RUSSIA
About forty years ago the Great Auk of the Northern Atlantic became exterminated. A vigorous search has been made for it and its remains; fabulous sums have been paid for skins and eggs. . . . Within the same period another large water bird has become extinct in the North Pacific, without having as yet attracted the attention. . . . Yet, this bird was the largest and handsomest of its tribe.
LEONHARD STEJNEGER, 1890
The most compelling and creative work of art I’ve seen that features a cormorant is a table. Audubon’s paintings of North American cormorants are extraordinary and often narrative. Maine artist Andrew Wyeth painted a dynamic watercolor of a soaring cormorant in 1942.1 Thanks to a friend, I own a lovely painting in several shades of blue of a pied cormorant, by a talented local artist in New Zealand. Several ancient Chinese and Japanese paintings capture the essence of cormorants with just a few melancholic brushstrokes. Many countries have issued indigenous-bird stamps with cormorants: the cormorant stamps from Serbia and Palau are especially appealing. It is easy to find stunning photographs of cormorants in books or online, but they usually lack a timeless quality. I’ve seen bronze cormorant sculptures at tourist sights and public parks in Laguna Beach, California, and Port Angeles, Washington.2 Among others in England, there is a five-foot cormorant sculpted with a chainsaw in a public park in Gloucestershire, another crafted of salvaged scrap metal that has been installed at a park by the River Thames, and there is a cormorant sculpture that a woman welded and assembled in a park in Peterborough.3 Most of these sculptures evoke a single cormorant standing with its wings spread. For me, none of these pieces of cormorant art, in any media, holds a feather to that created by the English artist Anna Kirk-Smith.
Kirk-Smith crafted her piece in 2011 as part of a large London-based exhibition involving over 120 artists. The “Ghosts of Gone Birds” project was produced to bring attention to extinct birds and those birds currently endangered. Kirk-Smith’s table is titled The Unfortunate Repercussions of Discovery and Survival (Spectacled Cormorant).
When you approach the sculpture it appears to be just an old piece of furniture. And it is. Except that she has varnished it to match the color of the body plumage of the spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus). She embedded the table with several glass-covered boxes in which the lining is painted iridescent green or deep blue to match the wing and tail feathers of this largest of cormorants. In one of the boxes is placed an antique sounding lead and a scale set to what would have been the weight of the bird. One end of the table has a historic map of the Bering Sea varnished into the surface. In the middle of the map she embedded the largest of the sunken boxes. In it is a book open to pages created from her sketches during her visit to the extinct cormorant specimens at Tring.
I contacted Anna Kirk-Smith after I saw the table. We’ve kept in touch since. Looking back on “Ghosts of Gone Birds,” Kirk-Smith says: “I had a choice of which metaphorical corpses to resurrect. When I first learned about this cormorant it was variously described as a clumsy, stupid, and ludicrous bird so, being English, I guess that cemented my decision to support the underdog. What I didn’t expect however was how involved I would become with this bird and its history, what journeys it would take me on.4
“The Spectacled Cormorant introduced me to an intriguing array of characters, a gripping plot line,” she says. “And I became more delighted with my choice as time progressed, and strangely possessive of this bird’s memory.”
It is September 1741. Vitus Bering’s ship the St. Peter gropes somewhere among the long desolate string of Aleutian Islands. No one is admitting this aloud, but nearly all aboard recognize it is unlikely they will ever make it home. Several of the crew are flattened with scurvy. Two men have already died. Bering himself is also terribly ill, perhaps with scurvy and heart disease.5 Much of their diminishing water supply is foul. The storm-force winds and seas are constantly in their face. They are not even clear as to where they are.
Sailing aboard the St. Peter, sharing the cabin with the sickly, aging Bering, is a German physician and naturalist named Georg Wilhelm Steller. In his early thirties and on his first voyage, Steller is a fiercely ambitious man fresh from university life and research. While the ship and her officers grope westward, Steller is doing a great deal of questioning of the mariners and still more praying to God for divine deliverance. He is certain they are near to land and to the south of the Aleutians, since he sees floating seaweed and various birds such as owls and gulls, which he knows to be strictly coastal. But no one listens to him, in part because he has not been shy in showing that he thinks them all buffoons, and also perhaps because his assessment of where they are, though confident, is not quite correct either.
Bering’s expedition continues, struggling to claw its way west toward Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and home.
“We heard the wind charge periodically as if out of a channel with such terrible whistling, rage, and frenzy that we were every moment in danger of losing a mast,” Steller writes in his journal. “The waves struck like shot out of a cannon, and we expected the final blow and death every instant.”6
The veteran sailors shout to him that they have never seen storms as horrible.
Steller explains: “Let no one think that the dangers of this situation are exaggerated, but believe rather that even the cleverest pen would find itself incapable of describing our misery sufficiently.”7
The officers begin to discuss the idea of finding an island to spend the winter because they cannot last at sea any longer. They watch sharks circle their ship. Their food is low. Their brandy runs out. Bering prays and leads a collection of money for a donation to the church in case they survive. The St. Peter weathers storm after storm and somehow keeps afloat. Two more men die.
