2. Seabirds
I spent my last day on land, my thirty-seventh birthday, in Portland, Maine. It was a summer downpour. I walked in the rain to the market and then walked home in the rain with bags in both hands. I had to stop often because it was a long walk to the docks, and I had impulsively purchased a lot of last-minute supplies and more food. Into my boat’s deck I through-bolted two new shrouds for extra safety, then I walked back through the rain to buy the Sunday New York Times. I made a few calls in a phone booth, talking loudly over the rain, and I had my last supper alone at a bar watching the rain out of the window.
I left at dawn the next morning under a clear sky, but with little wind, which puffed ever so slightly from the wrong direction. I used my engine to stay away from the breakwater, because I was continually sloshed toward the rocks and the smell of seaweed by the wakes of a roaring parade of outgoing lobster boats. Big-eyed seals poked up their heads and watched me as I sailed slowly, back and forth all morning, in clear view of the city. In the afternoon I was able to edge out into the Gulf of Maine. A dolphin appeared off the starboard side. I heard it exhale first. This dolphin’s arrival felt good, because I was grasping for good omens. The gloomy last day ashore and this windless first morning did not bode well for my trans-Atlantic.
I sailed across the Gulf of Maine. By midnight on the second day, at about the longitude of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, I slid under a blanket of thick fog.
I turned on the radar. I set an alarm on this radar to warn me if a vessel came within a certain distance, but I didn’t trust this, so I slept only in short stints. I saw the blue blips of fishing vessels on my radar screen and occasionally heard their engines. Once a vessel came within several hundred yards of me. It was so dark and the fog was so thick that I couldn’t see the boat. They didn’t answer their radio. I thought about using my air horn, but I knew their engine was far too loud to hear something like that. So I just waited on deck and listened. I stared into the black, continually checking the radar as the boat kept coming closer. Absurdly in retrospect, I brought up my red neoprene survival suit to have at hand in the cockpit. I turned my engine on. I considered tacking. The boat came within a few hundred yards of running me down, but even then I could not see its lights. It was as if I had my ear to a tiled wall of fog when a subway train chugged past.
Meanwhile, I was seasick. I didn’t vomit over the side, which might have felt better actually. This was more the kind of seasickness where you’re listless, lazy, and wool-brained. Where it’s only a few hours into it that you realize, oh, I’m seasick. In retrospect, the seasickness probably numbed my anxiety, forcing me to take naps when I otherwise would have been too wired and worried to do so.
Come daylight it was still thick fog, but the wind had died. Fox rolled in the flat, green-gray seas and the little red wind indicator at the top of the mast spun in confused circles. Water dripped in rivulets off the sails. While I was trying to figure out how to manage these conditions, a brown shearwater and a couple of white fulmars glided out of the fog and fluttered onto the water’s surface beside Fox, within my fuzzy cone of visibility. The birds paddled to the stern, pivoting their heads, asking, it seemed, to speak with the commanding officer.
The pair of fulmars stuck with me for the entire morning, pittering around inquisitively as I stood alternating between watching them, checking the radar, and observing silvery drops of water unite together under the stainless-steel railing and blip onto the deck. Northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis), a seabird you rarely see near shore in New England, are stockier and thicker than a herring gull but with the same white head and body and grayish wings. They have thick, stubby tube-noses, like petrels, and their eyes are dark with some black feathering around them, which makes their eyes look larger and darker with a stern-looking brow.
The fulmars lightened things up a bit. Maybe they had learned to scavenge offal from fishing vessels in the area. Occasionally one bird would look up as if to say: “Having some trouble, Mac? Relax. Got any haddock?”
I kept a daily logbook as mariners do, recording weather observations, barometric pressure, my GPS position, and so forth. I wrote down small bits of observations, kept track of my boat maintenance, and all sail and course changes. Despite my intentions, I rarely at this point sat down with a journal to record my thoughts more broadly. I also rarely took the time to key out a species of animal, to figure out, say, if that was an adult or juvenile northern fulmar or which species of shearwater that might be. I took photographs when I could (from these it looked like they were adult fulmars and a Manx shearwater, Puffinus puffinus), but I was usually just too tired and worried to be journaling or paging through field guides, especially early on when sluggish with seasickness.
