31.5°S, 159°E - by Keely Jobe
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
photo: Silke Stuckenbrock
There is an island floating in the Tasman Sea, a lush volcanic remnant cupped like a hand. Its reefs are riddled with fish. Its twin mountains, smug at the southern end, generate their own weather.
On the island, there is a burrow, three metres deep in sand. Its walls are lined with down. Its entrance sips the salty wind.
In the burrow is a bird, fluffed like a dandelion and still as stone. Fallen open like fruit. Gone to feather and bone.
In the centre of the bird, a message.
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“In the centre of the bird, a message: Bottle top golf tee balloon clip tube cap cable tie nurdle pen top strapping tape twist top lollipop bread tag glow stick.”
*
Jenn’s heading back to Lord Howe Island. We meet at the pub for a drink before she goes. She’s been doing this same trip for years, from Hobart to Lord Howe and back again. A seasonal migration. She seems a little fidgety, as if that tiny island in the Tasman Sea is already calling her back.
Jenn’s been studying flesh-footed shearwaters on the island since 2007. Lord Howe is home to the largest breeding colony in Eastern Australia and is a hub for marine biologists. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the world who knows more about these strange grey seabirds than Jenn Lavers.
I’ve read some of her research. It’s pretty grim stuff. The birds experienced an overall population drop of 50% in a decade. In 2005, 79% of shearwater chicks were found with plastics in their stomach. Ten years later it was 100%. And then, in the last few years, an alarming new trend found in birds returning from migration – a journey that takes them past the old Fukushima power plant and the radioactive waters surrounding it. Limp quills and feathers bleached white; nuclear shock carried home in the flesh perhaps, or metal contamination from a surge in ocean plastics. The phenomenon is too new to say for sure.
I’ve seen footage too. Jenn feeding a tube down a bird’s throat while a student holds its torso firm. Jenn pumping water into the bird till it throws up a gutful of plastic, then repeating the process. Jenn’s hands deftly holding a scalpel before slicing into a dead bird’s stomach. Her fingers flipping the membranous organ inside out, the dump of colour, the monstrous tally – over 250 pieces of plastic in a single bird, each shape distinctly familiar. I can still hear the scrape and clack as she lifts the tiny gut from the cavity, a sound like Scrabble letters in a drawstring bag. She has performed this task hundreds of times and the results get steadily worse. I don’t know how she has the strength to keep going, or the faith to return.
‘Tell me about shearwaters,’ I say.
She abandons her cider and merrily launches into a list of facts, polished with wear.
‘When a shearwater fledgling takes its first flight, it doesn’t touch land again for five years. It will feed on the wing, sleep on the wing, and when it returns to the island years later, it will come back to the burrow it was born in. Shearwaters breed for life. If one of the pair dies, the remaining bird will find another partner, but their breeding success will be reduced for a few years while they get to know each other. When a shearwater pair returns to breed, they always come back to the same burrow and one will arrive early to give it a sweep out. They are consummate seabirds, the picture of grace until they come to land where they don’t so much waddle as endlessly fall forward.’
“She thinks of the birds as kin, that’s clear, and her adoration is contagious.”
I have guzzled my beer. She thinks of the birds as kin, that’s clear, and her adoration is contagious. I return with a fresh drink and tell Jenn about my recent gloomy thought – that fledglings must be dying in the burrow having starved with stomachs full of plastic. That some must never see the world beyond, and when their bodies rot away, a little heap of plastic must remain deep in the sand. That those small plastic heaps must be peppered across the island, buried in nests we can’t see.
Jenn agrees this scenario is quite likely. The adult birds feed their young by regurgitating food from the sea, but more and more, that meal includes plastics. The fledgling gets into strife because it hasn’t yet developed the ability to vomit – it’s designed to horde any nutrients it gets – and when plastic becomes a part of the diet, it accumulates in the gut until the young bird can’t eat anymore. It wastes away with a full tummy.
‘I can’t say for sure though because we don’t have access to the burrows. They’re made of sand. We can’t ethically risk the chance of a collapse because of what the burrow is to these birds – a home, a history, a reason to return. All we can do is watch for signs.’
