Lost Woods (7 page)

Observers of birds at Mattamuskeet over the years have marked up a number of unusual species, such as the white pelican, blue goose, white-fronted goose, Hutchins goose, black tern (a fall transient), European wigeon, black rail, and – as interesting stragglers from the west – the avocet and Arkansas kingbird.

What does the Mattamuskeet refuge do for the waterfowl that could not be done in the same area of wild country without management? This is a fair question, and its answer gives one of the chief reasons for establishing wildlife refuges in selected localities over the country.

The answer is this: by cultivating or managing the marshlands by scientifically tested principles, the land within the refuge is made many times as productive of natural foods as outside areas not under management.

Underlying and determining the character of the management activities are the great recurrent rhythms of nature. Moving over the marshlands as over a stage, the passing seasons bring the cyclic sweep of two great series of events, one in the animal world, the other in the world of plants. The two cycles are directly related. In the spring the marshes that have been brown and desolate come alive with fresh green shoots of plants like the sedges, bulrushes, and salt grass. Spring yields to summer, the hot sun is over the land, the plants grow, flower, mature their seeds. By the time autumn begins to paint the leaves of the gums and the swamp maples, the marshes are loaded with food – the roots, seeds, and shoots of the plants that waterfowl eat.

Now the fall migrations of the birds – the sweep of the other, the animal cycle – fill the marshlands with ducks, swans, and geese come down from the north. Here in the marshes they find the food they must have if they are to survive the winter.

By late winter or early spring the food supplies are exhausted. But once more the urge to migrate is stirring among the waterfowl, and soon the marshes are left empty. In the stillness and heat of summer the recuperative powers of nature set to work to build up new food supplies.

To get the largest possible production of waterfowl foods out of the marshes at Mattamuskeet, the manager operates the refuge with certain aims in mind. Among the most important, he must keep down the brush that is forever moving into the marshes. Geese, swans, and ducks feed in marshes but not in thickets, so every foot invaded by the fast-growing brush is a corresponding loss of waterfowl pasture. Today at Mattamuskeet you can see hundreds of acres of productive marsh which have been won back from the thickets by burning, disking, and cutting.

Control of the water level is another method used by the refuge manager to increase the production of food plants. In the spring he lowers the water by manipulating the gates in the canals that lead from the lake to Pamlico Sound, about 8 miles distant. This lays bare extensive areas where 3-edge, 4-square, and other food plants can grow. In the fall the gates are closed, and the marsh areas flooded to serve the food plants in the way the birds prefer – under a few inches of water.

By late January or early February, most of the natural marsh food has been eaten. The thousands of birds that remain must have food to fuel their bodies on the long spring migration. This is a season of busy activity on the refuge. Crews of men move out into the marshes, starting fires in the marsh grass. Keeping the fires carefully under control, many hundreds of acres are burned. Less than a week later, new green shoots are coming up all over the marsh. Within ten days the geese have moved in to harvest this new food supply.

By thus coordinating the management of the refuge with the natural cycles of plant and animal life, the Fish and Wildlife Service has developed Mattamuskeet to the point where it now supports much larger flocks of waterfowl than came to this region in former years.

8

[ca. 1942]

Memo to Mrs. Eales on
Under the Sea-Wind

LITERARY NOTICE
for
Under the Sea-Wind,
Carson’s first book on the life of the ocean, was prematurely cut short when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor barely a month after the book’s publication. Eager nevertheless to assist Simon and Schuster’s efforts to publicize her book, Carson completed an author questionnaire at the request of a Mrs. Eales in the publisher’s marketing department. In this synopsis, Carson describes with exceptional candor how she came to write the book, how she conceived its parts and main characters, and what qualities made her approach to ocean life unique.

Although
Under the Sea-Wind
sold fewer than two thousand copies before it went out of print in 1946, the book was given new life when Oxford University Press republished it in 1952 and it justly assumed a place on the
New York Times
best-seller list along with
The Sea Around Us.

