Adaptation: a bird’s tale

ON May 23, 1833, John James Audubon, traveling on the U.S. revenue-cutter Swiftsure, landed on New Brunswick’s White Head Island to look for a particular bird. The bird in question would have been on the endangered species list if such a list had existed in his day. Last year I visited White Head to search for the same bird, to see how it had fared (or indeed if it had fared) over the past 172 years.

Shortly after the ferry from the neighboring island of Grand Manan docked, a man in a geriatric pickup truck offered me a lift. I started telling the driver about Audubon and his visit to the island, but he interrupted me.

Audubon, he said, had stayed with a long-dead relative, William Frankland. According to family lore, because there wasn’t any salt on the table at the time, the artist-naturalist cheerfully sprinkled gunpowder on his food.

“Anything else your family tell you about him?” I asked.

“Well, I heard he liked to eat old wives’ eggs.”

The great champion of birds was not alone in being a connoisseur of bird eggs; “old wife” is a local euphemism for the bird that both Audubon and I had come here to see. Up and down the East Coast, everyone else at the time seemed to savor the eggs, which is one reason why the bird’s numbers had undergone a serious decline.

Another reason -- and one often attributed to the extinction of other bird species: Its feathers were popular adornments on women’s hats, so popular, in fact, that ornithologist Frank Chapman, one of the founders of the Audubon Society, is said to have given a lecture, “Women as an Enemy of Birds.”

As we were driving along the 1,250-acre island’s only road with its stunning views of the Bay of Fundy, I noticed a number of boarded-up houses. According to my host, they belonged to Americans who came here only for a week or two in the summer. He was not pleased to see his island turning into a playground for wealthy outsiders.

“Those houses were once owned by fishermen,” he said. “Now they’re owned by folks who just want property by the sea, with the result that we islanders are becoming an endangered species ourselves. You can put that in your article....”

And as a concession to local sentiment, I have indeed put it in the article.

My host dropped me off at the site of William Frankland’s house. It was in the woods behind this house that Audubon made an astonishing discovery: The bird he wanted to see, previously a ground nester, was now building nests in fir trees to escape the depredations of humans. Some of these nests were as much as 40 feet above the ground, thus showing the bird’s adaptability.

“How strangely Nature has provided them with the means of securing their eggs and young from their arch-enemy Man,” wrote Audubon. No one had paid much attention to the bird before him. In fact, the portrait he painted of it while he was on the island was the first by a professional artist.

Maybe a few birds are still nesting in trees, I said to myself. So I began hiking through the woods, studying the branches of every fir I encountered. The only nest I saw belonged to a red squirrel, which, upon seeing me, proceeded to raise an unholy racket.

I walked on. The ground was littered with rusty beer cans, Vienna sausage tins and scraps of plastic, ample evidence that I was not the first person since Audubon to pass this way. Within minutes I saw a robin, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a white-throated sparrow and a boreal chickadee, but none of these was the bird I was looking for.

At last I emerged from the woods and came out at the edge of a marsh known locally as Grandma’s Heath. Seeing a grove of firs a few hundred feet away, I began crossing the marsh and soon found myself sinking into sphagnum muck. When I tried to walk to the nearest elevated ground, I only ended up deeper in the muck. To make matters worse, I was starting to become a target for every mosquito for miles around. I cursed Grandma, whoever she was. Her heath made King Lear’s “blasted heath” seem like a putting green.

In the end, I had no choice but to slog through the muck. By the time I reached dry ground, I had so much of Grandma’s Heath clinging to me that I probably looked more like a habitat than a human being.

A couple of kids stopped playing ball and stared at me as if I’d just arrived from a distant galaxy.

Soon I found a path leading down to the sea. Here I saw at least 100 of Audubon’s birds. Several hundred more seemed to have colonized an offshore islet.

Others were following a fishing boat as it headed toward port. There were even a few on a nearby ledge, gazing at me brazenly.

The bird is, of course, the herring gull, which has made a remarkable comeback since Audubon’s time. You can now find it almost anywhere in North America.

That some people consider this species more or less a pest is a tribute to its ability to adapt to habitats as dissimilar as an urban dump and a fir tree on a small Atlantic island. And that it can adapt, indeed survive, in response to the thoughtless whims of its human neighbors is something of a miracle.

But “adapt” is the operative word here, as many less fortunate species might attest, if they were still around. There is little choice.

It’s either change your nesting ground on this increasingly ravaged planet -- which sometimes seems like a garbage dump itself -- or join the hemorrhage of 30,000 irreplaceable species each year.

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Lawrence Millman is the author of numerous books including “Last Places” and “Northern Latitudes.”