Crow Games and Storm Petrel Dreams: How Working as an Ecologist Made Me a Better Fiction Writer
Author Stacy Carlson shares how working as an ecologist on an island loaded with birds made her a better fiction writer.
The day was windy but not stormy, so I figured the crows would be out. Still wearing my Grunden’s bibs and Xtra Tuffs from a morning of field work, I took my peanut butter and jelly sandwich to a spot in the lee of the island’s highest point, where I’d be protected from the ocean spray coming off the Pacific.
In a nearby Sitka spruce, a group of six crows discussed the wind conditions. Or that’s what it seemed like they were talking about. Semi-sheltered by tufts of thickly needled branches, the crows vocalized in a calm, continuous stream of whistles, caws, clicks, and pops that sounded exactly like corks escaping bottlenecks. I’d been living and working for two months on Saint Lazaria Island, a 65-acre basalt outcropping at the mouth of Sitka Sound, so I recognized a few of the crows by sight. Unusually, members of the two separate crow colonies (one for each forested end of the hourglass-shaped island) had come together for whatever was happening here.
The crows came to consensus and flew to the top of the spruce, one carrying something red in its beak. The birds arranged themselves in the highest branches, and the one with the red thing, which turned out to be a plastic twist-off container top, floated a ways above the tree. After hovering there for a beat, the crow dropped the container top. As the top fell, the crow dived after it, executing some impressive (and typically corvid) acrobatics along the way: half barrel-roll, closed-winged dive, and quick aerial pivots as it chased the top down the air column and scooped it back up before either of them hit the ground. The crow’s fellows cawed and whistled, and the one with the top took a victory lap around the tree before handing off the plastic prize to the next crow in line.
The game continued, each crow taking turns attempting what the first crow had gracefully accomplished, for my entire lunch hour. Some dropped and caught the top easily, and others missed every time. I laughed out loud, shook my head in wonder, rooted for the underdogs, and marveled at the camaraderie I felt with the crows. Finally, I had to go back to work, so I left them to their windy-day game, gathered my spotting scope, calipers, and wing ruler, and set off for another afternoon of biological field work.
What I witnessed that day strengthened my resolve as a biological technician. That summer, my work fed a long-term baseline study that measures population, productivity, diet, and habitat status for a sampling of the 430,000 nesting seabirds that call Saint Lazaria Island home. The point of the study is to gauge changes over time to the ecological health of the island’s birds, and through diet sampling, the ocean around them. The study’s findings influence habitat conservation efforts in the Alaska Marine National Wildlife Refuge (AMNWR). Even though crows aren’t among the birds studied, seeing their game, and later in the summer witnessing a full-blown crow funeral, reinforced how important it is to protect all the island’s birds and their wild, ample habitat.
The crow game, and many other bird behaviors I witnessed that summer, also strengthened my resolve as a fiction writer. Each one offered visceral, lived understanding that the workings of birds and wild landscapes contain not just data points, but a multitude of stories that feature individual characters, families, drama, and reciprocity with land and sea. Through the art of fiction, these stories become realms of compassion that can bring humans closer to our own wild natures. Through them, can we begin to live as part of, not apart from, the wild? My aim as a writer is to nudge in the direction of this unity, because I believe humans need untrammeled wilderness for our collective ecological and spiritual health, and we hold an urgent responsibility to protect that wilderness and its more-than-human inhabitants. Fiction is how I express this conviction.
Located 20 miles west of Sitka, Alaska, Saint Lazaria Island consists of two forested headlands connected by a rocky lowland. Designated a wilderness area, the island is too far offshore for land-based predators and boasts direct exposure to the open ocean and marine upwelling, which brings nutrients, which brings phytoplankton, which brings fish, birds, and the rest of the food web. The island is perfectly situated to be a seasonal avianopolis, and for the past 25 years and counting, ecologists and summer field technicians such as myself have counted, measured, and weighed the birds (and what they eat) as part of a joint study run by the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Department and AMNWR.
From May to September, day and night, I lived with birds and bird stories. Nests and eggs were everywhere: in underground burrows, on precarious ledges, in conventional tree nests. Different bird species dominated different regions of the island. The two crow colonies previously mentioned ruled the spruces; the island’s ocean-facing sea cliff was as crowded with common and thick-billed murres as New York’s Upper East Side; a lone peregrine falcon from the southern reaches of the island buzzed the murre colony at the same time every day, sending thousands of birds into the air, while the tufted puffin colony was more hidden, in burrows along the mainland side. Each time I crossed from one end of the island to the other, I risked attack by glaucous-winged gulls, whose sprawling colony was located at eye level on the columnar basalt, just high enough to avoid the tide, and included a large tidepool the gulls used as a nursery and guarded ferociously. Like any city, the island was loud, chaotic, and full of drama!
I observed moments of avian tenderness, the hatchings of new life, and many deaths by predation, some followed by mourning. Birds followed me around, watching me carefully, and I spent weeks on end watching them. Even though I worked in the sciences, and collecting data was the reason I was there, each day I felt more communion, kinship, and reverence with the birds.
Days were crowded with work and bird dynamics, but nights were something else entirely. Out of almost a half million birds nesting on the island, about 50% were fork-tailed and Leach’s storm petrels. This tiny, dovelike, tubenosed seabird spends days at sea, skimming krill, phytoplankton, and tiny fish off the ocean’s surface. What it doesn’t eat, it stores in a special pocket of its gut to take back to its chick, who is kept warm by the storm petrel’s mate in an underground burrow. The storm petrel returns by night, to avoid avian predators (peregrine falcons among others). Miraculously, this eight-inch-long bird finds its Saint Lazaria Island burrow among hundreds of thousands of others by an extraordinary sense of smell and...its mate’s unique call. Like in any good love story, the storm petrels know each other’s call by heart and use it as a compass to find their way home.
The sound of a hundred thousand storm petrels returning to their burrows is ethereal and otherworldly, a cooing, trilling symphony of homecoming and nourishment (just listen to this Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macauley Library recording and imagine it times 1,000).
A few times a week that summer, I would set an alarm for 2 a.m. and make my way in darkness to the same place where I watched the crow game. I’d settle into my sleeping bag under the stars and listen to the storm petrels sing their way home. Sometimes I fell asleep there and dreamt I was one of them. My time with the birds filled a creative wellspring within me that I still dip from, and rooted me more deeply in my writerly purpose to share stories that brim with our shared wild nature.
Check out Stacy Carlson's The Gyre here:
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