"Opinionatedly Yours"
#4: September 3, 1997
Last Day at the Office
By Barry Kent MacKay

Four times a year, for a couple of weeks per visit, I am at API's Sacramento office. As I type these words, I'm starting to get ready for my next trip; the September visit.

Flashback to the last time I was there, a Friday in late June. On Sunday I'd fly out, heading home. But it was Friday and I was in the office, feeling just a touch blue because I'd soon be leaving my friends in California. I was also feeling happy because I'd soon be home. Into these conflicting feelings came an urgent call of the kind our office would normally relay to the appropriate agency. But this time we handled the call. That's because I was in the office and the appropriate agency might be less appropriate than me, if by "appropriate" we mean doing the best thing under the circumstances to resolve the concern.

The concern was a "hawk," obviously in some form of distress, found in a schoolyard. What to do? As it happens I have a long background of involvement in wild bird rescue and rehabilitation. For years my mother and I answered all such calls coming into the local humane society. I do have a large measure of experience in how to rescue, handle and help birds. I was therefore called by one of our staff and asked if I wanted to respond. We don't normally do "hands-on" work at API ... at least that is what we say, but of course we all do it from time to time. It is better to resolve the problem that puts animals in distress in the first place than to be involved with individual rescues while the cause of the problem remains, but that does not mean that you don't help individual animals, as we are doing with our orphan bear cub rehabilitation efforts (see Mainstream Fall 1997, 1997 Bulletin #1, 1997 Bulletin #4, and 1997 Bulletin #5).

And so Andrea Ball, working at API for the summer, and I headed out to the schoolground. Here we found a most delightfully caring group of teachers and their very young charges, eager for help and appreciative of our prompt response. With a ragtag group of very urban urchins in tow, Andrea and I were led to the back of the building, where, huddled in the deep recesses of a small, prickly shrub growing against the wall of the building, was an American Kestrel.

Let's pause for a very brief course in ornithology. The American Kestrel is a falcon, a member of the avian family, Falconidae (pronounce it: fal-KON-ih-dee). Of the 7 species living in North America, the American Kestrel is the smallest and most common. Also the most brightly colored. This bird was a male, with blue gray wings, a cream-colored breast, rather bright brick-red back with black barring and a tail boldly patterned in red black and white. His eyes were large and dark. Black streaks extended down beneath each eye, and behind each eye. Those streaks are the normal markings and to me they always impart a rather sad look to the bird, as though he were crying. They are really dashing little birds, a bit larger than a jay, with long, pointed wings and superior flying ability.

Add to those tear-streak marks the fact that the bird had a bit of dried blood on the top of his head, and was scrunched into dense foliage (you would normally see him sitting on a wire or telephone pole, or hovering over a field ... one of the most common sights throughout temperate North America) and I could only be grateful that I was there to help. More to make them feel important than in any expectation that they would be of assistance I asked the kids to form a semi-circle around the stricken bird. I couldn't be sure how energetic the little falcon was and I didn't want him scrambling out across the playing field, and possibly into more serious danger, when I went to catch him. A wall of little kids might help prevent that. Then I crouched, raised my left hand above him to give him something to look at, and made a quick and very practiced grab with my other hand. I had him. He struggled and sought to bite me with his sharply hooked beak or sink his eight, needle-tipped talons into my hand. That was a good sign; he was strong. He was well fleshed, not emaciated, but still there was the fact that he was not flying away like any normally healthy kestrel would have done.

Now there was a brief tug of conflicting values. I could see the dried blood on the top of the bird's head, and surmised from his behavior that he had a concussion, probably from hitting a window while pursuing prey. The wings and legs were not broken, and although stressed, the bird was alert and in good condition overall. I've seen thousands of similar birds and I thought the prognosis for this one was excellent. But the bird needed to be put in a quiet place and taken for help. He needed to be where experienced people could care for him. However, the children all wanted to see him.

Andrea and I happen to believe that it's important for children's natural empathy for individuals of their own and other species to be encouraged, so there was a brief "show and tell" while they experienced their very first close encounter with a real live American Kestrel, up close and personal. A compromise ... ten minutes taken off the time it would take to get the kestrel into a more comfortable and healing situation in order to promote further interest in such beings among these fascinated youngsters.

Then it was back to the office. A staffer was recruited to leave early to deliver the bird to the local raptor rehabilitation center, where the necessary care could be given.

