Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson

Author:Rachel Carson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

Indian Summer of the Sea

THE SPIRIT OF THE autumn sea was heard in the voices of the kittiwakes, or frost gulls, who began to arrive in flocks by mid-October. They whirled in thousands over the water, dropping down on arched wings to seize small fish that darted through translucent green. The kittiwakes had come southward from nesting grounds on the cliffs of the Arctic coast and the Greenland ice packs, and with them the first chill breath of winter moved over the graying sea.

There were other signs that autumn had come to the sea. Every day the flights of ocean birds, that in September had poured in thin aerial streams over the coastal waters from Greenland, Labrador, Keewatin, and Baffin Land, swelled in volume as the birds hastened to return to the sea. There were gannets and fulmars, jaegers and skuas, dovekies and phalaropes. Their flocks spread out over all the waters above the continental shelf, where the shoals of surface fishes moved and the plankton herds browsed in the sea.

The gannets were fish eaters that patterned the sky with the white crosses of their bodies as they scanned the sea for prey. Sighting it, they plunged from a hundred feet in the air, and the shock of the heavy body striking the water was broken by a cushion of air sacs under the skin. The fulmars fed on small schooling fish, squids, crustaceans, offal from fishing boats, or any other food that they could seize from the surface, being unable to dive like the gannets. The small dovekies and the phalaropes were eaters of plankton; the jaegers and the skuas lived chiefly on what they could steal from other birds, seldom fishing for themselves.

Few of these birds would see land again until spring. Now they belonged once more to the winter sea, sharing its daylight and darkness, its storms and calms, its sleet and snow and sun and fog.

The yearling mackerel who had left the harbor in late September had at first lived timidly in the open sea, lost in its vastness after the familiar conformations of the harbor. During the three months in the protected cove they had attuned their movements to the rhythms of the tides, feeding on the flood, resting on the ebb. Now the tidal sweep of the surface waters, which here in the open sea, no less than along the coast, yielded to the pull of sun and moon, was almost imperceptible to the young mackerel. For them the tides were lost in the vaster roll of waters. As they roamed the ocean, as yet unfamiliar with its paths of current and varying saltiness, they sought in vain the safe refuges of the harbor, the shadow of the fishing wharfs, the forests of rockweed. Always they must move on into green space.

Scomber and the other yearlings had grown rapidly since they left the harbor, thriving on the rich food of the open ocean. Now in the sixth month of their lives the young fish were from eight to ten inches long—the size fishermen call “tacks.

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