Background of the Book

IT ISN
’
T AT ALL SURPRISING
that I should have written a book about the sea, because as long as I can remember it has fascinated me. Even as a child – long before I had ever seen it – I used to imagine what it would look like, and what the surf sounded like. Since I grew up in an inland community, where we hadn’t even a migrating seagull, I had to wait a long time to have my curiosity satisfied. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until I had graduated from college and gone to the famous Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that I saw the ocean. There, too, I began to get my first real understanding of the real sea world – that is, the world as it is known by shore birds and fishes and beach crabs and all the other creatures that live in the sea or along its edge. At Woods Hole we used to go out in a little dredging boat and steam up and down Vineyard Sound or Buzzards Bay. After a time, with much violent rocking of the little boat, the dredge would be pulled up and its load of sea animals, rocks, shells, and seaweeds spilled out on the deck. Most of these animals I had never seen before; some I had never heard of. But there they were before me, dripping with sea water and perhaps clinging to a piece of rock or shell or weed that they had brought up from their home down there on the bottom of the sound. Probably that was when I first began to let my imagination go down through the water and piece together bits of scientific fact until I could see the whole life of those creatures as they lived them in that strange sea world.

In a way,
Under the Sea-Wind
had its beginning about six years ago, when I happened to write a short essay on life in the sea. A friend who read it suggested that I send it to the
Atlantic.
At first I didn’t take the suggestion very seriously, for I let the essay lie in my desk for about a year; but finally I polished it up a little and sent it to the
Atlantic.
In due time a letter of acceptance came. A few weeks after the essay – which was called “Undersea” – had been published, I received a letter from Mr. Quincy Howe, who is editor-in-chief of the firm of Simon and Schuster. Mr. Howe said he had enjoyed the undersea article, and wondered if I was planning a book on the same general subject; if so, would I care to talk it over with him? As a matter of fact, I had never seriously considered writing a book, but naturally that letter put ideas in my head. I went to New York and we talked over a general plan for a book which would give the non-biologist a true picture of life in the sea. It was left that when I got around to writing such a book, the firm would like to consider it for publication. Actually, it was nearly two years later that the definite plan of the present book took form in my mind and I began to write, doing it all during my evenings and Saturday afternoons and Sundays. After I had written the first section the publishers signed a contract for publication of the book, and from that time on the writing went a lot faster, because a deadline had been set and I was writing under pressure, which sometimes isn’t a bad thing.

General Plan and Viewpoint of Book

I believe that most popular books about the ocean are written from the viewpoint of a human observer – usually a deep-sea diver or sometimes a fisherman – and record his impressions and interpretations of what he saw. I was determined to avoid this human bias as much as possible. The ocean is too big and vast and its forces are too mighty to be much affected by human activity. So I decided that the author as a person or a human observer should never enter the story, but that it should be told as a simple narrative of the lives of certain animals of the sea. As far as possible, I wanted my readers to feel that they were, for a time, actually living the lives of sea creatures. To bring this about I had first, of course, to think myself into the role of an animal that lives in the sea. I had to forget a lot of human conceptions. For example, time measured by the clock means nothing to a shorebird. His measure of time is not an hour, but the rise and fall of the tides – exposing his food supply or covering it again. Again, light and dark may mean merely the difference between the time when you are relatively safe and the time when an enemy can find you easily. All these adjustments in my thinking had to be made; and in writing the book I was successively a sandpiper, a crab, a mackerel, an eel, and half a dozen other animals. Hardest of all, I had to get the feel of a world that was entirely water.

I very soon realized that the central character of the book was the ocean itself. The smell of the sea’s edge, the feeling of vast movements of water, the sound of waves, crept into every page, and over all was the ocean as the force dominating all its creatures.

In order to give a fairly complete picture of sea life, I divided the book into three parts, one to picture the life of the shore, one for the open sea, and one for the deep abyss. In each of these parts, or books, I told the life story of one particular animal.