A happy story, although I'm not sure how it fits in with classic animal rights philosophy, as the survival of the kestrel, a predator, depends upon the sacrifice of his prey. One kestrel, in his or her lifetime, will eat many thousands of voles, mice, small birds, grasshoppers and other large insects, small lizards, and other animals.

Soon after the kestrel was on his way to the raptor rehabilitation center, it was time to say my good-byes and head back to the motel where I was staying, some miles from the office. I was driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway, nearing my turnoff, when I saw some cars parked on the side of the road ahead of me. There was also a tow truck. No ambulance; no police; no sign of an accident. But there were four young women, teenagers probably, out in front of one of the parked cars. One of them was holding shopping bag open at ground level while the other three were herding a duck into the bag.

And here I am, a bird expert with lots of experience with many kinds of injured birds, including ducks. I stopped, parked on the shoulder, and walked back. The young women came over to me anxious to receive help. I peeked into the bag. There was a female Wood Duck. Her babies were scattered on the road, squashed. "They killed them all," said one of the women, distraught. "Just drove right over them." I could see a couple of squashed bits of meat and down ... recently a beautiful little bright-eyed creature all full of perky innocence on the way to maturity.

Allow me another brief ornithological lesson. The Wood Duck is a beautifully colored native duck who nests in holes in trees. The young hatch more or less at the same time. They stay in the nest chamber briefly after hatching, then leave. As the nest hole may be high in a tree, it means that the tiny ducklings must leap to the ground. They fall, sometimes a long way straight down, other times careening off branches, without damage. Their tough skins and soft skeletons allow them to bounce, with the force of impact distributed evenly through the body, causing no harm. Then mother Wood Duck leads her fluffy brood to a marsh or wetland. That is obviously what this poor female duck had attempted to do during the 5 o'clock traffic rush on Interstate 80, at the north end of Sacramento, near the Cal Expo turnoff to my motel.

Her young perished, what of the rescued duck? Alas, her beak was shoved out of configuration. She was bleeding from her mouth. It was a cursory glance, but long experience indicated to me that her prognosis was not good. Disastrous was more like it.

What to do? I was not a local. I have not lived nor grown up in the area. Back home I would have been able to give crisp, precise directions; phone numbers, or been able to convince the women that I knew what I was doing and to give me the Wood Duck because I would be able to do what was best for her. But I couldn't take the bird. I had no equipment to work with back at my motel, and no special knowledge of who was who in the bird rescue world of Sacramento. I had to get on an airplane very soon and taking a live wild bird across an international border was out of the question. I didn't have a number to call. I stammered and made generalized comments about there being a local bird rehabilitation center, although I couldn't recall where it was even though I had been there.

The women understandably were disappointed that I couldn't suddenly resolve the problem and with hopeful optimism turned to rush back to the tow truck, who apparently had parked because he'd seen the two cars by the road. He had a cell phone or maybe a two-way radio. I didn't. They would "phone someone." I had doubts that they would easily find the right person if that bird were to live, and I felt terrible guilt that I couldn't come up with a solution. I had little doubt that either the bird would suffer, badly injured and rendered unable to eat, or would be euthanized. Possibly the latter would be the most humane solution, but it's not something I'd want to decide without a consultation with a good avian veterinarian.

Later, back in my motel room, as I was packing, I realized I had been driving back from the office with all my personal office materials, including my phone book. If only I had remembered I could have given out phone numbers of API staff members and friends involved in animal work in the area. The knowledge that I had failed to do depressed me then and depresses me now. That had been no time for my absent-mindedness to manifest itself.

Flash forward to the present, or recent past, actually. It was Wednesday, August 20th, late in the afternoon. A phone call came from a friend who works as a volunteer at the Toronto Humane Society's wildlife department, one that I had set up many years ago when I was alarmed at how little proper attention incoming wildlife received. I was told that a Greater Shearwater had been brought in earlier in the day. They needed help.

There's nothing odd about me being called to help with a problem about birds; it happens from time to time. But there's something you should know about Greater Shearwaters: they aren't found in Ontario. Of course from time to time birds show up in Ontario, or in any other part of the world, who are not supposed to be found there. Such birds are called "accidentals." But we had never had a Greater Shearwater in Ontario, so far as anyone knows.

To fully appreciate just how unusual such a thing is, we need another ornithological lesson. I'll try to keep it brief. Shearwaters belong to an order of birds called the Procellariiformes (pronounce it: pro-sell-ah-rye-ih-FOR-meez), although as that's a bit of a mouthful, we sometimes call them the tube-nosed swimmers, instead. The group consists of petrels, storm-petrels, fulmars, shearwaters, prions, and albatrosses ... all ocean birds who spend most of their lives at sea, far from the sight of land. In fact they are clumsy and helpless on land and come to shore only to nest, either on remote oceanic islands or, rarely, isolated headlands.