Steller writes one morning that God “pulled up the fog.”8 They can see shorelines, and the crew takes a sounding. It turns out they are cutting north through the chain of islands, and if it were not for the break in the weather and the timing of daylight, they would have wrecked.
Steller meanwhile watches for birds. The night before, a little black murrelet had flown aboard. He writes: “It passes the night in cliffs and, like an owl, flies during the day against everything it sees indistinctly close by. That is why they are caught alive by hand in large numbers around Avacha [the port of Kamchatka from where they departed]. A person supplied with a coat simply sits down close to one; they are accustomed to assemble under the coat as if it were a prepared nest.”9
As the ship coasts safely through the channel, surrounded by sea otters, only about ten of the men remain in any condition to work. The officers decide nonetheless to continue sailing north in the hopes of making the mainland.
In the first week of November, with Captain-Commander Vitus Bering sick in his bunk and the officers and Georg Steller on opposite sides of the quarterdeck, the St. Peter limps into what is now named the Bering Sea. One of the officers would write later: “Our ship was like a piece of dead wood, with none to direct it.”10
Steller scrawls in his journal that the sick are “suddenly dying off very quickly.”11
Robert Prŷs-Jones told me that at most one or two people come each year to the Natural History Museum’s Bird Group in Tring to see the spectacled cormorant specimens.
To be honest, when Prŷs-Jones placed them in front of me, I was initially paralyzed. I had traveled far just to have them in front of me. Then I didn’t know what to do once they actually were. So I drew pictures. I took photographs from a dozen different angles. I made a lot of measurements of all the parts of the stuffed birds in case Prŷs-Jones hustled by—so I might look somehow slightly legitimate. Most of the time I just sort of looked at the skins. Silenced and moved, I had never before seen the body of an extinct animal, a species that had not breathed for over 150 years and would never again. I put my fingers on each chest as if I could feel a heartbeat.
When Anna Kirk-Smith made her own pilgrimage to the Bird Group, she wrote beside one of her pencil sketches, now shown inlaid into the table: “It’s humbling to behold.”
At one point I heard a person walking down the aisle. The steps were too sloppy for Prŷs-Jones, but I picked up my tape measure anyway, just in case. I began recording the length of the upper mandibles. A bald man with a rusty beard paused to chat, a pastime of which he was clearly fond. He chewed gum.
He looked at the spectacled cormorants and said: “Beautiful specimens, eh?”
The man told me about work he was doing that includes painting extinct birds. He said the spectacled cormorant specimens in St. Petersburg are “simply marvelous.” The double crests are still intact.
He said: “It’s harder to paint with the double crests, however.” His fingers felt the beaks of the cormorants as he chatted. “I’m a paleontologist mostly, bird bones. But any time I can get a bit of painting in, as a sideline, I’m pleased as punch.”12
Miraculously in early November of 1741 the St. Peter finds land and a natural harbor. The officers believe it to be connected to the Kamchatka Peninsula from where they departed. Bering is still too ill to come on deck. The officers drive the ship unintentionally, chaotically over a reef, but eventually in the middle of the night they settle into a relatively calm anchorage. The naturalist Georg Steller is shocked to walk on deck and witness a few of the sailors heaving some of the dead men overboard without ceremony—believing the corpses to be the cause of their trials.
Steller, his servant, and several sick men are the first to row ashore the next day. The landscape looks similar to Siberia. The plant life does too, but Steller thinks the clouds suggest this is an island. He is surprised by how the sea otters come swimming over to the boat as it approaches the beach. Once ashore he notices a huge unknown manatee swimming along the coast. Several fat Arctic foxes approach them without fear. The men easily shoot and eat several ptarmigans.
He tells Bering, when the captain-commander is brought to the island: “The abundance and tame self-possession of the animals alone clearly indicate that it must be a sparsely inhabited or entirely uninhabited land.”13
It turns out that though they are only a few days’ sail from Kamchatka, this island is desolate and indeed without a single human settlement. What they would name Bering Island is over fifty miles (80 km) long, however, so it takes them months of hiking around and exploring to confirm this to be surrounded by water.
Steller’s status as a Jonah likely fades as he leads the establishment of a makeshift camp on shore and does much to save the lives of his shipmates by crafting a sense of order and a social structure that divides the labor as they prepare to winter over. He organizes the hunting of animals and collecting plants to heal those with scurvy. Steller leads the digging out of rude shelters in the hard sand.
Another storm shoves the St. Peter onto the beach. The vessel is damaged but safe, and the shipwrecked men begin to settle into a sort of routine in order to survive. Once ashore the sailors and soldiers begin to revive, but the severest cases among them die in the first few weeks. Despite Steller’s efforts, Bering himself doesn’t make it. The captain-commander probably dies of heart disease, and likely exposure, age, infection, and exhaustion. When he breathes his last he is in a miserable condition, with his joints swollen and pus discharging near his anus. He has half-buried himself under the sand to stay warm. He is infested with lice.14 Bering dies in December after a full third of the seventy-eight men aboard the St. Peter have already perished. A few more will not make it through the winter.
