Rat Island by William Stolzenburg

Author:William Stolzenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

SURFBOARDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS

Within two years of Bill Wood’s arrival, Croll and Tershy’s team had gathered two more linchpins to their Baja campaign. Brad Keitt had come to the team as a young college graduate and old buddy of Tershy’s, with the résumé of an itinerant windsurfer, kayaker, eco-tour guide, and fellow seabird junkie. When Tershy offered Keitt a project in need of a student—involving a mysterious ocean-wandering seabird named the black-vented shearwater, nesting almost exclusively on a little island called Natividad (which also happened to feature a world-class surf break)—Keitt’s decision wasn’t one of yes or no, but whether to pinch himself.

Keitt’s academic questions concerned the natural history of a bird hardly known to science, and in danger of remaining that way forever. The black-vented shearwater bred nowhere else but the northern coast of Baja. More precisely, 95 percent of the world’s black-vented shearwaters gathered each season on the single island of Natividad, an island now swarming with cats.

The original sources of those cats—as hoped-for hunters of mice—were the four hundred or so people of Natividad’s fishing community. The island’s fishermen had come to consider the shearwaters as just another kind of nocturno, a generic term lumping together all burrowing seabirds of the night. Keitt gave them another way to think of the shearwaters. He shared with them his discoveries, of a bird with wings that could fly it all the way to Canadian latitudes, then propel it to incredible depths of the sea in pursuit of little fish. He would relay such tidbits to those making their living diving for abalone and lobster and watch for that aha moment when the particulars hit home. “You mean these birds dive deeper than we go in our scuba gear?”

Keitt took school groups on field trips to the shearwater colony, snaking fiber-optic probes into the birds’ burrows, amazing the kids with live videos of shearwater chicks never before imagined. It was a secret village of birds, hidden all this time, right beneath their feet.

He convinced Natividadans young and old that this amazing and beleaguered bird living in their midst was their bird. Isla Natividad was soon sprouting billboards and T-shirts emblazoned with images of the black-vented shearwater. The school and its soccer team had a new mascot.

When Keitt then showed the villagers what the feral cats were doing to their shearwaters, the massacres amounting to one hundred birds per week, the islanders didn’t just agree that the cats should go; they demanded it.

Keitt’s arrival at island conservation was soon followed by that of Josh Donlan, a long-haired, footloose biology major out of Virginia’s James Madison University. Donlan had capped his college career with a twenty-year moment, deciding that before any grad school or meaningful employment he would sample the good life. After crossing the United States, adventuring all the way to Alaska, he eventually found himself paddling a kayak the length of Baja, on a four-month tour of the Gulf of California. He was drawn to the islands, putting ashore and exploring their miniature universes of evolution.

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