The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Fine man, fine bird

Rich Stallcup died December 15, 2012. He was a kind, wonderful guy and a brilliant naturalist. Once he told me a story about a bristle-thighed curlew, and the people who admired it. Before the story I want to say what a freakily great bird the bristle-thighed curlew is.

 

First, the bristle thighed curlew (Numenius tahitiensis) spends the summer in Alaska and the winter in Hawaii. Or Tahiti or other tropical Pacific islands. Nice work if you can get it. Maybe not that easy to get, since there are only about 7,000 bristle-thighed curlews in the world.

 

That might be tundra with dwarf willow, so I'm guessing this bird is in Alaska

 

 

They're hard to see. The Hawaiian birds aren't hanging around Oahu, they're out on uninhabited islands. And the Alaskan birds are off in low-lying, mosquito-infested tundra. If you do see one, you might mistake it for the very similar whimbrel. Hearing its distinctive call might be your best bet for identifying it. Birdwatchers, especially birders who are trying to see every breeding bird species in the US, or in North America, long for sightings of these rare curlews, but most have never seen one.

 

Bristle-thighed Curlews on a Pacific island beach. Not Waikiki, Midway.

 

This curlew is a large brown moth-patterned shorebird with a long sickle bill. From a distance they just look brown. You can't see the complicated plumage patterns or the bristled thighs. I don't know why they have bristled thighs. I haven't run across any speculations. If you held a gun to my head and made me guess (part of a really sick scenario), I'd say it might have something to do with courtship, and showing another bristle-thighed curlew of the appealing sex that you too are a bristle-thighed curlew and you'd like to get to know them better. (Please put the gun down now.)

 

They eat almost anything. Flowers, bugs, berries, land crabs, invertebrates, and the eggs of other birds. Here's a startling thing: they use tools to break open large eggs. The long sickle bills aren't the best tool for smashing things, so they grab rocks or pieces of coral and slam them down on the egg.

 

They're the only shorebirds known to use tools, a habit that has been beautifully documented in a paper by Jeffrey S. Marks and C. Scott Hall, published in the 1992 Condor.

 

Marks and Hall observed bristle-thigheds on Tern Island and Laysan Island, in the far northwestern part of the Hawaiian Archipelago. When the curlews get a food item too big to swallow, like a largish ghost crab, they slam it against the ground or a rock until it breaks into delightful bite-sized morsels. Adults haven't been seen doing this in Alaska, but baby curlews there will slam bits of moss, lichen, or plastic flagging (presumably put up by curlew biologists trying to get their bearings).

 

When the young curlews arrive in the islands for the first time, having traveled 2,500 miles from their birthplace, they are in a slammin' mood, and will slam feathers, shells, or bits of seaweed. I presume they soon learn to focus on more edible things to slam.

 

From "Tool Use by Bristle-Thighed Curlews Feeding on Albatross Eggs," Marks, Jeffrey S. & Hall, C. Scott. Condor 94: 1032-1034. 1992. Used with kind permission of the Cooper Ornithological Society. Is this not the greatest bird? Note bristled thighs.

But sometimes a curlew comes across an abandoned albatross egg. It's too big to pick up and slam, and the shell is too thick for a curlew to puncture with its bill. That's when the tool use happens. Marks and Hall say it's probably an extension of slamming behavior, and I agree. But I still think it's clever. 

 

So: smart rare mysterious long-distance travelers. A bird I'd love to see.

* 

At one time Rich Stallcup led 30-day Alaskan birding tours for the company Wings, tours for the fanatical and obsessed. On his fifth tour his group – 20 devoted birders – was exhausted from days of camping. They flew to St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs, arriving at 9 p.m. There were three hours of daylight left in the long Alaskan summer day, but word on the birder grapevine was that no notable rare birds were about. No vagrant Siberian birds had been spotted. The seabird nesting colonies – the two species of kittiwakes, three auklets, two murres, two puffins – would still be there in the morning.

Rich assembled the weary group in the lobby of the King Eider Hotel, the island's only hostelry, run by Aleuts. He went over the next day's plan. Since there were no rarities around, he said they could all go to bed early, and sleep in.

 After five hours sleep, Rich found himself wide awake. He wandered down to the beach. “I'm just admiring the Kittlitz's Murrelets,” he told me, when he heard a bird call he'd never heard before. (He whistled this for me – Sibley gives the flight call as “teeoip.”) “I go, 'Ho, shit. What's that?'” Teeoip! 

“Straight in from Hawaii, here comes the Bristle-thighed Curlew, one of the most wanted and rare birds in America. It flies right in front of me – teeoip! – real low. I'm just quivering because it's so great.” The curlew flies away, low and to the west, whistling teeoip “as if it wanted to land,” leaving Rich on the beach, in awe and dread, wondering “What am I gonna say at breakfast?” 

The trip leader is not supposed to sneak off and see the good birds himself after telling everyone to sleep in. And the Bristle-thighed Curlew is an unspeakably good bird. 

Rich spent the day trying to atone. If only they could find the curlew again! He dragged the group all over the island, even when they whimpered about missing lunch. (They must have despaired of seeing the curlew by then, to complain about such a petty thing. And maybe they had been too agitated to eat their breakfasts. Still.) 

Late in the afternoon, at Stony Point Lake, the curlew sprang up. It landed where everyone could see it and drink in its exotic beauty, marvel at its thighs. They returned to the King Eider in triumph, rejoicing mightily. 