While organizing rations and food and the daily chores, Steller steadily follows his passion as a field naturalist. He observes, collects, and describes all that he can. He writes down how they caught food and preserved pelts. His account of combating the foxes, for example, is at times gruesome. The foxes attack the sickest of the men and eat and steal seemingly everything. In one day Steller and another man kill sixty foxes with an ax and a Iakut hunting knife.15 In their ineffectual attempts to scare these animals away from camp, the men dismember a few foxes, even half-skin them alive or burn their feet. The shipwrecked men eat the foxes, too, and they club sea otters, fur seals, and sea lions for food.
Steller and the officers ration the flour from the ship’s stores to always have some sort of biscuit, however meager. Finding any wood to make a fire becomes more and more difficult, however, particularly when all the ground is covered in snow. Their shoes and clothes are rags. Sometimes a blizzard entirely buries their shelters.
After a seemingly endless winter, spring finally arrives in May. The rains flood out their shelters at times, but the castaways now have access to driftwood and a few sprouting plants. Despite the fact that all of the ship’s carpenters have died, the men begin to build a smaller boat out of the wreckage of the St. Peter.16 Stomachs continue to grumble, however, since they must travel farther and farther away from camp in order to find meat.
Before wrecking on Bering Island, the St. Peter had achieved its goal of doing a preliminary survey of the North Pacific and touching mainland America not far from today’s Kenai Peninsula and the town of Valdez. Yet Georg Steller’s landing in Alaska was for him infuriatingly brief. Once on Bering he took extreme care of all his journals and notes. He intended to bring back the first descriptions of the native peoples of the Alaska-Aleutian region, as well as his observations of dozens of animals unknown to Europeans. Several of the species still bear his name, notably the Steller’s jay, the Steller sea lion, and a type of sea duck, the Steller’s eider. He also observed a dramatic, gorgeous predator now known as Steiler’s sea eagle, which is found today only in this corner of the North Pacific.17
Most famously Steller gave the first and only description of living cold-water manatees that grew to be some thirty feet long. The animals had, as he put it, an “extraordinary love for one another.”18 Though the shipwrecked men saw the creatures regularly, it was not until the end of their stay that they were forced to figure out how to row out and harpoon them because of the scarcity of any other remaining meat. Steller’s sea cow would be extinct in less than a century.
The spectacled cormorant is the second, much lesser-known species for which Georg Wilhelm Steller provided the only known living description left. These were huge cormorants, numerous, and easy to catch. The men ate them with the same understandable relish as they did everything else.
“The flesh of one would easily satisfy three hungry men,” Steller wrote. “They were a great comfort.”19 This would be the thematic principle for Anna Kirk-Smith’s sculpture: she carved these words into the top of the table.
Steller may have first discovered the huge cormorants during one spring excursion for food. He, his servant, and a couple of the other men were far from their camp when a blizzard overtook them. After a grueling night, near frostbitten, they found an ideal cave in which to shelter themselves. They later named this Steller’s Cave.
Steller explained: “The sea birds and the migratory birds that I had opportunity to observe on Bering Island are almost the same as those one meets with on the eastern coast of Kamchatka. However, a special kind of large sea raven with a callow white ring about the eyes and red skin about the beak, which is never seen in Kamchatka, occurs there but only on the rocks near Steller’s Cave.”20
This “sea raven” had a thick, powerful bill. It had two large crests while in breeding plumage, oriented one behind the other, like a Mohawk. Steller wrote in one translation: “From the ring around the eyes, and the clownlike twistings of the neck and head, it appears quite a ludicrous bird.”21
Another description, translated in part from a version of Steller’s descriptions, was later published in Sir Walter Rothschild’s book of extinct species: “Of the size of a very large goose. Of the shape of the former [another cormorant], which it also resembles in the white patches on the flanks. The body is entirely black. A few long, white, narrow pendant plumes round the neck, as in Herons. Occiput [head] with a huge tuft, doubly crested. Skin round the base of the bill bare, red, blue and white, mixed, as in a turkey. Round the eyes a thick, bare white patch of skin, about six lines wide, like a pair of spectacles. Weight 12 to 14 pounds [5.4–6.4 kg].”22
Steller wrote that the cormorants had a certain stoliditas, a stupidity, but this might be more owing to their lack of fear of man and perhaps a sluggish, awkward flight. If they flew at all.23 Because if the spectacled was indeed that heavy, then it was almost twice the weight of the largest of the airborne cormorants today, the great cormorant, whose wings are about the same length.24 So if the spectacled could fly, it surely wasn’t that efficient.