Book I – Edge of the Sea

Almost everyone knows the sea beach in a general way. Unfortunately, though, most people stay within sight of the piers and boardwalks of a resort beach, and never become acquainted with the animals of the beach, except for the few whose remains may be found in the litter along the high-tide mark. I always seek out the wild sections of beach that are usually to be found a few miles above or below a resort. One particularly lovely stretch of wild ocean beach in North Carolina forms the setting for most of the chapters about the shore. It is a beach that is separated from the mainland towns by a wide sound, fringing one of those narrow strips of outer land which the Carolinians call “banks.” I have visited that beach in spring and fall to watch the comings and goings of the shorebirds. I have spent hours on end among the dunes or on the beach, saturating myself with the sounds of water and the feel of hot sun and blowing sand. I have watched the fiddler crabs and ghost crabs, and, in autumn, seen the mullet fishermen draw their seines on the beach. This was the background for the story of a bird that almost everyone who has visited the beach has seen as it runs along at the edge of the waves – a special kind of sandpiper called a sanderling. I chose the sanderling as the main character of the shore section because of its fascinating life story. The sanderling is one of the bird tribe’s long-range migrants. I believe that few of the people who like to watch the sanderling on the beach have any idea of the hardships these birds endure, or the long and hard flights they make. Some of them actually travel more than eight thousand miles every spring and return the same distance every fall. These little birds winter as far south as Patagonia, at the extreme southern end of South America, and in the spring they migrate northward, most of them beyond the Arctic Circle, and some to within a few miles of the North Pole. This seems a strange place to choose to rear their young, but many of the shore and ocean birds nest in the Arctic. Probably they are obeying some instinct inherited from forgotten generations of ancestors. We see the sanderlings in the spring as they are migrating up along our coastline, then, about May and June in Maryland and Virginia, all but a few immature birds disappear. This is during the period when the adult birds are nesting on the Arctic tundras. When they first arrive in the Arctic the snow and ice have not melted, food is scarce, and late-season blizzards may take a heavy toll of life. Eventually, spring comes even to these frozen tundras, the birds prepare their nests and lay their eggs, and the young are hatched. There are many enemies abroad on the tundra. Some of these are the large snowy owls, the foxes, and hawk-like birds of the gull tribe known as jaegers. After the chicks have hatched, the mother sanderling takes great precautions to hide the egg shells, so that enemies will not be led to the nest by them. Usually she leads the young away from the nest when they are only a few days or even hours old, if she has been frightened by marauders. Very quickly, however, the young become able to take care of themselves. As soon as they are no longer needed, the old birds leave for the south. The young remain behind until their wing feathers have grown strong enough for the long journey down across the two Americas. By late July the older sanderlings are seen on our beaches again, and a few weeks later we begin to see young birds.

This is the story that I have told in the first section, against a background of Carolina beach and Arctic tundra.

Book II – The Gull’s Way

The central character of the second section is another long-distance migrant, but this time a fish. In this section, which pictures the strange world of the open sea, I have written the biography of a mackerel, beginning, as biographies usually do, with the birth of my central character. There could scarcely be any stranger place in which to begin life than the surface waters of the open sea. Yet these waters are a sort of nursery where literally hundreds of kinds of sea creatures deposit their eggs, and where the young get their start in life. Parenthood in the sea is a relatively simple matter, for as a usual thing the parents do not care for their young and probably never even see them.

The open sea
is
a strange place for anything so fragile as a mackerel egg to be set adrift: just sky and water, and great silences, but teeming, incredibly abundant life. In the first place there are the eggs of all sorts of animals – fishes, crabs, shrimps, clams, worms, starfish, and the like. From all these eggs larvae or young animals are hatching. Almost immediately, each larva is on its own resources. It begins to swim about and seek food, eating almost anything that is small enough to take into its mouth, or to overpower and swallow. All sorts of enemies of young fishes prowl through these surface waters: small jellyfish with enormous appetites, little, transparent worms with sharp, biting jaws, schools of small fishes that eat smaller fishes, and larger fishes that eat them. Just to give an idea of some of the hazards of sea life: a full-grown mackerel may produce half a million eggs in a season, or a large cod may shed three or four million. But the destruction of the young is so enormous that, on the average, only two young mackerel or cod will survive out of all the potential offspring produced by the mother fish during her whole life. This ceaseless ebb and flow of life – the constant destruction of individuals contrasted with the survival of whole species – is one of the most impressive spectacles which the sea presents.