“That evening we went over in a bus. We brought most of the Aleuts, the seal-killers and the mechanics. Everybody wanted to see this wonderful thing.” That's not something that usually happens on birding trips. That Rich's excitement was so infectious, and that he was so intent on sharing the experience, tells you a lot about him.

This photo of Rich Stallcup appears in a lobby display at the headquarters of PRBO Conservation Science (www.prbo.org). The building is dedicated to Rich, who co-founded PRBO in the 1960s and served as Naturalist and Bird-A-Thon Committee chairperson until his death in December 2012. Photo by Janet Wessel.

At the lake the curlew was bathing in company with a Eurasian Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus phaeopus), a bird ordinarily notable in itself. Eventually the Whimbrel wanted to leave. “The Whimbrel jumps out of the water and starts screaming. Quiquiquiquiqui! The curlew gets out. Quiquiquiquiqui! The whimbrel's so anxious, it jumps up into flight, and finally the curlew jumps up too, and they tower up to a thousand feet – with oldsquaws chittering, and Black-legged Kittiwakes – kitti-weeik! Kitti-weeik! – and they fly off. People were on the ground weeping.”

 

Teeoip!

 

Teeoip, Rich.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We apologize to the birds

I volunteer at a wildlife rescue center, one which specializes in aquatic birds. Sometimes volunteers and staff apologize to the birds.

 

What's that you have in your hand? Oh, a camera? Are you sure? It can't take temperatures, can it?

 

 

A Red-throated Loon is brought in and has an intake exam, in which we try to figure out what is wrong with the bird. What made this wild creature so ill or hurt that it fell into human hands? What are its problems? Are they things we can fix?

 

We handle it, pull its legs out and study its feet, extend its wings and fold them up again, stare into its desperate face with our huge monster faces. We draw blood from one foot. We take its temperature, and it flinches as the thermometer goes into its cloaca. “I know. I'm sorry,” murmurs the person inserting the thermometer.

Adult Red-throated Loon, suspicious of photographer. Chicks in background show a fish what a loon can do when it's not being pestered.

 

 

We'll learn more about his condition when we get the results from centrifuging his blood. We can already tell the bird is skinny and cold. His temperature, which would be a fever for a human, is low for a bird. We keep an eye on his temperature, and end up moving him into a warm intensive care room.

 

These are wild birds, and our practice is not to talk to them, and to minimize talking around them. We work quietly. But occasionally apologies slip out.

 

You don't put any tubes down my throat and I won't put any beaks in your eye. Deal?

A lot of Western Grebes have been brought in lately. An indignant grebe has just been examined, and is being returned to a big pool where he can swim around with other grebes. He's wrapped in a towel. Right before we put him back in the pool, we'll give him some medicine, and a feeding through a tube, because he's still too thin, and doesn't really have the hang of eating dead fish out of the basket on the side of the pool. He doesn't want the tube down his throat, and we don't blame him. He struggles. “Calm down,” the other volunteer tells him. As he jerks his head, she says quietly, “I don't like it either. I apologize.”

A rude gesture? I don't know why you would assume that.

 

 

Some of the people who work here have pet birds at home. Those birds understand human tones of voice. Not these wild ones. Soothing voices don't soothe these guys. In their natural lives, they're never around terrestrial mammals. They don't have much intuition about our noises.

 

So why do we apologize to them? It's not to help them. They don't understand the words, or the tone.

 

We say we're sorry, and we go right on doing it. We're sorry in the sense that we don't want to hurt and frighten them. We regret the necessity, but we do think it's necessary. Taking the loon's temperature gives us information that's likely to save its life. Tube-feeding the grebe will keep it alive until it's well enough to eat on its own. They'll both go free when they're healthy enough to survive.

 

The little sorries just slip out. Maybe we're apologizing for our own sakes, to stay aware of where we are on the long slick slope of our concern for them. On one end of the slope we would take over their lives, make them into pets or livestock or exhibits. Unwild. On the other end we'd treat wild animals as wholly other, wholly responsible for their own welfare – we'd let them die, or at best, “put them out of their misery.”

 

One reason we don't is that wild creatures no longer live in a world that humans haven't affected drastically. We've changed their habitats: we've shrunk, depleted, invaded, and tainted those places. Humans have taken away some of the resources wild animals use to support themselves. This wildlife rescue center came to be, and specializes in aquatic birds, because of oil spills.

 

So we've placed ourselves somewhere in the middle, neither disclaiming responsibility nor trying to manage them like unruly pets. We work at not going too far toward either extreme. Maybe saying sorry helps us keep that balance.

 

The loon told me about you. Sicko.

Here's a Red-necked Grebe, with wounds on its feet. For these birds, foot injuries are dangerous. Like bedsores, they can rapidly turn ugly, grow, spread infection through the body's system, and kill. The birds need to have decent feet before we let them go.

 

 

At night, in winter storms, some birds try to land on rain-slick surfaces that look like water to them – roads, roofs, or pavement. They may break bones or tear up their feet. Maybe that happened to this grebe. Its feet are starting to heal, and to help the process along we have to debride the wounds. That means someone has to take (sterilized) retractors and pick dead tissue out of the site. Sometimes it hurts the bird.

 

The small grebe twitches, tries to jerk its foot away. Softly, the caregiver says, “I know. Sorry, buddy.”

 

They love their Halloween costumes so much I didn't have the heart to make them change. They're warrior ninja grebes and I have to warn you: I have NO CONTROL over them.

 

 

 

Note: This post is the first ever to be cross-posted on SorryWatch and The Nature of the Beast.