The Greater Shearwater is famous for the fact that virtually the entire population nests on two uninhabited islands in the Tristan de Cunha archipelago, in the remote South Atlantic, part way between the southern tip of Africa and the southern tip of South America. There have been a very few also found nesting, recently, in remote sections of the Falkland Islands. The birds start nesting in the southern spring, October, in crevices and holes in the rocks in large colonies. But in the winter, June, July, August, as we in the northern hemisphere are having summer, the Greater Shearwater is in the North Atlantic, a true transequatorial migrant. By August the birds start to head home, indirectly, by flying east, toward Europe. There they swing south, always keeping well offshore, and head down the coast of Africa, before swinging out across the trackless expanses of stormy oceans of the South Atlantic, to find those small, distant islands. Experiments with another species of shearwater, the Manx Shearwater, have confirmed the obvious ... that these birds are incredibly adept navigators ... and added to our knowledge of them that they require the sun for orientation.

All Procellariiformes have an odd adaptation: small tubes on tops of their beaks that encase their nostrils, pointing them forward, hence the name "tube-nosed swimmers." Last spring a surprising number of Black-capped Petrels, tube-nosed swimmers who would normally be out over the Gulf stream of the Carolinas at that time of year, showed up in Lake Erie. It was an extremely rare event, but there was no mystery there ... the birds had been blown off course by a freakishly fierce hurricane. So far as could be determined, they all died, their bodies washing up on shore, but not before some birders went to look at them, to add them to their "lists." It was a chance in a lifetime to add the species to the provincial list. I didn't go, fearing that the birds would die, and so I could hardly take pleasure from their plight.

I've seen lots of Greater Shearwaters, in the summer, in the waters of our east coast. But no one had ever before seen one in Ontario. From the description I couldn't think what else it could be. A volunteer offered to drive the bird up to me at my home, in Markham, north of Toronto. The shearwater arrived in sad shape. No wonder the bird had been found flightless ... he couldn't fly; his muscles were simply too wasted for flight to be possible. He weighed 390 grams. His normal weight would be 715 to 950 grams. He had been able to bite with enough force to draw blood when he first arrived at the society, but as the wildlife technician said, that was his last burst of energy. He was so feeble that he couldn't puncture my skin in spite of the strong hook at the tip of his beak. Even if we had a handy ocean nearby, he was beyond saving, and even if through some miracle his life were saved, his survival in the wild would depend on navigational skills he clearly lacked. There had been no storm to account for his unique presence. A shearwater in captivity is unthinkable.

I once wrote of the first time I saw Greater Shearwaters, as we set sail across the Bay of Fundy from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia:

Apart from the gulls and cormorants of Saint John harbor, the first seabirds I saw were Greater Shearwaters. With dark caps, small white rump patches and dirty smudges on their white bellies, they were quite distinctive ... Just as the books of my childhood said they would do, the shearwaters glided on stiff wings between the waves. At times, as they banked, it looked as though the lower wing tip was scratching the water's surface. Their mastery of flight was profound as they vanished in wave troughs and reappeared, engaged in a complex dance with the sea.

We could, of course, make an heroic effort with intravenous feeding, suspending the bird in a hammock with his feet dangling because his toes and webs, adapted to air and water, were too fragile to bear his weight. We could try to find bits of squid and herring and maybe some crab and force it into him in some sort of puree, only it seemed fairly obvious that he would not live to morning, when the stores opened. He was dying and he was suffering. In the end we knew we really could not save him and any effort to do so would be for our benefit, to make us feel good that we had "done all we could." And the bird would still suffer. We could not save him but we could very quickly and cleanly end his suffering. And a short time before midnight, our choices all talked out, that is what I did.

The next day I phoned the department of ornithology of the Royal Ontario Museum, depository of provincial ornithological lore and history, and reported the rarity to a surprised curator. The specimen would have to be preserved for posterity, and I asked if I could do that for the museum. Agreed. I wanted to do this to learn from this bird all I could of structure and anatomy, to take anatomical photographs of spread wings and details of feet and beak, to assure myself that the body would be treated with dignity ... something that mattered not to the shearwater but for some reason mattered to me ... and with a view that one day I'd paint a picture of a Greater Shearwater in his memory ... not as I saw him ... the last of his kind I've seen to date ... but soaring through the heaving seas amid shifting banks of fog and rain, far from land, as I first saw his kind so many years ago, when I stood cold, wet, and thrilled out on the deck of the ferry boat on its way across the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, from St. John to Digby.