It might be that the cormorants on Bering Island, which Steller observed, did not breed on the rocks near Steller’s Cave at all. Their nests would need to be entirely inaccessible to the foxes. Perhaps they had colonies at the time only on the tiny islets just off Bering and then swam and flew, in whatever fashion, back and forth to fish.25
In their efforts to survive, the men surely ate as many of the spectacled cormorants as they could acquire, presumably by wringing their necks or clubbing them. According to the most rigorous of Steller’s biographers, the shipwrecked men likely prepared this bird the way that the natives of Kamchatka did other cormorant species: “namely by burying it encased—feathers and all—in a big lump of clay, and baking it in a heated pit.” Steller thought it was quite tasty.26
This is about all the information that is known about this cormorant alive, none of which we have from Steller’s original hand. Most of Steller’s descriptions and his journal entries are usually from the translations by Peter Simon Pallas, a natural history professor in St. Petersburg who in the late eighteenth century was the first major scientist to work from Steller’s manuscript material. But it seems Pallas was at times a liberal, even creative translator. Steller’s original journal manuscript is now lost. There might as yet be more materials about the cormorants from Steller in archives kept in St. Petersburg, but no one has done the full work yet. Pallas never met Steller, nor did he ever see the bird himself, dead or alive.27
Since Pallas brought this animal to the attention of the scientific community in 1793, the bird is often known as the Pallas’s cormorant. Pallas christened the bird with the scientific name perspicillatus, which means, in a rough Latin, “wearing spectacles.”
At last, in August of 1742, the survivors of the St. Peter cram into their new boat to try to sail to the mainland. The cobbled, untested craft is loaded down. The officers permit Steller more weight than almost everyone else, but this allocation is still next to nothing: not nearly enough to bring the majority of his skins, skeletons, and plants. He does not have room for his skin of a young sea cow, stuffed with sea grass. Steller will have to abandon practically everything to the foxes. He negotiates, cajoles, pleads with his shipmates and the officers. Eventually Steller steps off the island with only a few seeds, a couple of sea otter skins, his notes, journal, and a nearly complete manuscript describing the marine mammals. He brings home only the palate of the sea cow and nothing of the gigantic sea raven.28
Of the fewer than ten thousand known bird species on earth, conservation biologists believe that about 130 have gone extinct since Columbus sparked the European age of ocean-crossing exploration.29 These extinctions include a few species of owls, sandpipers, finches, grebes, doves (e.g., the dodo), emus, macaws, herons, starlings, wrens, and parrots. The list of extinct birds also includes one gone species each of oystercatcher, ibis, quail, and petrel. Living out only perhaps a couple more generations in some sort of conservation facility are four more birds that are believed to be extinct in the wild: the Hawaiian crow, the Guam rail, the Alagoas curassow, and the Socorro dove.30
In addition to these 130 or so extinct wild birds are populations of nearly 200 other avian species whose numbers are so low or have not been credibly witnessed alive in so many decades that they might be considered functionally extinct. These have been designated as “critically endangered.”31
The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) is the central body for keeping track of endangered species, which are published as the “Red List.” A significant percentage of the bird species that are in real danger are birds of the open ocean. Over a dozen species of albatross and petrels are listed as critically endangered. This is due mostly to human disturbance, introduced species at the rookeries, the prevalence of ocean plastics, and the efficiency and practices of deep-sea fisheries.32
Of the thirty-three extant cormorant species recognized by the IUCN Red List, nineteen species, including all six in North America and the two in the British Isles, are “of least concern.” (See appendix.)
Four cormorant species are considered “near threatened.” This includes the guanay cormorant and the red-legged “chuita” cormorant, who live off the coast of Peru and to the south. The other two are the Cape cormorant and the crowned cormorant, who both live in a small set of colonies off the coast of South Africa and Namibia.
Seven of the cormorants on the Red List are considered in worse shape, “vulnerable,” largely because they have only a limited number of small rookeries: these are the flightless cormorant of the Galápagos and the Socotra cormorant of the Middle East, and five of the Southern Ocean species, such as the Stewart shag and New Zealand’s king shag.
The IUCN labels two cormorants of the thirty-three living species with the bell-ringing alarm of “endangered,” meaning that they are at a very high risk of becoming extinct. The first is the bank cormorant, long ago given the portentous species name of neglectus. This bird lives along the South Atlantic coast of Namibia and South Africa, alongside the two species of “near threatened” cormorants. The second officially endangered cormorant is the Pitt shag—a true cormorant dandy with orange feet, lime-green facial skin, and a tall, jaunty crest tufting both forward and aft off the head. This endangered shag lives on a set of isolated islands far to the east of New Zealand in a total population sputtering at around 500 pairs.33
The IUCN scientists believe that one cormorant is “critically endangered,” meaning in genuine risk of becoming extinct. This is the Chatham shag, which lives in the same set of desolate islands as the Pitt shag, yet in still fewer numbers. This shag has caruncles by the beak, red facial skin, and a green metallic sheen to the feathers. Other than fencing to keep out introduced mammals from human settlements on the islands, there is not much more that can be done.
The IUCN does not make any predictions on the future of these endangered and critically endangered cormorants—or on any endangered animals. Its aim is primarily to provide some centralized information and to promote awareness of the frightening, spiraling loss of global animal diversity. In this way the goals of the IUCN are the same as the art of Anna Kirk-Smith and the “Ghosts of Gone Birds” project.