That foggy morning at the outer edge of the Gulf of Maine, however, thanks to the fulmars, I had my first moment to smile a little bit. With a towel over most of the page to keep the logbook dry from my dripping jacket, I wrote in the logbook: “11:15. Still becalmed. Followed closely by a Northern Fulmar, paddling faster than me. It sampled both a piece of Cracklin’ Oat Bran cereal and a bit of banana peel. Didn’t like either.”
Seabirds are the most visible marine life for sailors. And especially for the solitary mariner, they are the most relatable. With their eyes, nose-like beaks, and two legs, they are easily anthropomorphized. For tens of thousands of years, early Indigenous wayfinders and fishers and mariners all around the world have used seabirds as guides to land, to sea routes, and as indicators of fish. Sailors of earlier ages from a range of cultures also ate seabirds if they could catch them, and mariners have seemingly always collected seabirds as trophies and created art and tools from their feathers, bones, and webbed feet. Some mariners have imagined the souls of dead sailors in the bodies of birds at sea, a belief that continues among some people today. In 2006 solo circumnavigator Bill Pinkney wrote that one day after sailing past Cape Horn the reincarnation of a friend seemed to appear in an albatross that landed in the sea behind his boat, assuring him the storms were over, that now “you’ll be okay.”
Sometimes observations by mariners out in the deep sea give us anecdotal and occasionally quite useful data points about the ecology of different parts of the ocean, the ranges of species, their pelagic behavior, and how, more qualitatively, human actions and our understanding and attitudes around and about the ocean’s animals have shifted or remained the same. Single-handed sailors, attentive in their small, quiet boats, have observed seabirds closely and featured them in their stories.
In My Ship Is So Small, for example, Ann Davison wrote occasionally of seabirds to paint the setting of the part of the Atlantic on which she traveled and also because these birds offered her the most substantial connection to other living things. Only days out from the Canary Islands, she commented that when she was cleaning out her stores of rotten fruit, she was amazed at how quickly groups of gulls and petrels arrived. She ascribed their ability to find her boat to a sensitivity to physical movement, rather than, as we understand this today, to the birds’ superior sense of smell. Later in her trans-Atlantic crossing, Davison identified a pair of “bosun birds,” now more commonly called tropicbirds (Phaethon spp.), known for their long thin tail feathers. She described their flight and their “shrieking ornithological oaths at one another.” Several days later she saw another tropicbird, eastbound. Davison was surprised that this bird was traveling alone and did not stop to observe her boat. She whistled loudly. The tropicbird turned, flapped back to her boat, then “dives and stalls about three feet from my head, looks sharply at me, decides against whatever he had in mind to do and flies smartly away again.”
Ann Davison went no further into this meeting in her story, this not being her way, but is telling, because you would think this might have been a profound moment. She had been alone at sea at that point for nearly a month, several hundred miles and weeks of travel from any land, floating in an environment in which humans as individuals are not equipped to live for any length of time. Now here she was, at her urging from her whistle, trying to speak the bird’s language, face to face with this representative from another species who very much did belong here. Here was another animal fluttering above her that was comfortable living and navigating across this open ocean. Tropicbirds spend the majority of their lives out at sea, usually alone. They have large black eyes, which blend into a thick streak of black plumage that grows across and below, even more dramatically than fulmars, presumably evolved to help with glare while spotting prey below. December can be a time for breeding for tropicbirds in this part of the world. Maybe this was a female tropicbird, a few days out foraging while her mate sat on their single egg. Whoever this wild bird was, whatever their thoughts, their history, their destination, this one tropicbird responded to Davison’s sound and paused to consider her: eye to eye.