Now let's consider these three birds from another perspective.

The American Kestrel made it. And because he did, an unknown number of other animals will die. Of course all animals, like all of us, die anyway, but the timing and means vary. Possibly because of predators like the kestrel the dying is not as bad as it could otherwise be. In the evolution of prey and predators and their complex interrelationships the predators tend to select those members of prey species most easily caught, and those most easily caught, in turn, tend to be the weak and the sick. Left without predation, some species become so abundant that they overwhelm their environments and mass dieoffs occur. This happens.

We'll leave that thought for a moment ... the kestrel atop the food chain helping to keep populations of smaller animals in balance with the carrying capacity of their environments ... and move to the Wood Duck.

One pair of Wood Ducks lays from 6 to 15 eggs, but usually the number is 8 to 10. Let's say 9 on average. Not all hatch, maybe half, and so that's how many ducklings may have died on the interstate as I left API's office for the last time that visit, say 4 or 5. They may not all have been ground to pulp by the indifferent passing of motorists, but those who survived the tires would have suffered more, hiding in grasses that would be no real refuge without the care of the female. In Wood Ducks the female, alone, cares for the babies. Any who made it off the highway would have been left to die of hunger, dehydration of exposure, or been prey to maybe a Garter Snake, weasel, Red-tailed Hawk ... or possibly a kestrel.

You find Wood Ducks all over Sacramento. Visit the Sacramento zoo and you'll see wild Wood Ducks, as beautiful as any captive duck on display flying in and out of the so-called "Lake Victoria" exhibit, near the entrance, oblivious to the fact that they aren't geographically "correct." Check the arboretum at U.C. Davis, and you'll probably find Wood Ducks at the right time of year.

You'll find them in most of temperate North America, where, at one time, they were rendered quite rare by overhunting. In the 1930s it was feared that this bird, whose beauty was no protection, would become extinct. But remember I said, above, that Wood Ducks nest in holes in trees? That meant there was a two-pronged way to save the Wood Duck. Bag limits were reduced or eliminated, and artificial nest boxes large enough to accommodate the Wood Ducks, were erected in huge numbers, near bodies of water, well away from such hazards as freeways.

The results of these efforts were spectacular, and the Wood Duck rebounded. In 1976 it was estimated that the population was 1,300,000. It is now one of the most heavily hunted of ducks in North America, second only to the mallard, but without an impact in its population. That's because the species lays, on average, 9 eggs, give or take a few. That means that, as a rough average, at the end of the season, if all went perfectly, where you started out with two ducks, drake and hen, you'd add say three or four ducklings and wind up with five or six birds. But as there only needs to be two ducks to produce the 9 eggs, roughly 3 or 4 young, on average, the following year, an average of 3 or 4 won't make it.

All that is needed is for enough to survive to assure that there are birds available to breed next year, and among their ranks are the number above that ... the number above the "replacement" number to account for the ones dying before reaching flying age, or by attrition. They, the ones above that number, are the ones wildlife managers consider "surplus" when they allocate a significant fraction of that number to be shot by duck hunters each fall. The fact that the Wood Duck (and others) thrive proves their point for them.

It's not quite that simple, but effectively, even with such high pre-maturity mortality, the birds produce more young than are "needed" precisely because there is a naturally high duckling mortality rate, whatever the causes. What is the determining factor in how many Wood Ducks there are is, again put simply, a two part consideration. One, the number that are killed. Think of the "surplus" as "interest" on "capital." If human hunters kill too many, interests is wiped out and shotguns start eating into capital. That's what led to the near extinction of the species. The other factor is how many homes are there for Wood Ducks. Homes include marshlands and wetlands, especially not near such hazards as freeways, plus nesting sites.

The young women who rescued the Wood Duck wouldn't care about any of that, nor did I. Our concern was of the moment, not for the species, but for the individual. There may be a couple of million Wood Ducks, give or take a few hundred thousand, but there are five and a half billion people. I hope we all still care for the individual human, even though loss of any one of us does not in the slightest effect our population size ... indeed, unlike Wood Ducks, American Kestrels or Greater Shearwaters, we are continuing to increase well beyond the "carrying capacity" of our environment, which is why so many dozens of us, mostly children, died of starvation while you were reading this, on average, that is. I simplify. There's still enough food to go around, to feed every man, women and child on earth, but distribution is not equal. Like a Greater Shearwater in Lake Ontario, too many of us are where there is not enough to eat.