There is still more to be concerned about, unfortunately. An attempt to rethink the IUCN Red List for birds—its historic and current extinction totals—was published recently by an American group led by two men out of an Edgar Allan Poe bibliography: Stuart Pimm and Peter Raven. The scientists calculated that rather than the over 130 extinct wild birds that the IUCN recognizes, probably closer to 500 species have actually gone extinct since the turn of the sixteenth century. In other words, about 5 percent of all the known birds of modern times will never again be seen alive. Pimm, Raven, and their colleagues contend that the Red List underestimates because the IUCN is too cautious, too reluctant to include those “critically endangered” as actually irrevocably extinct or doomed within generations. New extinct species are also continually being found and identified—birds that were lost before Western scientists got a chance to describe them. Dozens of birds were eradicated by the exploration and overexploitation by Polynesian and other native peoples. When Steller was paging through his books aboard the St. Peter in 1741, his fellow naturalists knew of only a tiny fraction of all the birds that lived around the globe. Linneaus in 1758 listed 446. Rothschild in 1900 would have known of only about 80 percent of the birds science now describes. The more we learn, the more species we find both alive and that have gone extinct.34
Early European exploration and commerce led to quick, thoughtless destruction of species. Several groups of native peoples did the same, such as the Polynesians settling throughout the Pacific.
Pimm and Raven’s team believes that if the current trends of rapid habitat destruction, introduced species, and global warming continue, then the near future will be absolutely precipitous for bird life on earth. Quoth Raven: “Some 1,200 more species are likely to disappear during the twenty-first century. An equal number are so rare that they will need special protection or likely will go extinct, too.”35
That would mean by 2099, about one in six bird species that were alive in the time of Columbus will either be extinct or facing this eradication imminently—to be seen nevermore.
The largest of Anna Kirk-Smith’s sketches inlaid into the table is the head of the bird at Tring with a tuft of cotton wool in the cavity of the eye. No one today knows the actual color of the spectacled cormorant’s eye. Steller provided no description of the iris itself, inside the white ring. An animal’s eye does not survive preservation. Any biologist or artist who goes to an unaltered skin finds only a hole stuffed with cotton.
Cormorant eyes throughout the world span nearly the entire color wheel: dark blue, turquoise, gray green, emerald green, olive, light brown, dark brown, and even off-white. The eyes of the long-tailed “reed” cormorant are bright crimson. In a few species there can be a large range of color between individuals, and a few cormorant species have orbital rings—the fleshy skin around the eye—of varying widths and a variety of colors, such as yellow, red, and, of course, blue. Some orbital rings even have polka dots, as do Mr. Yamashita’s Japanese cormorants. Sometimes cormorants have a third color on a thin inner rim between the iris and the orbital ring. All this in mind, know that the person who prepared the best existing mounted specimen of the spectacled cormorant, held at a museum in the Netherlands, inserted green glass eyes. This is a logical guess.
The spectacled cormorant living off Bering must have survived on a variety of fish, including the salmon species that migrate through the area and were supporting all those fur seals, sea lions, and Steller’s sea eagles. Many of the salmon—perhaps even some individuals that once hatched in the Columbia River—would be quite large at the stage they were swimming through the Aleutians—too large for the most part for current cormorants, but perhaps not so for the huge spectacled. Bering Island and the other islands of the Komandorski group host hundreds of other fish species in enough quantity today to still attract millions of sea and shorebirds a year, including murres, puffins, several types of ducks, and two other species of cormorants.36 (Steller also seems to have left a tantalizing note about a “white sea raven,” as an additional species, but there isn’t enough to go on. Perhaps it was a juvenile or an albino—some sort of Moby Shag.37) The spectacled cormorants surely would also have eaten some of the invertebrates, such as shrimps and crabs, that lived off the coast of Bering, hunting for them among the vast and tall kelp beds that had once also sustained the vegetarian sea cow.
Biologists believe the eyes are the primary tool for a cormorant to catch fish. Vision is its most developed sense. As evident when looking at the great cormorant skull inlaid into Kirk-Smith’s table, the eye socket makes up most of the bird’s head. (See figure 12.) Vision is the primary sense for most shorebirds and seabirds, except for those that in part find food in the open ocean with their remarkable smell—such as the albatross and petrels—snuffling up food in an immense ocean haystack.
Cormorants, like most birds and fish, have monocular vision: their eyes are on both sides of their head. They reconcile these separate images in their brain. This gives them a sliver of a blind spot dead ahead and immediately astern, but overall, they have an almost 360-degree field of vision. I love how when you slowly approach a cormorant it will turn the side of its face to you—as if it is being nervously nonchalant about your approach. Actually, it is getting you directly in its field of vision. It is very hard to sneak up on almost any species of wild cormorant today. I have tried. The spectacled cormorant wasn’t stupid or blind, of course. It just didn’t know it was supposed to be afraid of a person.
