The Ragged Edge of the World (32 page)

On Midway the three species of albatross coexist amicably. Laysan albatross are by far the most numerous, followed by the slightly larger black-footed albatross. There are also a few short-tailed albatross, the largest of the northern albatross species, distinctive because of their golden heads. After watching a mating dance of the black-footed albatross, Stu deadpanned: “Well, the stereotype holds. The black-footed birds are definitely better dancers.”

In our wanderings we came across black-footed and Laysan albatross cohabiting. Andy was amused and speculated on how these couples came about: “It was late. . . . I had one too many squid. . . .” No one seems to know whether these mixed families work out.

One of the pleasures of Midway is that there are almost no motorized vehicles. The tiny island is ideally suited to bicycles, and that's what we used to get around. One of the group, a poised young woman from the United Arab Emirates named Suaad Alharthi, had never learned to ride, unfortunately, and so for the first few days she used a cumbersome three-wheeler. Since we were on what is possibly the best place on earth to learn to ride a bike—a flat piece of land with no cars and vast empty expanses of pavement for runways and aprons—I took it upon myself to teach her. There was never a possibility of driving off the road, so the process took about twenty minutes. All she had to do, after all, was learn to turn into a fall if the bike started to lean over.

Islands tend to attract eccentrics. The management of the island infrastructure has been outsourced to Chugach McKinley Inc., a Native American-owned company. Our administrative contact was a cheerful Inuit woman named Darlene, and at first it was a bit startling to be dealing with an Eskimo on a subtropical island. Darlene, however, is an unusual Inuit, professing to hate the cold—“I was always freezing in Alaska!” She doesn't like fish, moreover, or birds, for that matter. She seemed to like us, though, and cheerfully joined us for meals and the occasional beer at the Captain Brooks (named for the sea captain who stumbled on Midway in 1859), a small, airy bar built on the low dunes on the north beach.

Part of the study routine was to take trips out to various parts of the atoll. John Klavitter, the resident ranger, took us out to Eastern Island, a virtually featureless patch of deteriorating runway, sand and brush, to see Laysan duck and some of the other exotic birds that make it their home. Though the Laysan duck was once widespread through the Hawaiian Islands, hunting and habitat loss had reduced the world's population to a mere eleven members in 1911, before efforts to protect it began. A century later it remains the most endangered duck in the Northern Hemisphere.

It's easy to see why: The bird adapted to conditions without humans and, indeed, without mammal predators. Over the millennia the birds grew to prefer duckwalking to flying, and even lost some of their primary feathers. Before the appearance of humans and introduced species like rabbits (which eat the vegetation that sustains the bugs that sustain the ducks), the only real hazard for the ducks was curious albatross, which occasionally picked up chicks, trying to figure out what they were. Dave Johnston said that the ducks have learned to bark to scare off approaching albatross. As part of a recovery plan, a number of ponds were dug on Eastern Island, and the ducks were introduced. The effort has been incredibly successful, with up to 200 nesting pairs happily snapping up brine flies.

We got a full dose of Midway's other avian species—noddies, boobies, tropic birds and terns—as we explored Eastern Island. White terns, also called fairy terns, hovered around us. Andy told us that if we were patient and held our hands in the air, the fairy terns might land on them. Some of the group tried this, although I didn't hear of any success. One of the students, Leah Medley, who often seemed to be enjoying a private joke, looked at me seriously and announced, “I've decided that if a fairy tern lands on my hand, I'm going to make it my favorite bird.”

Midway also serves as a refuge for a number of other endangered species. Monk seals and green sea turtles haul out on the beaches, acrobatic Hawaiian spinner dolphins fly through the lagoons, and fish that have become rare elsewhere, such as giant trevally, are common here.

Almost every species on the island has some human agency or agent studying it and protecting it. On Midway, at least, each animal has a guardian angel. And while all this scientific firepower and goodwill has definitely improved the prospects for the local species, it may not be enough.

Despite endangered species protection and the security of the Midway Atoll refuge, for instance, Hawaiian monk seal numbers are not really recovering to the degree that Dave Johnston and other marine mammal specialists have hoped. There are about 1,300 monk seals left in the world, 60 of which make Midway their home. Monk seals are vulnerable to many threats, including plastics, but their plight may also be an indicator of a force that threatens every corner of the earth: global warming.

As Dave explained it, monk seals, like seabirds, look for boundaries and transition zones in the ocean for feeding opportunities. While albatross use their eyesight from far above, marine mammals have to find these zones from below, using their hearing, their senses of taste and touch, and their sonar. They listen for bubbles produced by turbulence, they use their sonar to detect changes in the thermocline (the boundary between warm surface water and cooler waters below), they taste the water to determine its salinity, and they use their whiskers to feel currents and track fish wakes.

Monk seals deploy all these abilities to find what is called the Transition Zone Chlorophyll Front (TZCF), a 200-kilometer-wide transition zone that separates the relatively sterile subtropical gyres in the North Pacific from the chlorophyll-rich sub-Arctic gyres. As the front moves north and south with the seasons, it fertilizes massive stretches of the ocean by bringing south nutrient-rich waters from the north, as well as by stirring up nutrients through its eddies. Apart from monk seals, white sharks, sea turtles, seabirds, and northern species like elephant seals and orca all join the party.

This moveable feast tends to hover between 22 and 30 degrees North in the fall and spring, said Dave, and then moves north of 40 degrees in the summer. Midway lies at 28 degrees North, so monk seals don't need to venture far to get a good meal when the front's nearby. Some years, though, the front does not come down as far as Midway, and that can have fatal consequences for seal pups within their first two years of life. In 1999 the front never fell below 32 degrees North. With no injection of nutrients, the pups born that year had a low survival rate.

