Arctic Dreams, page 18
Tule Lake is not widely known in America, but the ducks and geese gather in huge aggregations on this refuge every fall, creating an impression of land in a state of health, of boundless life. On any given day a visitor might look upon a million birds here—pintail, lesser scaup, Barrow’s goldeneye, cinnamon teal, mallard, northern shoveler, redhead, and canvasback ducks; Great Basin and cackling varieties of Canada geese, white-fronted geese, Ross’s geese, lesser snow geese; and tundra swans. In open fields between the lakes and marshes where these waterfowl feed and rest are red-winged blackbirds and Savannah sparrows, Brewer’s sparrows, tree swallows, and meadowlarks. And lone avian hunters—marsh hawks, red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, the diminutive kestrel.
The Klamath Basin, containing four other national wildlife refuges in addition to Tule Lake, is one of the richest habitats for migratory waterfowl in North America. To the west of Tule Lake is another large, shallow lake called Lower Klamath Lake. To the east, out past the tule marshes, is a low escarpment where barn owls nest and the counting marks of a long-gone aboriginal people are still visible, incised in the rock. To the southwest, the incongruous remains of a Japanese internment camp from World War II. In agricultural fields to the north, east, and south, farmers grow malt barley and winter potatoes in dark volcanic soils.
The night I thought I heard rain and fell asleep again to the cries of snow geese, I also heard the sound of their night flying, a great hammering of the air overhead, a wild creaking of wings. These primitive sounds made the Klamath Basin seem oddly untenanted, the ancestral ground of animals, reclaimed by them each year. In a few days at the periphery of the flocks of geese, however, I did not feel like an interloper. I felt a calmness birds can bring to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the heavens, the pooling of time in the present, as if it were water.
There were 250,000 lesser snow geese at Tule Lake. At dawn I would find them floating on the water, close together in a raft three-quarters of a mile long and perhaps 500 yards wide. When a flock begins to rise from the surface of the water, the sound is like a storm squall arriving, a great racket of shaken sheets of corrugated tin. (If you try to separate the individual sounds in your head, they are like dry cotton towels snapping on a windblown clothesline.) Once airborne, they are dazzling on the wing. Flying against broken sunlight, the opaque whiteness of their bodies, a whiteness of water-polished shells, contrasts with grayer whites in their translucent wings and tail feathers. Up close they show the dense, impeccable whites of arctic fox. Against the bluish grays of a storm-laden sky, their whiteness has a surreal glow, a brilliance without shadow.
When they are feeding in the grain fields around Tule Lake, the geese come and go in flocks of five or ten thousand. Sometimes there are forty or fifty thousand in the air at once. They rise from the fields like smoke in great, swirling currents, rising higher and spreading wider in the sky than one’s field of vision can encompass. One fluid, recurved sweep of ten thousand of them passes through the spaces within another, counterflying flock; while beyond them lattice after lattice passes, like sliding Japanese walls, until in the whole sky you lose your depth of field and feel as though you are looking up from the floor of the ocean through shoals of fish.
What absorbs me in these birds, beyond their beautiful whiteness, their astounding numbers, the great vigor of their lives, is how adroitly each bird joins the larger flock or departs from it. And how each bird while it is a part of the flock seems part of something larger than itself. Another animal. Never did I see a single goose move to accommodate one that was landing, nor geese on the water ever disturbed by another taking off, no matter how closely bunched they seemed to be. I never saw two birds so much as brush wingtips in the air, though surely they must. They roll up into a headwind together in a seamless movement that brings thousands of them gently to the ground like falling leaves in but a few seconds. Their movements are endlessly attractive to the eye because of a tension they create between the extended parabolic lines of their flight and their abrupt but adroit movements, all of it in three dimensions.
And there is something else that draws you in. They come from the ends of the earth and find this small lake every year with unfailing accuracy. They arrive from breeding grounds on the northern edge of the continent in Canada, and from the river valleys of Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic. Their ancient corridors of migration, across Bering Strait and down the Pacific coast, down the east flank of the Rockies, are older than the nations they fly from. The lives of many animals are constrained by the schemes of men, but the determination in these lives, their traditional pattern of movement, are a calming reminder of a more fundamental order. The company of these birds in the field is guileless. It is easy to feel transcendent when camped among them.
Birds tug at the mind and heart with a strange intensity. Their ability to flock elegantly as the snow goose does, where individual birds turn into something larger, and their ability to navigate over great stretches of what is for us featureless space, are mysterious, sophisticated skills. Their flight, even a burst of sparrows across a city plaza, pleases us. In the Arctic, one can see birds in enormous numbers, and these feelings of awe and elation are enhanced. In spring in the Gulf of Anadyr, off the Russian coast, the surface of the water flashes silver with schools of Pacific herring, and flocks of puffins fly straight into the water after them, like a hail of gravel. They return with the herring to steep cliffs, where the broken shells of their offspring fall on gusts of wind into the sea by the thousands, like snow. On August 6, 1973, the ornithologist David Nettleship rounded Skruis Point on the north coast of Devon Island and came face to face with a “lost” breeding colony of black guillemots. It stretched southeast before him for 14 miles. On the Great Plain of the Koukdjuak on Baffin Island today, a traveler, crossing the rivers and wading through the ponds and braided streams that exhaust and finally defeat the predatory fox, will come on great windrows of feathers from molting geese, feathers that can be taken in handfuls and thrown up in the air to drift downward like chaff. From the cliffs of Digges Island and adjacent Cape Wolstenholme in Hudson Strait, 2 million thick-billed murres will swim away across the water, headed for their winter grounds on the Grand Banks.
