The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Why bother?

Wildlife rescue professionals responding to the Deepwater Horizon spill have been working very hard for months now. Oddly, they're kind of touchy when you mention people who've recently been saying that it shouldn't be done at all. They're mostly polite, but they talk faster and start peer reviewing right on the spot.

The contrarians say oiled birds almost all die, even when they've been washed. They cite some studies with sad results. They say that washing them isn't in their best interest. That they will suffer painful deaths after they're released. That euthanasia is the humane course. That there are better ways to spend money to help birds than on doomed victims. That it's not worth it.

It's worth it to those saved.

Oiled birds don't know rescuers are trying to save them, so they don't cooperate, yet they share a goal with the rescuers. They're struggling to live.

Animals don't want to suffer, but they'd rather suffer than die.

Sometimes it's worth it to animal species and populations. Sometimes it's not. (But since when have people cared only about species and populations? We're obsessed with individuals.)

As for those studies? People who say that most washed birds die anyway are picking the grimmest studies they can find. If they picked other studies, they could find much happier results. In some studies, many birds survive.

Unfortunately, studies are hard to compare. The rate of survivorship depends on a lot of things. What kind of birds were oiled, what kind of oil it was, how quickly they were brought for washing, how cold they got beforehand. Different rescue groups have different standards for triage and for release, which makes their results hard to compare.

It would also be relevant to know what survivorship was of birds that were never oiled and washed. In some species, most birds – especially first-year birds – don't make it from one year to the next even when life is great.

Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) are one of the species being washed in large numbers in the Gulf, and they're tough types.

Another tough customer that's suffered from oil spills is the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) also called the Black-footed penguin for its dark feet, or the jackass penguin for its poignant brays.

The 2000 sinking of the MV Treasure drenched their nesting islands in oil. 19,500 penguins were washed and released. They've survived well and gone on to breed almost as successfully as non-oiled birds. (There had been a previous big spill there in 1994, when the Apollo Sea went down in the same area.)

One great thing about penguins is that they can wear flipper bands you can read at a distance, and they stand around while you get the binoculars on them. So it's relatively easy to get penguin data.

While the birds are tough, the species was officially Vulnerable in 2000, and is now Endangered. This is probably because they can't get enough fish to eat, probably because commercial fisheries near the islands are catching so many.

Here's the thing: using that good penguin data, it's been calculated that this imperiled population is 19% bigger than it would have been if oiled penguins hadn't been washed and released.

Worth it.
 

Another story.

In 1996, after the Anitra oil spill in Delaware, some endangered piping plovers (Charadrius melodus) were among the oiled birds.


Rescuers from Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research trapped and washed the oily plovers. Because it was nesting season, they released them earlier than they ordinarily would. One of the birds was a female, whose mate hadn't been oiled. He sat tight on the eggs while she was missing.

When she reappeared, skinny, clean, and ready to take her *&^%$& turn, he jumped up and raced off for his first decent meal in two days. They settled back into their nesting routine, but some *&*^*$# came along and ate their eggs. She laid some more. Some #$%&^* came along and ate those. She laid some more. A late storm buried the nest in sand. The next morning the plovers dug up the eggs and resumed sitting on them. One egg hatched. Plover chick!

Worth it.

 

Dinosaur sins

It was morning. My spouse was dressing for the day. I was reading in bed, working through Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. “This is an interesting bar graph,” I said. “It shows a bunch of major living groups through time, and the only group that doesn't make it into the present is the dinosaurs.”

“Oh?” said my spouse, not really seeming fascinated.

“And I've been reading all these books about religion, and so the idea naturally occurs to me that if the dinosaurs were the only group wiped out, it must be because God punished them. I wonder if anyone has advanced that idea.”

“Uh huh,” my spouse said.

“The dinosaurs must have really sinned to be singled out that way,” I said.

“The dinosaurs were sluts!” my spouse shouted as he rifled through his sock drawer. “Sluts and gonifs!"

I don't know where that came from. I had no idea that he harbored resentment about the moral character of dinosaurs.

 

I don't want anyone to think I take Miller's graph too seriously. He calls it “elementary.” But I've been thinking off and on, when I have something else to do, about the sins of the dinosaurs. Some Biblical literalists say the dinosaurs drowned because they weren't taken onto Noah's ark. Well, why weren't they? Not because they were too big, for there were many small dinosaurs – they weren't saved.

It can't be that they were unclean, because Genesis has Noah loading both clean and unclean animals.

So some dinosaur did something awful? For a second, I thought maybe it was a dinosaur who suggested frugivory to Eve, but then I remembered that Genesis not only fingers the snake, but says the snake is punished by having to crawl on its belly thereafter. All the dinosaurs I know about had legs.

A dinosaur did something even worse than abetting the Fall? Not necessarily. Peoples in holy writ are often obliterated for things that I, personally, might pass over with a glare and a sniff. Maybe something trivial got the dinosaurs killed, whether you believe it was done by barring them from the Ark, or by something mechanistic like having an asteroid flung at them.

Maybe a pteranodon laughed at a prophet's bald head, or a stegosaurus danced naked on an altar, or a velociraptor worshipped a golden calf. Could have been anything, really. Being a slut or gonif might be enough.

But let's think about the biology. What sins are dinosaurs likely to have committed? Let's look at birds, their closest living relatives. What really annoying things do birds do? Often they make a lot of noise. I've heard many complaints about trees full of grackles or starlings shrieking their heads off. A lot of self-proclaimed tree-huggers become enraged when describing a mockingbird singing at night when said nature lovers are trying to sleep, damn it. One dark secret about penguins is how incredibly noisy their colonies are. (The other is how badly those colonies stink.)

Maybe dinosaurs were noisy. There were a lot of them, and some were huge. Imagine a bunch of forty-ton tubas having an argument with a colony of ten thousand furious piccolos. (Maybe a few swooping pterosaurs – imagine angry fiddles with 11-meter wingspans.)

Fans of the Gilgamesh epic will know that the Babylonians also wrote of a Great Flood. It happened because humans, who had become numerous, were noisy and made so much racket that Enlil, greatest of the gods, couldn't sleep. Plagues didn't shut them up. Droughts didn't shut them up. So, flood.

Thus the possibility that the dinosaurs roared and chirped and screamed so incessantly that they were destroyed by divine wrath has theological precedent as well as biological plausibility.

Sluts, gonifs, loudmouths, who knows what got the dinosaurs in trouble? Whatever it was, they clearly threw amazing parties.

You wouldn't find them sitting around reading about reconciling evolution and religion.

Sometimes I really miss the dinosaurs.