A white-tailed tropicbird flying near the masthead as observed by sailor Ellen Massey Leonard on the way from Antigua to Bermuda (2010).
A half-century earlier, Joshua Slocum wrote more often about seabirds. As a lifelong mariner and navigator, Slocum was especially tuned to notice the difference between coastal versus pelagic species in helping him find safe harbors. On three separate occasions in Sailing Alone Around the World, the first known solo circumnavigator described using seabirds to navigate. One afternoon in the Canary Current, after his initial crossing of the Atlantic from Nova Scotia as he approached the Mediterranean (the same current in which Davison would almost be run down), Slocum watched the birds “all flying in one direction” toward shore, confirming his navigation and leading him to joke, “I discovered Spain.” On his way home, after a three-week passage in the Indian Ocean, Slocum’s first indication of the low-lying Cocos Keeling Islands was a coastal bird: “The first unmistakable sign of the land was a visit one morning from a white tern that fluttered very knowingly about the vessel, and then took itself off westward with a businesslike air in its wing.” Slocum explained that on these islands this tern, likely what we call today the white tern or common fairy tern (Gygis alba), is known as the “pilot of the Keeling Cocos.” Then, toward the end of his circumnavigation, in the open South Atlantic, Slocum “was awakened by that rare bird, the booby, with its harsh quack, which I recognized at once as a call to go on deck; it was as much as to say, ‘Skipper, there’s land in sight.’ I tumbled out quickly, and sure enough, away ahead in the dim twilight, about twenty miles off, was St. Helena.”
Slocum identified coastal seabirds, such as terns and boobies in their general groupings, and he had spent enough years on deck at sea to recognize the latitudinal ranges of different seabirds in the open sea. After passing through the region of Cape Horn and into the South Pacific, he explained, “New species of birds came around; albatrosses fell back and became scarcer and scarcer; lighter gulls [likely petrels, as known today] came in their stead, and pecked for crumbs in the sloop’s wake.”
Every once in a while a solo sailor will find a bird landed on the boat in mid-ocean. Sometimes these are land birds that have been blown off their migrations or are ill or injured. Seabirds occasionally also suffer the same or land on a sailboat seemingly just to take a break from migrating or foraging. Seabirds who breed in burrows on their island rookeries will at times seek unexpected holes on a boat. Howard Blackburn—a former fisherman who one horrific night when adrift in a fishing dory on the Grand Banks watched his shipmate die from exposure and then lost his own fingers and half his toes to frostbite—was years later in 1899 sailing along on the first of his two solo trans-Atlantic crossings. Blackburn had left a dirty pan from a supper of stew on the floor of his cabin. In the morning he heard a rustling inside the pan, under the lid that he had left askew. Inside he found a storm-petrel. The bird had likely not flown into the pan for the food, but for the sense of security. Blackburn picked up the tiny dark gray bird. “I took it in my hands,” he wrote, “went on deck and threw it up into the air. It flew a short distance and then fell into the water, where I hoped after freeing itself from the stew it would be able to fly again.”
As I sailed farther east into the Grand Banks, I came out of the fog. The sky cleared. I made progress. Whenever I saw a seabird I found myself welcoming it in a way specific to its type. Spotting a fulmar flying toward the boat, soaring flat-winged like a mini-albatross, I shouted as would a stadium announcer introducing the home-run hitter: “Fuuullll-Maaaar!” as if the name meant, indeed, full ocean. When I saw a shearwater gliding on the scant updraft at the lip of a swell, I found myself whispering: “Sssssshhheearwater,” trying to match its effortless flight. When into view flew a solitary gray skua, a faded leather rugby ball with wings, I chanted like at a war dance: “Aaah, skoo-ah—skoo-ah—skoo-aah!”