Fall migration of lesser snow geese from nesting areas on Wrangel Island and in northern Canada to Tule Lake, California.
Such enormous concentrations of life in the Arctic are, as I have suggested, temporary and misleading. Between these arctic oases stretch hundreds of miles of coastal cliffs, marshes, and riverine valleys where no waterfowl, no seabird, nests. And the flocks of migratory geese and ducks come and go quickly, laying their eggs, molting, and getting their young into the air in five or six weeks. What one witnesses in the great breeding colonies is a kind of paradox. For a time the snow and ice disappear, allowing life to flourish and birds both to find food and retrieve it. Protected from terrestrial predators on their island refuges and on nesting grounds deep within flooded coastal plains, birds can molt all their flight feathers at once, without fearing the fact that this form of escape will be lost to them for a few weeks. And, for a while, food is plentiful enough to more than serve their daily needs; it provides the additional energy needed for the molt, and for a buildup of fat reserves for the southward journey.
For the birds, these fleeting weeks of advantage are crucial. If the weather is fair and their timing has been good, they arrive on their winter grounds with a strange, primal air of achievement. When the snow geese land at Tule Lake in October, it is not necessary in order to appreciate them to picture precisely the line and shading of those few faraway places where every one of them was born—Egg River on Banks Island, the mouth of the Anderson River in the Northwest Territories, the Tundovaya River Valley on Wrangel Island. Merely knowing that each one began its life, took first breath, on those intemperate arctic edges and that it alights here now for the first or fifth or tenth time is enough. Their success urges one to wonder at such a life, stretched out over so many thousands of miles, and moving on every four or five weeks, always moving on. Food and light running out behind in the fall, looming ahead in the spring.
I would watch the geese lift off the lake in the morning, spiral up white into the blue California sky and head for fields of two-row barley to feed, able only to wonder what this kind of nomadic life meant, how their lives fit in the flow of time and made clearer the extent of space between ground and sky, between here and the Far North. They flew beautifully each morning in the directions they intended, movements of desire, arabesques in the long sweep south from Tundovaya Valley and Egg River. At that hour of the day their lives seemed flush with yearning.
One is not long in the field before sensing that the scale of time and distance for most animals is different from one’s own. Their overall size, their methods of locomotion, the nature of the obstacles they face, the media they move through, and the length of a full life are all different. Formerly, because of the ready analogy with human migration and a tendency to think only on a human scale, biologists treated migratory behavior as a special event in the lives of animals. They stressed the great distances involved or remarkable feats of navigation. The practice today is not to differentiate so sharply between migration and other forms of animal (and plant) movement. The maple seed spiraling down toward the forest floor, the butterfly zigzagging across a summer meadow, and the arctic tern outward bound on its 12,000-mile fall journey are all after the same thing: an environment more conducive to their continued growth and survival. Further, scientists now understand animal movements in terms of navigational senses we are still unfamiliar with, such as an ability to detect an electromagnetic field or to use sound echoes or differences in air pressure as guides. In discussing large-scale migration like that of snow geese, biologists posit a “familiar area” for each animal and then speak of its “home range” within that area, which includes its winter and summer ranges, its breeding range, and any migratory corridors. The familiar area takes in the whole of the landscape an animal has any notion of, an understanding it gains largely through exploration of territory adjacent to its home range during adolescence. Intense adolescent exploration, as far as we know, is common to all animals. Science’s speculation is that such exploring ensures the survival of a group of animals by familiarizing them with alternatives to their home ranges, which they can turn to in an emergency.
A question that arises about the utilization of a home range is: how do animals find their way to portions of the home range they have never seen? And how do they know when going there would be beneficial? The answers to these questions still elude us, but the response to them is what we call migration, and we have some idea about how animals manage those journeys. Many animals, even primitive creatures like anemones, possess a spatial memory of some sort and use it to find their way in the world. Part of this memory is apparently genetically based, and part of it is learned during travel with parents and in exploring alone. We know animals use a considerable range of senses to navigate from one place to another, to locate themselves in space, and actually to learn an environment, but which senses in which combinations are used, and precisely what information is stored—so far we can only speculate.
The vision most of us have of migration is of movements on a large scale, of birds arriving on their wintering grounds, of spawning salmon moving upstream, or of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle trekking over the plains of East Africa. The movements of these latter animals coincide with a pattern of rainfall in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem; and their annual, roughly circular migration in the wake of the rains reveals a marvelous and intricate network of benefits to all the organisms involved—grazers, grasses, and predators. The timing of these events—the heading of grasses in seed, the dropping of manure, the arrival of the rains, the birth of the young—seems perfectly fortuitous, a melding of needs and satisfactions that caused those who first examined the events to speak of a divine plan.