Johnston stressed that the monk seals evolved to deal with climate variability, but he believes that their high mortality is a function of cumulative human impacts. For instance, in the deep past the seals might have migrated to the main islands of the Hawaiian chain in times of stress, but most of their haul-outs there have long since been given over to tourist development.

With their enormous range, albatross have far greater flexibility in seeking out feeding grounds, but they still need land to build their nests and raise their young. Unfortunately, almost none of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are more than a few feet above sea level. Dave ticked off the likely losses under very conservative sea-level-rise assumptions in this century: French Frigate Shoals would lose 43 percent of its area; Pearl and Hermes Reef, 31 percent; Midway, up to 67 percent; and so on.

On balance, Midway is a happy story, a story of humans atoning for past sins, of bloodshed giving way to life, of nature's resilience, of the exhilarating freedom of the albatross and their admirable lives, of a safe sanctuary on this beleaguered planet. But, like every story at the ragged edge of the world, it is a good story in the sense that a story of heroism and selflessness during a war is a good story: humans undertaking something elevating, but within a context of fear, death and destruction.

I
've had the privilege of traveling with Pygmies in the African rainforest on several different occasions. From my first encounter I felt a bond that went beyond mere respect for the preternatural skills they displayed in the forest. Almost invariably Pygmies have proven to be good company, possessed of an easy sense of humor, and completely devoid of the passive-aggressiveness that all too often characterizes encounters between locals and expatriates in sub-Saharan Africa. When I was in the Ivory Coast, hostility toward whites bubbled just beneath the surface, and in both Francophone and English-speaking Africa, undercurrents of tension and resentment tended to make official and social encounters forced and exhausting—probably for both sides. With Pygmies, however, racial politics never intruded on any encounter.

Mike Fay, the explorer-botanist, has probably spent more time with Pygmies in their element than any other American during the past several years, and he, too, has noticed the absence of resentment. Fay's opinion is that the Pygmies' confidence in their forest skills makes it easy for them to approach expatriates on their own terms. Pygmies admire the white people's ability to navigate the modern economy, Fay once told me, and their attitude is, “You whites are good at certain things that we aren't good at, and we Pygmies are good at certain things that you aren't good at.”

The key to their confidence lies in an important qualifying phrase—“in their element.” Their element is the rainforest. Pygmies encountered outside of the rainforest all too often come across as pathetic displaced people displaying all the pathologies of the dislocated, including heavy drinking and the breakdown of family and social structures. In the forest, however, these same people thrive. Fay has seen this many times, and I've witnessed it as well.

The intractable problem facing Pygmies is that all the things they excel at take place in a setting that is vanishing by the minute. Pygmy culture endows its people with extraordinary knowledge about the workings of the forest and the habits of its creatures, but those who have acquired these skills from their elders have fewer and fewer places to deploy them.

My first experience with Ba'Aka Pygmies was on my initial forays from Bayanga in the Central African Republic. With Andrea Turkalo and Nick Nichols, I went into the forests around the town with a Ba'Aka Pygmy named Teti and some of his confreres. Andrea relied upon the Pygmies in her research on trying to determine what forest fruits, berries and nuts the gorillas ate, and how their diet overlapped with that of human hunter-gatherers. Pygmies have to be familiar with these foods as a source of nutrition, and they need to know how to recognize seeds embedded in scat in order to know what animals have been passing by and what they have been eating. When we came upon a pile of dung near a tree, Teti casually remarked, “Leopard.” When I asked when it had been there, he replied, “Last night.”

Although Andrea had by then studied 1,100 samples of gorilla dung, her specialized point of view had its drawbacks. On a trail, when we came upon a seed, she would recognize it only when Teti mentioned its name. “I'm more used to seeing these seeds coming out than going in,” she remarked.

Another, more impressive display of Pygmy knowledge came just a few days later. On another of my trips out of Bayanga I went to visit Bai Hoku, a clearing near where gorilla researcher Melissa Remus had set up a research station, again accompanied by Andrea, Nick and Andrea's Pygmy assistants. Before setting off, Bakombe, one of the Pygmies, spied an assortment of seeds that the researchers had collected and arrayed on top of a stump. He instantly started to identify the trees from which each seed had come and what creatures had eaten it. The assortment was supposed to be limited to fruits consumed by gorillas, but Bakombe picked up one and, speaking Lingala, said that only people ate it. Andrea confirmed that Bakombe was right, and the seed should not have been included.

During our exploratory hikes we got a taste of how the Pygmies used their knowledge of gorillas' eating habits. Teti pulled some
mosabe
berries off a branch by the trail to see if they were ripe. If they were, gorillas were more likely to be in the area. Off the trail we came upon the fruit of
taebor montannu;
one of our trackers picked it up, identified it as gorilla food and gave us its Pygmy name,
mogaminza
.

While the average Pygmy's knowledge of the forest dwarfs that of all but the most erudite tropical biologists, and while they respect the forest for its bounty, few have any sense that the rainforest can be depleted or have any particular passion for protecting it. As we hiked we passed a five-foot-thick tree that other Pygmies had cut down to get at a honey-filled hive in its upper branches—about as wasteful a use of the forest as one could imagine. Pygmies don't see themselves as having the capability of killing off the forest, and at least the Pygmies I met had not yet realized that others might have that power. Throughout the Congo logging opens the forest to poachers, who quickly kill off game, but even though the Pygmies depend on hunting, those I spoke with did not make the connection of the inverse relationship between their livelihood and logging. One, when asked whether logging ruined the forest, shrugged and replied in effect, “We're just working for the white man.” Another, thinking of the cash that loggers bring, quipped, “We eat money very well.”