The most common and consistent birds that I saw during my passage, especially from the fogs of the Gulf of Maine up until the far outer edges of the Grand Banks, were storm-petrels, the smallest of all open-ocean seabirds. Although none of them tried to hide in one of my cooking pots, by their geographic range I knew they were either Leach’s or Wilson’s storm-petrels (Hydrobates leucorhous or Oceanites oceanicus). They look similar and the differentiation was beyond my skills and attention at the time. Storm-petrels are tiny, ashy gray birds with black tube-nosed beaks. They’re so small you can’t believe they’re all the way out there. Storm-petrels are famous for their thin webbed feet just barely pattering across the surface of the sea, a behavior from which their name is likely derived, as they appear to walk like St Peter over the surface. Some people even call them “Jesus petrels,” and they’ve long been a favorite of solo sailors. Vito Dumas, an Argentinian who in a little wooden boat sailed around the world in the 1940s via the storms of the Southern Ocean, had a special sympathy for the tiny storm-petrels, for what appeared to be their struggles in such high winds and steep troughs. He pondered if they ever rested, if a single storm-petrel might have “sometimes settled in this immensity without my noticing it.” When Dr. David Lewis wrote of his solo trans-Atlantic crossing in 1960 he portrayed the storm-petrels as dainty as kittens, “too fragile to live on the face of the ocean.”
Wilson’s storm-petrels, Oceanites oceanicus.
Before this crossing I once had a moment with a storm-petrel that has always remained with me. I was working on a sail-training ship in the Caribbean when one rough night we heard a thwappy sound in the small boat hung off our stern. A crew member named Sean, who knew a lot about birds, followed the noise and picked up the storm-petrel that had landed in the boat. Due to the slippery bulwarks, it appeared unable to take off again. Sean opened up his hands and showed us this tiny, lightly breathing ball of gray, its little black eye looking terrified—or at least we projected this emotion. We had to shout through the wind to hear each other. When it was my turn to hold the bird in my hand, I was stunned at how light it was. I’ve since learned that even the larger of the North Atlantic storm-petrels weigh less than a child’s handful of paperclips. Sean took the bird down to the leeward rail, faced the wind, and opened his palm. After a pause, the storm-petrel felt a gust of wind and flew off into the dark. It was like a bee finding an open window, as if the storm-petrel suddenly relaxed, relieved to be back into that dark blustery gale at sea, as if thinking “Thank God, now I am safe.”
For my North Atlantic passage I had no idea that I’d see so many storm-petrels. When I did, I kept thinking about that one in the Caribbean. Here up north, I saw them almost daily, from the longitude of the Fundian Channel to beyond the Grand Banks until I was over 450 miles away from any land.
Storm-petrels appeared most often around my boat after sunset, which was usually off Fox’s stern. Perhaps the hull of the boat stirred up nocturnal zooplankton that the storm-petrels wanted to eat. The dark birds wheeled and fluttered around like bats. I had some spooky, unnerving moments in the fog and dark when I first heard their cackling sounds, before I realized that it was the storm-petrels. I had never heard the call of these birds before, since on the ships I had worked on previously it had never been that quiet on deck, or maybe we had never stopped to really listen. Their creepy call in the dark is part of the folklore of storm-petrels, often referred to as evil hags, cackling creators of storms, or, conversely, sometimes as good witches, as helpful harbingers warning sailors of heavy weather. Anglophone mariners since at least the 1700s have also known these birds as “Mother Carey’s Chickens.” I had thought this came from how they pecked their beaks in the water, but after my solo ocean passage I think it was because of their chirping, too.
For the first couple of weeks across the North Atlantic, I heard those storm-petrels, in both calm and heavy winds, usually at dusk, but I saw and heard them throughout the night—alone, in pairs, or even in flocks as large as a dozen. Sometimes I saw them during the day. But I don’t recall them making any noise when the sun was up. By mid-ocean that early August I saw only shearwaters and an occasional large skua. There were a few different species of shearwaters, or at least varieties of males and females and a range of ages, but I was not able to identify them all. Then in the middle of the third gale, closer to the coast of Europe, I saw one final storm-petrel, eye to eye, which I’ll tell you about later.