Cormorants, like most if not all birds, probably see a particularly vivid color picture, much better than humans. To another cormorant, the black plumage must look startlingly different from how it does to us, particularly considering the luminescent traces within the black feathers. Cormorants, like other birds, might be able to see into the ultraviolet spectrum or perhaps see polarized sunlight.38 Birds are also better at seeing movement than we are, but not as good at detecting a predator or prey that is motionless or not visible: hence why bird observation “blinds” and the East Sand Island tunnels on the Columbia work so well.39
The anatomy of a cormorant’s eye is fairly similar to that of a human’s but with significantly more color receptor cells and a flatter retina, which seems to give them a wider in-focus view. Like other birds, cormorants have oil droplets in their color receptor cells. Biologists are still not entirely sure of the reason, but they speculate that it might help with the perception of so many colors and the reduction of glare—the latter being especially important for a seabird.40 Birds have a third eyelid, the nictitating membrane, which comes across the eye vertically to help lubricate and protect. For cormorants, this membrane serves like goggles, replete with a high-refraction lens to help them see better underwater.41 Cormorants in particular have a thick, flat cornea on the outside of their eyes, but a more flexible lens within the eye, adjusted with exceptionally strong muscles associated with the iris and pupil. All of this likely helps cormorants focus when submerged and adjusting to light refraction when under over one hundred feet (30 m) of water.42
Ornithologists have long marveled how the cormorant eye, functional also in flight at well over thirty-two hundred feet (1,000 m) above sea level, then allows cormorants to see darting fish when the birds are swimming underwater, often in murky, dark, cold conditions.43 The great cormorants in the Arctic today, for example, feed primarily on sculpin, a fish that has a variable, camouflage patterning to its scales, helping it blend into the bottom and among the rocks. Sculpins can’t be easy to see underwater. Yet cormorants in this region will even feed at night.44
Scientists have been studying this vision in cormorants. At the University of Birmingham in England, ornithologists built a high-tech aviary specifically for these birds, with multiple bays and swimming tanks. They trained a half dozen cormorants to swim inside a tank in which there was a “swimway” with a fork at the end and an image of a fish that they could vary in terms of contrast, amount of light, and so on. Other studies have attached little cameras to the heads of cormorants.45 In this way researchers have found that the cormorants might not actually have superb vision after all, at least in terms of identification underwater. Maybe, the researchers speculated, that cormorants do not really zip all around to pursue fish underwater but need to get within a few feet to allow their quick neck to really do the work, more like a heron. Or perhaps when in high-density schools of fish the cormorants use the sense of touch from their beak.46 Maybe their skill is really about the extraordinarily quick perception of movement rather than the object itself. I wonder if this is related to how the researchers on East Sand Island say cormorants go right for people’s eyes: wet, delicate, quick movement. Or maybe the cormorant’s specialized vision is why it is so opportunistic, often eating whichever species is easiest to catch.
Thirteenth of August, 1742. The forty-six survivors of over eight months shipwrecked on Bering Island lie crammed shoulder to shoulder as one of them steers. Another man bails, since the boat has a leak. They sail past the southern point of the island and call it Cape Manati because of the number of sea cows.
They do not have a favorable wind, so most of their passage is spent rowing. But eventually, after almost two weeks, they pull into Avacha Bay. Everyone in the small village had thought they were long dead.47
Probably the most significant tangible result of the expedition of the St. Peter and Steller’s work was his careful, thorough descriptions of the marine mammals on Bering and throughout the Aleutians. The sea otters in particular were already of enormous value in China. From Bering Island the crew brought back almost nine hundred pelts to sell back home. Even though Steller had to leave nearly all his samples, he seems to have ended up with about three hundred of the sea otter skins—some of which he purchased from his shipmates back in Kamchatka, while many others he received as gestures of gratitude.48 Steller wrote: “This animal deserves the greatest respect from us all, because for more than six months it served us almost solely as our food and at the same time as medicine for the sick.”49 At one point Steller brought over to the dying Vitus Bering a baby sea otter still suckling on its mother, asking if he might cook it for him. Bering refused to try it.
In his first letters and reports after he arrives back safely in Kamchatka, Steller speaks of the potential profit from these furs. Soon the quality and abundance of sea otter and fur seals along the Aleutians ignites a Russian westbound trade and an arc of exploration, cultural impact, and commerce that will be devastating to both the marine mammals themselves and in many ways the coastal indigenous peoples as far south as California.50 Near East Sand Island in 1805, Lewis and Clark saw sea otter pelts being traded and worn by the Columbia River First Peoples.51 As the years progressed, the Russians, Americans, Spanish, and British all had to sail farther and farther to find these furs.
Scott O’Dell’s young adult novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) is set on San Nicholas Island off the coast of southern California. In this story a young girl named Karana, probably of the Gabrielino Indians, is orphaned in the mid-nineteenth century after a Russian vessel manned with Aleutians plunders the island for sea otters and then kills her father and most of the Native American men. The Russians had come this far south in search of these furs. In the novel, the girl ends up alone on the island. With the skins and feathers of the cormorants that she eats to survive, she works on sewing a skirt in the evening hours in her cave. When finished, Karana explains: “I had never seen the skirt in the sunlight. It was black, but underneath were green and gold colors, and all feathers shimmered as though they were on fire. It was more beautiful than I had thought it would be.”52
The novel is based on a true story. The young woman eventually ended up at a mission on the California mainland. The cormorant garment was supposedly sent to Rome after she died, but it no longer seems to exist.53 Toward the end of Island of the Blue Dolphins—a novel written just as the American environmental movement was about to really take off and cormorant populations were beginning to recover—Karana decides that she will not kill animals any longer, for any purpose.