‘Have you seen any?’
‘We’re finding plastics at the entrance to burrows. When the adults return to breed, it’s possible they’re sweeping out the remains of fledglings who didn’t make it, and the plastic that killed them too. A clean slate to try again.’
I leave the pub thinking that Jenn’s devotion might be learned from the birds. Perhaps her return is as compulsive, her yearning as tidal, her grief as galvanising. Perhaps her leaving is a ribbon unravelling and one day the burrow winds her back. I think I might never know that kind of faith.
“Perhaps her return is as compulsive, her yearning as tidal, her grief as galvanising. Perhaps her leaving is a ribbon unravelling and one day the burrow winds her back. I think I might never know that kind of faith.”
*
There is a bird in a burrow on an island in the Tasman Sea. Its dandelion fluff has turned to barb and vane. The bird is nourished with slips of fish and squid, knicker nuts ground to a paste and the smoothing slick of mucus. Such meaty things sing to the bird of what’s to come – an endless looping song, vast as the foraging grounds.
As the bird waits, the wind runs into the burrow, reeking of the world outside. The wind speaks to the bird in stanzas of kelp and brine.
You won’t be here long. You are not for land. Soon your wings will open, a snap-locked span of feathered force. Soon you will join the roving circuit.
The bird shivers.
How will I know the way?
You will know. The course is set.
Will I be alone?
Never.
The bird shivers again, knowing it wants that frictionless motion, knowing it will return to this place.
*
Months later, Jenn uploads a few images from Lord Howe to social media. It’s been a bad season, worse than the team expected. I see a malnourished shearwater collapsed in the sand, one long drag-line trailing behind. Too weak to fly, it appears to have crawled to a stop. I see the obsidian eyes of a shearwater peering into a tray of its own sick. There are too many plastic pieces to count. I see Jenn standing with a group of bird carcasses. Her back is to the ocean, the shearwaters are fanned out in front. There’s something ceremonial about the image – the bodies are laid with care – but there’s no avoiding the violence. The birds are knocked over like bowling pins. It’s a strike.
Jenn looks shell-shocked. I send her a message. Are you okay? She replies with a crying emoji.
photo: Paul Sharp
Later she tells me they found forty-one birds that morning. Forty-one birds on a single beach. It was a record. The season had been a disaster. Some mornings there were too many carcasses to bring back to the lab. Some mornings, when their backpacks and bike baskets were filled with dead and dying shearwaters, they had no choice but to stuff the remaining birds in their sleeves. Then that morning, when they’d completed the count that toppled all others, Jenn felt compelled to do something – make some gesture, acknowledge in some way what she was witnessing. She needed to attend.
Under the light of a headlamp, she lay the birds out in the dark, heads to the sea, tails to the shore, breasts to the sky, wings tucked at their sides. The photographers, Silke and Paul, found it too painful to watch. They couldn’t understand why something so awful needed to be documented. They kept asking Jenn what she was doing. She said she didn’t know.
When the sun came up, they took the photo. Then they dug two big holes in the sand and buried the birds.
‘What did you do then?’ I ask Jenn.
‘I went home and boiled the kettle. I got on with my day like nothing had happened.’
photo: Paul Sharp
I know what’s at stake for Jenn because I’ve seen her hold a bird like a burrow does. I’ve watched her press a fledgling to her shoulder like she was burping a baby, watched her smooth the restless wings and thrumming pulse. That grip must be so familiar now she’d carry the feel of it in her hands.
“I know what’s at stake for Jenn because I’ve seen her hold a bird like a burrow does. I’ve watched her press a fledgling to her shoulder like she was burping a baby, watched her smooth the restless wings and thrumming pulse. That grip must be so familiar now she’d carry the feel of it in her hands.”
*
A bird waits in the dawn light, crazy with thoughts of hover and flight. It has dragged itself to the burrow’s edge but can go no further. Limbs too heavy. Throat pinched dry. Below, the sea shifts and groans, endlessly waking. The smell is irresistible.
The bird shuffles forward, belly thick, clicking the new language.
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