But I digress. Let's look at kestrels, just briefly. They are not hunted. They are more or less protected throughout their range by state or provincial laws. People who do that sort of thing estimate that in North America there are probably 1,200,000 breeding pairs ... or 2,400,000 birds, give or take one or a few tens of thousands, here or there. They lay 4 to 6 eggs, usually 4. Occasionally they are double-brooded. Nest success ranges from about 67 to 89% in hatching, and of the birds that hatch, about 72 to 89% of the babies successfully fledge. There are lots of kestrels, and food would be the main limiting factor in determining population size.

Now let's conclude by going back and look at a few bits of data and stray facts as they relate to the Greater Shearwater. I think I can include with a little surprise for you, especially if you happen to be an animal rights advocate well aware of the mass destruction of wildlife.

It's been estimated that there are about 5,000,000 breeding pairs at one island, and about 600,000 to 3,000,000 at another, both in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, plus smaller populations at two other isolated islands, in the Falklands. Say 11 or 12 million birds, give or take a few million. No one can say for sure because the non-breeding birds, wheeling and skimming close to the oceans waves of vast areas of open sea adjacent to the nesting areas, can't be counted The species lays but one egg. The egg is incubated for 53 to 57 days, compared to about 30 days for the kestrel, and about 28 to 32 days for the Wood Duck. The chick stays in the nest about 105 days. Compare that to 30 days for the kestrel. The Wood Ducks leave the nest in about a day, but they still need their mother's care for close to two months.

Survival of the millions of Greater Shearwater chicks depends on there being sufficient small fish, crabs, squid and small crustaceans, which are caught at sea and then regurgitated into the maws of the insatiable young. Chicks grow very fat. Fat is oil. Oil is valuable.

Here's the surprise, or it is to most animal protectionists I tell it to. Every year the people who live on the inhabited islands of Tristan da Cunha visit the uninhabited islands where the Greater Shearwaters live, and take thousands of eggs. No matter. There are plenty of "surplus" shearwaters to move in and replace the missing eggs with their own. Then, later, at least one of the islands is visited again, and about 50,000 baby Greater Shearwaters are killed, to be used for meat and oil. Fifty thousand! Cute, helpless, baby birds. No animal rights organization complains, no one cares; few people even know, and perhaps it does not matter even if we forget about the individual's own "right" to live and are only concerned about survival of the species. How much it matters even in that narrowed context is guesswork. No one knows how many can be killed without endangering the species.

But never mind the species, what of the individual? Oh how we anguished over that one shearwater who came ashore at the beach bordering Toronto's southern end. How sorry I was about the Wood Duck whose skull was smashed on a California freeway, her chicks flattened on the blacktop. Never mind the tens of thousands of Wood Ducks shot by hunters each fall; never mind the shearwaters trapped in fish nets, or who die slow deaths in the uncounted thousands when mired in the unreported oil slicks that so befoul both the North and the South Atlantic. There is no monitoring, and no one there to notice or care when a shearwater falls into the sea. It is such mass destruction that perhaps should concern us.

It is not for us to tell the people in remote Tristan da Cunha, far from the cornucopia of prepared food in shops and stores and restaurants of the cities most of us live in or near, not to take their food from the sea all around them, including those beautiful seabirds called Greater Shearwaters. At best we can find common ground only in not wanting to destroy "the resource." Vegetarianism isn't an option nor could it be without buying into a technological infrastructure that is, itself, a major cause of mass destruction of so much of the world's wildlife and habitat. I worry, for example, about ozone depletion ... already reaching very high levels in the skies over the South Atlantic. How sensitive are the tiny organisms near the sea's surface to the increased solar radiation? They are at the base of a food chain that includes all the fish, the whales, the dolphins and porpoises, the sea lions and fur seals and seals and penguins and petrels and shearwaters and humans. Is there a tolerance that could be passed without us knowing? Could a cascade of mass dieoffs be triggered?

The experts say yes.

And still I grieve for that one lonely, displaced Greater Shearwater found floundering on the shore of Lake Ontario, at the foot of the city. How I wish I had been able to do the right thing for that Wood Duck. And maybe, when I go back to Sacramento in a few days, one of the kestrels I see flying across the road as I drive to the office on my way to work, will be the one Andrea and I helped to save.