She explains: “Nor did I ever kill another cormorant for its beautiful feathers, though they have long, thin necks and make ugly sounds when they talk to each other.”54
Georg Wilhelm Steller is dead at the age of thirty-seven. He never makes it back to St. Petersburg. He sees none of his discoveries published or any of his ambitions realized. Steller had imagined a triumphant return to the capital and the academies, but he gets held up in Siberia twice for what seem to be planted charges regarding his dealings with the native Kamchadals. He dies of a fever in the middle of winter trying to get home. Desparately poor people dig up his body to steal the red cloak in which he was buried. A pack of dogs ravages his corpse. Decades later the river slowly washed away the gravesite and the stone marking where his remains were buried.
It is likely that Steller’s legacy would never have been established, regardless of Pallas, if it were not for a man born about a century after Steller died in Siberia. Leonhard Stejneger, a Norwegian, would be as close to a reincarnation of Steller as even the German naturalist could have wished for. Bering Island would be Stejneger’s professional and spiritual high point, too, and the remains of the spectacled cormorant was one of his most compelling finds.
Leonhard Stejneger arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1881. Though he was not proficient in English, he knew several other languages and had already published a few scientific papers. He walked up the steps of the Smithsonian Institution to ask for a job.55 They put him to work helping to prepare and catalog specimens of birds from the Caribbean. The next spring he was asked on short notice if he would be willing to take biological and meteorological observations way out at Bering Island. He would serve in part as the keeper of a U.S. Signal Service station. Leonhard Stejneger packed his bags.
He lived for nearly two years on the island. Once he almost drowned when he became trapped underwater after he flipped over in a skin canoe. Stejneger returned to Washington as the expert on the fur seals of the North Pacific. From Bering Island and the surrounding region, he brought back to the Smithsonian a staggering collection of skulls, skeletons, fossils, preserved specimens (including three full Kamchatkan mountain sheep), and about seven hundred bird skins.56
Stejneger had been intrigued by Steller’s writings of the rare cormorant. He interviewed some of the local people as he traveled, to find out if he might see some of these birds. He collected the very first skeletal remains of the extinct spectacled cormorant when he was excavating some buried middens in a cliff at the north end of Bering.57
The young biologist concluded by the end of his stay in 1883 that the spectacled cormorant was extinct. The animal had been wiped out by the 1850s. On returning to Washington from Bering, Stejneger wrote: “You will not be more disappointed than I am in learning that there is no hope whatever of getting a specimen.”58
If the birds lived anywhere besides on Bering, Stejneger found no records. After the St. Peter and the discoveries of Steller and other contemporary Russian explorers, seal hunters had begun visiting the island. They ate the cormorants while camping there. In the 1820s the Russian-American Company brought Aleutian natives to Bering Island to hunt for the mammals full time, to settle. These Aleutian natives also ate the spectacled cormorants. During his travels, Stejneger was able to speak to some of the Aleuts, who remembered these cormorants as being plentiful, especially on Aij Kamen, a rocky islet just off the northwest of Bering Island.
Stejneger wrote: “The reason they give why this bird has become exterminated is that it was killed in great numbers for food. They unanimously assert that it has not been seen since, and they only laughed when I offered a very high reward for a specimen.”59
The Aleuts that had been brought to Bering by the Russians found the spectacled cormorant better eating than the other cormorants they had already hunted farther to the east off the Alaska region. Apparently the Aleuts had a long history of eating cormorants, mostly the pelagic and red-faced varieties. The native people seem to have collected shag pelts as a valuable trade item and even told of the month of January as the one best for hunting cormorants.60
“The natives of Bering Island inform me that the meat of this species was particularly palatable compared with that of its congeners,” Stejneger wrote. “And that consequently, during the long winter, when other fresh meat than that of the cormorants was unobtainable, it was used as food in preference to any other.”61
Perhaps it was the foxes that eradicated the last of the spectacled cormorants, or even volcanic activity, as one theory goes. But surely humans—Russian and Aleut hunters—sealed the extinction of this bird.62
Very little evidence exists to put together any kind of past distribution of the spectacled cormorant. According to one set of researchers, Pallas and the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue recorded anecdotal stories of natives collecting and eating spectacled cormorants on the Siberian mainland.63 A nineteenth-century naturalist named Lucien Thompson wrote of Aleutian natives of Attu Island describing a big cormorant only recently extinct as being “fully twice as large” as the other cormorants. The species was apparently quite abundant in the area, and, Thompson writes, it could have “been none other than the greatly desired Pallas’s Cormorant.”64 And a recent archaeological dig on Amchitka Island, also several hundred miles to the east of Bering, found among the remains of hundreds of other cormorants one single indisputable two-thousand-year-old wing bone of a spectacled. This could be identified thanks to Stejneger’s collections.65 But these few tidbits hardly assemble a former range.
Stejneger and other scholars of extinct birds, including Lord Rothschild at Tring, believed the only known specimens still in existence were collected by a Governor Kuprianof, once placed in charge of the region. One of Kuprianof’s directives was to supply samples of all known animals to the museum at St. Petersburg.66 It seems he had a few extra spectacled pelts, one of which he gave to an expedition of the British navy under the command of Captain Edward Belcher, sometime between 1836 and 1842. This is one of the specimens that is now at the Bird Group in England.
