By Frank Gallo
Northern Gannets are raining into the sea. One after another these birds pound the waves like hail on pavement, thundering into the surf to spear fish. Gannets move on the wind in every direction, suffusing the sky with flecks of white, as if a massive feather pillow leaked its stuffing across the clouds. Set aglow by the late afternoon sun, they appear as beams of light tipped in jet, arching across the heavens, skimming the surface of the waves, speeding on angled wings toward the horizon. Where they converge, thunderheads form from swirling avian bodies, broiling masses that are transformed by the sunset’s rays into glistening crystals of purest white. Once they reach the apex of these living clouds, they freeze in motion. Then without warning, like water droplets from saturated clouds, they rain, wings folded, pouring into streams, rushing into torrents, cascading into the sea in a frenzy of feeding birds.
How many passed by me in that hour? Ten thousand? Twenty? In less than four minutes, I counted 1,800, and watched countless squadrons of Gannets form on the horizon to follow one another like kamikazes into the waves. But where had they come from? Northern Gannets are gregarious creatures, nesting in large colonies on cliff-faces in the North Atlantic. Normally, they spend the winter far out at sea, from our area to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Rarely do wind and tide combine to bring such numbers within view of shore. I felt privileged to have witnessed such an unusual and inspiring spectacle.
Never would I have expected to see two such awesome events in succession. Yet, the previous evening, I watched Long-tailed Ducks fill up the sky, moving in mass to their evening roost in a protected harbor. It was as if the edge of a weather front was approaching. An estimated 200,000 strong, they advanced in a thick line from horizon to horizon for more than an hour! In my mind, nothing rivals, not in sheer numbers or beauty, the aerial display of these cackling creatures passing before the setting sun, its rays glinting off the patchwork plaid colors of their bodies.
Seeing such splendors reminded me of accounts I had read of passenger pigeons darkening the skies for days with their numbers and of the vast unimaginable buffalo herds roaming across prairies of virgin grass. What must it have been like to witness such celebrations of life!? I have, perhaps, an inkling of an idea now. I am glad to know that some such wonders still exist. But it saddens me to realize what is now missing. Incomprehensible as it seems, the passenger pigeons are all gone. The buffalo, like the virgin prairies on which they thrived, are reduced to remnants (remnant populations). How little our predecessors have left to us of the splendors they were given. Our present world is very different from that of our ancestors, yet we accept what remains to us as the norm. My concern is that what is left to be accepted as normal will diminish with each passing generation. If this trend is to be halted, we can no longer afford to foster our environmental ills onto the next generation to cure. Immediate attention is required for the security of our descendants’ future environment. It is far too easy for them to accept whatever future they are handed.
This article was originally to be about Morus Bassanus, the Northern Gannet. I intended to write about their crowded cliffside nests and of a life spent predominantly at sea, visiting land only to repopulate. I wished to express a natural beauty and grace on the wing and contrast their incredible capacity for long distance flight with their comical inability to ambulate well on land. I meant also to discuss Long-tailed Ducks. I wished to relate the story of how settlers used their incessant winter cackling as an unflattering basis for their former name, Oldsquaw, and to draw attention to their extraordinary ability to dive to depths of up to 200 feet in search of crustaceans. Instead, I got to wondering. What would it have been like to see the buffalo roam? Sadly, we’ll never know.
I had the good fortune to gain spiritually from seeing Long-tailed Duck-filled skies and gannet rain. It is my hope that our descendants will not have to accept any less from us than we were given.
