A 10-16 foot white shark

Better bird names, a shark story, and flower of the week

Bird names for birds

In brief: there has been much hand-wringing in the bird world over the effort to rename McCown’s Longspur, a bird named “in honor” of a major general in the Confederate army. John P. McCown fired a shotgun at a flock of birds in Texas in 1851, found an unknown species among the dead, put it in a bag, and sent it to a naturalist buddy, who named the bird after him. McCown subsequently became a not-so-effective general in the war to defend chattel slavery. We continue to keep his name in circulation nearly 150 years later in referring to a vulnerable grassland bird that deserves a much better label. This type of name, an “honorific,” tells you nothing about the bird’s appearance or biology. Some honorifics pay tribute to people who, like McCown, were part of the slave-owning oligarchy or helped carry out Native American removal and genocide (in his case, both.)

It’s past time to ditch honorific names and replace them with descriptive, ecologically meaningful names: bird names for birds. But many white birders are hot and bothered about changing anything in their hobby. The most recent eruption I’ve seen was in the Missouri birding listserv. Tell you what, if getting rid of a racist name ruins your hobby for you, that just might be a signal of some larger issues. Rather than a slippery slope, this is the smallest positive change we can make towards the much larger goal of a truly inclusive and anti-racist ornithology community—the kind of community envisioned by the #BlackBirdersWeek initiative. You can sign a petition to the American Ornithological Society, which regulates common names in English. For more, here’s the Audubon story on honorifics.

Just another Massachusetts shark story

We got to Duxbury beach on a Sunday and found a spot nice and far away from others to set up our chairs. While the air was hot, the water was cold, and few were swimming. I’d run in up to my knees, start to lose feeling in my ankles, and then return to our chairs. A few older people braved the chill to immerse and bob in the light surf.

While I was reading a little later, someone jumped into a wave. A lifeguard blew his whistle and jogged over. Strange, I thought. I didn’t think this was one of those fussy beaches where they tell you not to splash too much.

We decided to move to the other side of the peninsula, along Duxbury bay where the shallow water tends to be much warmer. On the way we saw a flag with a white shark emblem raised at the entrance to the beach. Ah, that must have been why they blew the whistle at that guy, we realized.

As we were packing up for the day we ran into our friends who had camped out at a different spot. One had tried to swim and had also gotten the whistle. He said that the lifeguard told him there had been a shark sighting and that swimming was temporarily closed.

I had seen plenty of alerts like this on the app Sharktivity, which tracks shark sightings in the region. Fishing boats and tagged sharks provide many of the observations. When they’re at a beach, it closes for swimming for an hour and then reopens if the shark isn’t seen again. I had never been at a beach where a sighting had happened, though.

The next day, I checked the app to see if I could find more info. In fact, there was a confirmed sighting for Duxbury from the previous day:

“Coming across from browns bank, 10-16 foot white shark hit a striped bass at the surface. Left the water and went back down.”

Left the water and went back down. Wish I had seen that.

The experience felt strangely ordinary. A shark is seen and the shark flag runs up the pole. We stay out of the water for a while and everyone’s fine. The end. A well-run system continues to protect people.

It wasn’t always like this. Two attacks in Massachusetts in 2018, one fatal, sent the state into a flurry of discussion over what could be done. As early as March 2019, I remember articles pressing the urgency of the issue for the approaching beach season.

Improving data, better and more “ferocious” signage, and beach authorities taking precautions have largely been the approach. Scientists regularly talk to reporters about best practices. Cape Cod added some fancy detector buoys last year, but not all beaches have them. It’s mostly a low-tech public health strategy. Closing swimming for an hour after a sighting doesn’t reduce risk to zero, but it does reduce risk (of an already rare event.) Social shark distancing.

We’re not sending out Quint and co. to hunt the sharks or fining people for swimming in risky areas. Instead, awareness of the issue and local authorities taking it seriously seemed to make a difference in 2019—although we’d want longer-term data to draw big conclusions.

(We’re at the start of 2020 shark season. Sadly, there was a recent fatal attack in Maine but none so far in Mass. It’s the first recorded shark fatality in Maine’s history. Shark abundance could be increasing in Maine as competition for seals and other prey on Cape Cod increases.)

On Cape beaches, the flag language carries a potent message about sharing space with wildlife. Green, yellow, and red flags communicate the risk level for sharks (red meaning no swimming.) But underneath the risk level flag, a purple shark flag always flies, because this is the ocean and sharks live here.

I’m wary of the big fish. I keep an eye on Sharktivity, partly for the stories and partly to inform our beach choices. Chatham on Cape Cod’s elbow and the tip of the Cape are both constantly lighting up with shark sightings in the summer. These are also hotspots for seals, a great white prey item. Much fewer off the South Shore beaches so far. Incidentally, Martha’s Vineyard, the filming location for Jaws, tends to have relatively few sightings. (These patterns are subject to change! Follow local guidance!)

Meanwhile, another threat to public health, COVID-19, suffers from lack of understanding of risk and an insufficient buy-in to the risk-reducing policies. Chatham has taken its sharks seriously, but it’s now a hotspot for COVID transmission.

COVID is of course a much larger threat to human health than sharks. Why compare them at all? Well, as with sharks, 1) low-tech policies can make a difference and 2) the policies only really work if we don’t make lots of exceptions. And enforcement through police and fines tends to just hide risky behavior from view rather than prevent it. A teenage lifeguard can’t arrest you for swimming with a shark—there’s no need for a penalty when we understand the risk. We’ve decided the acceptable number of shark fatalities is zero. If we took some lessons from what’s protecting us from sharks and applied that thinking to COVID, we might be in a better place. Right now it feels like we’re being led by the mayor in Jaws, urging people into the water and trying to salvage the economic boost of beach season: “As you see, it's a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.”

Flower of the week: Sea lavender

Staying with the nautical theme, I thought I’d highlight one of the salty specialties of our local marshes, Carolina sea lavender (Limonium carolinianum.) Its hardiness is suggested by its range: it can grow all the way from Newfoundland to the Gulf Coast. We’ve lost much salt marsh acreage to development and over-fertilization that causes them to literally fall apart. We’re lucky to have a few marshes in Quincy, some quite small. For context, here’s where I took the picture, CVS in the distance:

Nonetheless, they give a glimpse of what makes these ecosystems special—a flower that blooms in salty mud not least among them.

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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.