In contrast to the quiet demise of the spectacled cormorant, as Stejneger wrote in this chapter’s epigraph, it is hard to underestimate the Victorian fervor ignited about the loss of other extinct birds, such as the great auk. About eighty skins of great auks are still around, and nearly as many of their eggs. An entire, gorgeous, painstaking volume is devoted to describing the great auk and the craze of final collections, art, and stories concerning this bird.67 The spectacled cormorant, meanwhile, never received any of this sort of attention, even as a few new specimens were identified in dusty European collections. Perhaps this lack of fervor was because of this bird’s lonely location in the far northwestern Pacific. Or perhaps it is reflective of a general cultural lack of interest in cormorants.
Unlike Steller, Leonhard Stejneger was able to return to Bering Island. The U.S. government sent him back a couple more times as an expert on the region. Stejneger found more bones of the spectacled cormorant and gathered enough remains of a sea cow to craft an entire skeleton. Stejneger’s final professional act in 1936, at the age of eighty-four after a lifetime’s worth of study and experience, was to complete his magnum opus, his definitive biography titled Georg Wilhelm Steller.
Leonhard Stejneger, like most of his fellow naturalists before the age of easy field photography, was a careful and gifted artist. His idol Georg Steller was not. Stejneger wrote: “It may be asserted with the greatest confidence that Steller was utterly incapable of making recognizable drawings of the natural objects, plants and animals which he observed or described.”68
Thus there are no remaining illustrations of the bird alive, unless somewhere yet to be identified there is a preserved work of Aleutian or Kamchatkan art or a rendering in a journal by an early nineteenth-century sealer. The early paintings of this bird—all done from preserved dead skins—have been the only lasting images.
The first known depiction was published by John Gould. He is the same man who purchased the second skin for the Bird Group—the scalped one without a tail. Gould painted two birds in an island cliff scene to accompany Captain Belcher’s Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Sulphur . . . 1836–42.69 Though normally he was a deft and elegant bird artist, Gould’s spectacled cormorants look sickly and immobile, like crosses between penguins and rooted zucchini. One of these birds looks as if it has a rodent in its neck, which it is still digesting snake style.
Since then, a few other painters have taken on the task of trying to give the bird life when only looking at a couple of musty pelts with no eyes and faded colors. The most-often reproduced work is a hand-colored lithograph by Joseph Wolf in 1869. This is static but elegant, and is mostly faithful to the bird, aside from the facial skin as Steller described it.70 (See figure 14.) For Lord Rothschild’s Extinct Birds in 1907, John G. Keulemans painted another attractive image, but he also represents the facial skin incorrectly.71
“I considered the early illustrations, their differences, their potential discrepancies from the actual specimens at Tring,” Anna Kirk-Smith tells me. On the top of the table, on a ceramic plate, she engraved her own version of a profile of the cormorant.
“I wanted on my plate to have an amalgamation of these references at once,” she says. “Hence the nod to Wolf’s and Keulemans’s with the pose, but with variations in the anatomy that I’d noticed from the skins at Tring. In this way I hoped to reinterpret the historical exploration and identification of this species again. The illustrations intrigued me more as a group—rather than singly.”
Kirk-Smith was obsessive about research. She got especially excited about this project. She was already fascinated with seabirds and their conservation—she once ended up keeping a small collection of common scoters in her kitchen as part of an RSPCA rescue after the oil spill of the Sea Empress. To prepare for her sculpture, Kirk-Smith went out and observed cormorants and shags on the English coast. She recorded their sounds and tried to play them back at a slower pitch to perhaps match the croak of the larger bird. She read enormously about the animal’s biology and about the history of Steller and Bering’s expedition. She read Stejneger’s accounts. She corresponded with dealers of antique maps in Alaska. All this in an effort to “try to re-create a gone bird, to conjure up a character.”
The emotion and history oozes out of Kirk-Smith’s sculpture, The Unfortunate Repercussions of Discovery and Survival (Spectacled Cormorant), whether you know the story of the Bering expedition or not. Kirk-Smith calls her table an altar, an in memoriam. There are hours worth of details. One leg of the chair has collaged pictures of currently endangered Bering Island birds. A portentous quotation from Bering’s lieutenant is scratched into the wood of another leg. She painted white wax rings on the table, what would be water stains left by a glass, to evoke the “spectacles” of the extinct bird.
For Anna Kirk-Smith the loss of the spectacled cormorant is about food and the mariner’s survival. The initial focus of the sculpture, when you first approach the table, is three seemingly formal place settings for the ghosts of three men. The men feast on the ghost of one gone bird, represented by the cormorant skull with the huge eye sockets. At the setting of the first man, Vitus Bering, is a map of the island etched on a ceramic plate. Bering’s gravesite is marked on the map. Kirk-Smith inlaid in resin a pair of navigation dividers to serve as Bering’s utensil. For the second place setting, that for Peter Simon Pallas—the man who introduced this bird to the scientific community—there is a plate decorated with Steller’s handwritten notes and a taxonomic tree. A quill pen is his utensil. The third and final setting, at the head of the table, is for Georg Steller. On this plate is Kirk-Smith’s painting of a spectacled cormorant. To the right of Steller’s plate is a replica of his Iakut hunting knife.