The dependable arrival of swallows at the mission of San Juan Capistrano, the appearance of gray whales off the Oregon coast in March, and the movement of animals like elk from higher to lower ranges in Wyoming in the fall are other examples of migration familiar in North America. I first went into the Arctic with no other ideas than these, somewhat outsize events to guide me. They opened my mind sufficiently, however, to a prodigious and diverse movement of life through the Arctic; they also prompted a realization of how intricate these seemingly simple natural events are. And as I watched the movement of whales and birds and caribou, I thought I discerned the ground from which some people have derived so much of their metaphorical understanding of symmetry, cadence, and harmony in the universe.
Several different kinds of migration are going on in the Arctic at the same time, not all of them keyed to the earth’s annual cycle. Animals are still adjusting to the retreat of the Pleistocene glaciers, which began about 20,000 years ago. Some temperate-zone species are moving gradually but steadily northward, altering their behavior or, like the collared lemming and the arctic fox, growing heavier coats of fur as required.
Climatic fluctuations measured over a much shorter period of time—on the order of several hundred years—are responsible for cyclic shifts of some animal populations north and south during these periods. Over the last fifty years, for example, cod and several species of bird have been moving farther north up the west coast of Greenland, while populations of red fox have been establishing themselves farther north on the North American tundra.1 As animals long resident in the Arctic respond to certain kinds of short-term ecological disaster, as was the case with muskoxen in the winter of 1973–74, or to violent fluctuations in their population, as with lemmings, they reinhabit, over time, former landscapes and abandon others.
To cope with annual cycles—the drop in temperature, the loss of light, the presence of snow cover, and a reduction in the amount of food available—arctic animals have evolved several strategies. Lemmings move under the snow; bumblebees hibernate; and arctic foxes move out onto the sea ice. Many other animals, including caribou, walrus, whales, and birds, migrate over quite significant distances. Arctic terns, for example, fly to the Antarctic Ocean at the end of the arctic summer, an annual circuit on which they see fewer hours of darkness than probably any animal on earth. Other migratory birds that head out to sea change their ecological niche. The long-tailed jaeger, a rodent hunter on the summer tundra, becomes a pelagic scavenger on the high seas in winter.
On a scale smaller yet than these annual cycles are the migrations of animals during a season, like the movement of muskoxen; and the regular patterns of localized movement keyed to an animal’s diurnal rhythms, like the habit among some wolf packs of leaving a den each evening to hunt. (Arctic animals, as mentioned earlier, maintain a diurnal pattern in spite of the presence of continuous daylight in summer.)
When one considers all these comings and goings, and that an animal like the muskox might be involved simultaneously in several of these cycles, or that when the lemming population crashes, snowy owls must fly off in the direction of an alternative food supply, and when one adds to it the movement of animals to the floe edges in spring, or the insects that rise in such stupendous numbers on the summer tundra, a vast and complex pattern of animal movement in the Arctic begins to emerge. Also to be considered are the release of fish and primitive arthropods with the melting of lake and ground ice. And the peregrinations of bears. And a final, wondrous image—the great ocean of aerial plankton, that almost separate universe of ballooning spiders and delicate larval creatures that drifts over the land in the summer.
The extent of all this movement is difficult to hold in the mind. Deepening the complications for anyone who would try to fix this order in time is that within the rough outlines of their traditional behaviors, animals are always testing the landscape. They are always setting off in response to hints and admonitions not evident to us.
The movement of animals in the Arctic is especially compelling because the events are compressed into but a few short months. Migratory animals like the bowhead whale and the snow goose often arrive on the last breath of winter. They feed and rest, bear their young, and prepare for their southward journey in that window of light before freeze-up and the first fall snowstorms. They come north in staggering numbers, travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to be here during those few weeks when life swirls in the water and on the tundra and in the balmy air. Standing there on the ground, you can feel the land filling up, feel something physical rising in it under the influence of the light, an embrace or exaltation. Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.
Animals define much of the space one encounters in the Arctic because the land, like the sea, is expansive and there are so few people about. Nowhere is this more apparent than in northern Bering Sea in the spring. Certain regions of the world, sea straits in particular, funnel the movements of migrating animals. This is true at the Bosporus and at Gibraltar, for example, where land birds move north and south and sea creatures east and west, as if through the throat of an hourglass. Bering Strait, however, is unique in the way it concentrates life. The arrangement of the earth’s land masses is such that they come close to meeting only in the North; at Bering Strait the Chukchi Peninsula of the Eastern Hemisphere, with its birds and animals, nearly touches the Seward Peninsula of the Western Hemisphere, with its birds and animals. Moreover, the North Pacific coasts converge here, bringing together the offshore migrations of whales and pelagic seabirds, the near-shore migrations of seals and walrus, and the coastal migrations of birds like eiders.2
