Bodies

I was on the project for two seasons. Almost.

The first year I was stationed in the desert. Way out in the bottom rock-land of Oregon high country, forty miles from the California and Nevada borders, almost an hour to the nearest town. Hot, dusty, high red rocks all around, shallow lakes; plateaus and grand vistas. There were a couple buildings at a crossroads that served as the town center: a post office and a general store/ bar/ restaurant where saddles and old-timey farm equipment hung. Unironically.

The University brought in two European PhDs who had previously never been to the United States, one girl from California, and me. A whole lot of bird knowledge in the collective group, but inexplicably, not one amongst possessing the skills we actually needed for the job, namely: how to drive large trucks, trailer boats, drive boats, fix and maintain boats, blind construction, safely handle guns. And, how to shoot birds.

We did receive a lot of training on these things, but this is different than execution of course, and we bumbled around, four academics barely managing to not maim ourselves and receiving an awful lot of disdain from the locals, which seemed pretty fair at the time. Beyond not knowing how to do anything crucial for the job (once we got the boat stuck and two cowboys on horses graciously hooked up the boat, dallied the ropes around the horns of their saddles and pulled us out), the ranchers also did not receive us kindly because they were no longer able to take water out of the nearby shallow lake where we were working. Because it housed a threatened fish. And then the government spent a cool couple million to build a floating island in the middle of the lake to lure in birds. Specifically, fish-eating birds.

We got up to some grand adventures that summer, thankfully, since the work itself was excruciatingly boring and easy. Also, heartbreaking, to watch seabird colonies eke out a slow and painful demise after convincing them to stay instead of continuing on to the ocean.

By the end of the season there were two Caspian Tern chicks left, Bandy Legs and Pippin, the others having been eaten by the dozens of girls that circled the colony. Naming was strongly discouraged, but we were rooting hard for these two. We had a permit to kill any gulls that threatened to eat the precious tern chicks, up to two hundred. None of us had ever shot a gun before, so this was hard and scary work. We sat sweating and nervous in the blind, hazy on even safe handling procedure. If we injured a bird, we would not be able to fetch it which upped the stakes, and of course there was the danger of hitting a tern on accident. Or anything else.

But, committed to the cause, if we stretched our imaginations and put aside questions of purpose and futility, of resources, of the ethics not yet deeply considered, if we leaned into our desire to help the planet, to save fish, to be of service, we could get behind these actions. We could do what it took. We did.

The colony failed. 

The next season I moved up. Instead of handfuls of birds on tiny floating islands, Astoria held tens of thousands of both the Caspian Terns which we had been studying the year before, a whimsical and charismatic white bird, and Double-Crested Cormorants, black, long-necked: much-maligned and demonized. The Columbia had been dredged for shipping for decades, piling up sand which had turned into big islands, perfect for these two ground-nesting birds. Which may have not been an issue in itself, but they were both eating a lot of already-threatened salmon species.

Instead of four biologists, in Astoria there were over a dozen of us squished three-or-four to a bedroom. Multiple levels of leads, higher-ups, and graduate students. Instead of one rifle in the back of a truck, there were hired contractors to do the shooting, multiple boats, trucks, radios, gear. For weeks before the birds arrived we built blinds and the tunnels that we would need to crawl through on colony once the birds arrived. The tunnels were built with little windows, to be able to reach out and grab a cormorant by the neck; also handy for oiling their eggs.

It's weird to see piles of dead bird bodies. Weird, I mean, if you think you are there to save things. This was not what I had signed up for. Necks lolling, wings spread at odd angles, feathers askew. Blood. Blood. Blood. At that point, the 'lethal take' was just for stomach sampling to see how much salmon they were actually consuming. Still, it was alarming. This was science for the good? Weren't these birds doing what every other creature is doing, just trying to stay alive, in a situation that we humans had almost completely manifested?

Though, if the prior season had been any indication, if I had asked a few more questions, if I had considered the source, I would have realized that this was exactly what I had signed up for: killing birds.

Still, I could not have anticipated some of the others that would be there too. I would have assumed, I did assume, that we were all the same, grimly doing what we thought was best. Instead, it was as if the island unleashed a deep hidden desire in some of these men, a blood lust, a cruelty.

I started to see the hole I had put myself in, and I desperately hunted around for some logic or action that could justify, ameliorate, shift. One day we sit by heaps of beautiful dead white birds, mangled, their stomachs having already been sliced open and sampled. I ask the lead if we can harvest and eat some of these birds. Eyeballing the piles I have no idea how to process a bird like this for food and truly no desire to try, but am convinced that by eating them, as even hunters do, or even just trying, I/ we could partially offset this massacre, honor their sacrifice. He scoffs. "Haven't you heard of the Migratory Bird Act? Of course we can't eat them. They are protected."

Earlier that day a male biologist had picked up a dead bird, spreading its wings like a puppet and pretending to make it talk. 

Earlier that week, a bird had suffocated and died in a tied-up pillowcase outside in the rain while waiting to be banded.

It doesn't take long until my body starts to do what it always does when it detects a dark path: a slow but unstoppable shut down. My limbs get heavy and I become a truly shitty employee. Lethargic, ineffectual, but still technically doing the job just enough so as to not get fired. And anyway, they would have been hard-pressed to fire me in the middle of the field season, with all of those millions of dollars to spend.

One day, a bad weather day, they are shooting cormorants from a crazily rocking boat and thus messing them up pretty bad. But because of this specific window of time, in which they had to get this specific data, they carried on instead of waiting for calmer waters. I was tasked with finding and collecting two dead cormorants.

It was cold outside but bright, the sea a powerful roiling force. I was wearing a purple sweater and a turquoise headband. I find the birds, so big, I carry them the way they taught us to, by their necks. They are heavy and still-warm, their sinewy throat muscles moving underneath my hands. I wade out to the boat and hand them up.

When I quit a few days later, my crew leader said he already knew, from that moment, and the sadness in my eyes. I wonder if he saw the hatred too. For him, for myself, for a system where this was not only legal but funded.

Soul-tormented, I wrote a long letter to the University ethics committee outlining what I had seen on the island and why I was leaving. I was afraid of what these people could do to my career, and so I wanted to submit anonymously, but they would not allow it without my name attached. The letter was dismissed.

Not long after this, one of the strongest voices in opposition to the project, a wildlife rehabilitator named Sharnelle, somehow found me after I left and asked me to speak out about what I had witnessed. I was still scared, and I was also ready to put it behind me. I refused.

I would learn later that they went ahead with the decision to shoot and kill thousands of cormorants and oil thousands of eggs. Sharnelle died not long after that. The birds would all abandon the island, but they now instead nest under the massive bridge connecting Oregon and Washington, likely eating more salmon upriver than before. Sometimes confused fledglings will end up on the bridge with the cars.

Somewhat serendipitously, years later I hear about a woman who was also on the project and wrote a book about it called Cormorant. I find her. She was on the government side of things, which I find incredible, unbelievable. We talk about the fucked-up-ness of the project, about regret, about grief. It destroyed her life for a while and it derailed mine, and it was a heart-balm to speak to someone who understands the wish of having done more, done it differently, to have been braver; fought harder, left earlier, been able to shine a light into all that darkness, take the fuckers down; helped Sharnelle.

But here we are, trying to make amends the best way we know how.

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