance to grow—we preserve what we love, we protect who we cherish. It is not enough to know that Northern Fulmars are pelagic birds who breed in the Arctic—although we may still provide good care for them with little more knowledge than this—but what kind of care might be possible after seeing these birds asleep on the slopes and the crests of thirty-foot waves in the Bering Sea.
The first Magnificent Frigatebird I ever saw was in a pet carrier retrieved from the airport. The aptly- named bird had been found far off course in British Columbia and sent by jet to the clinic where I had worked in Los Angeles. He was juvenile and very thin. I fed him fish and marveled at how merely spreading his nine feet span of wing sent him aloft. The next one I saw was on the Gulf of Mexico, floating far above me, far above the achingly blue sea. They seemed more like a dream. Now the first one’s effortless lift from the perch in the large aviary made beautiful sense. I began to understand what the patient longed to do. Now I would be a better husband to that bird.
We may teach or be taught to scatter a few leaves in the bottom of a Spotted Towhee’s cage—a good thing to do—but what happens when we see for the first time, and each time after, one of these creaking birds rattling around beneath a blackberry vine, kicking up dead alder leaves, searching for insects is immeasurable—a true sympathy begins. Now we can begin to imagine what will make the towhee more at ease while recuperating. Now we are more able to reduce stress.
A few years ago I had occasion to be on the central California coast—I camped overnight at Big Sur. The campground is primitive but accessible. As easy to use as a motel—but with the sky, the surf, the fog, the trees, the birds, the easy camaraderie of fellow campers, and a wood fire as the finest amenities and all so affordably priced—I paid seven dollars for the privilege.
On my way to the beach, a pair of Swainson’s Thrushes flew in circles through a thicket of young trees, singing their spiraling flute of song and calling their liquid drops in a bucket. The guide book calls them drab little birds but I prefer to think of them as subtle. It had been two years since I’d last heard this song, and I’d never before seen them with such clarity, unaided. Always they’d give just a glimpse here, a flash of tail there. But these two put on a show—calling their hearts out and chasing each other through the branches—a regular song and dance number.
Just past these trees the trail splits—one branch to the beach the other to the headlands. I took the headland trail. Out at its point, the ocean is perhaps seventy-five feet below. An orphaned piece of the land sits about one-hundred and fifty feet out. On this sea stack, facing the setting sun and the onshore wind, were thirty or so adult Western Gulls. Their plumage was pristine in the slanted light. They looked like a million bucks. Rats with wings, they are called—but out here they are truly home—a broken-off chip of continent, stained with generations of droppings—and they are beautiful and they are perfect, perfectly matched to this place in the sea and the sky.
And as I watched them cavort in the wind, pivot on a wingtip like the universe around Polaris, suddenly a gull chick, grey and speckled and until this moment neatly hid by his plumage and the rocks, stretched his young wings and stood facing the wind—the air sliding through his feathers not yet ready to bear him up—but he faced the wind and lifted his wings and his dream of flight was no pipe dream. He watched his parent swoop and dive and everything stretched out before this young bird. Just now becoming acquainted with the wind, it would be a lifelong romance and here was the very start.
I watched for another hour, eventually counting ten chicks, some maybe a week old others nearly ready to fledge. I wanted to stay to see them off. I wanted to put a small stove and rocking chair there on the edge of this bluff and make coffee and sit and do nothing more than see what happened next out on the rock of the gull. I looked about some more—on the same rock, in the cavities etched into its steep sides, were a handful of nesting Brant’s Cormorants, with a few nestlings. An osprey made several trips to sea and back, on each return a fish realizing its old dreams of flight clutched in its talons. Single file, fifteen Brown Pelicans brushed soundlessly past me as they banked toward the surf. Bank Swallows and Cliff Swallows were acrobats flying up and down the face of the bluff. Loosened feathers raced in the wind and it was and it is a bird’s world. The sun got fat and red and then sank.
Reluctantly I took my heavy body—solid and without feathers—ungainly and oafish—back down the trail to my sleeping bag.
Two days later I was back at the clinic where I work. We had a Western Gull who’d been covered in cooking oil. When I’d last seen him he had yet to be washed, but now he was clean and standing and looking much better. But still, against the birds I’d just seen teaching and learning to fly, I could see that his fierce and wild nature was dimmed. He stood in the aviary, facing east, eyes half closed, warming himself in the morning sun. He’d begun to preen his feathers back to shape; his body was responding to the medicine – soon he would begin to fly again, perching higher, nearer to the sky. Soon catching him would be possible only because he was captive.
This is the gift that all of our patients give to us—they bring us into a world that we forget is ours and teach us to see by its lights. People outside of this field often wonder if our patients ever express anything like gratitude. Of course they do not, I say. And besides, we are the ones who are indebted.
