Why I got up at 3 a.m. to drive for two hours

Seeing open-ocean species from land, late summer pollen, and declaring racism a public health crisis in Quincy

Getting up at 3 a.m. on a Sunday to drive two hours away and return the same day is not something I’d recommend doing very often. For me, adrenaline keeps me alert as well as aware of a general ache in every limb, so there’s no danger of falling asleep. That comes after returning home around lunch, the rest of the day completely shot.

This is the brutal little trip that Boston-area birders subject themselves to in order to get to Race Point, the sandy end of Cape Cod, at dawn. The ocean there shoves itself past the land’s end into Cape Cod Bay. Open-ocean animal species, following the prevailing currents, appear within sight of Race Point beach, making it a one-of-a-kind place in the region to see bird species that spend much of their time in pelagic or open water—birders call them “pelagics” as shorthand. The early-morning dash is necessary for a variety of reasons: seabird activity is best in the early morning, traffic gets much worse as soon as the day begins, and the heat gets cranked up once the sun gains some altitude. Once you realize that seeing a similar list of birds requires access to a boat (see: The Big Year, accurate in this detail), you start to understand why the trip by land might seem worth it.

The only consolation on the drive is that, in summer, the sky starts brightening around 4 a.m.

This is one of those experiences that tests your convictions and reveals what your priorities are. In early August, when two birder friends offered to meet up for a socially-distanced trip to Race Point, the stated goal was for me to see the four species of shearwaters possible: Manx, Great, Sooty, and Cory’s. Shearwaters are pelagic birds in the petrel family. Their names carry a glint of high-seas glamour. These would be “life birds” for me, because I’d never seen them. Birders expend great effort chasing “state birds” and “year birds” (firsts for their year list), so the allure of a life bird goes without saying.

But was I really just going to add ticks to my bird list? That’s what hits you around 4:15, when the sky becomes periwinkle and awareness begins to creep from the reptilian brain into the frontal lobe, the seat of doubts and second-guesses.

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If birding was just collecting a list of bird names, I’d never pick up a pair of binoculars. For me, it’s as much about the place and the whole ecosystem as about individual birds. The thing about bird species is that they tell you things about habitat. If you hear the rattle call of a kingfisher from within trees, there’s probably a stream or pond there where the kingfisher is diving for fish. A flycatcher is here to catch flies, and that hopefully suggests a healthy invertebrate community. Seeing the russet flanks of a swamp sparrow tells you not just that you’re in a wetland—you already knew that—but further, that a bird which seeks out and depends on wetlands for breeding habitat has seen this place and found it suitable to support life. The dozens of other species present add more shades and nuance to the picture of exactly what kind of habitat it is and where you are in the progression of the seasons.

For me, finding habitat-dependent birds helps mark the value of the habitat. It says that this marsh, beach, or forest is enough to support a living thing I recognize. The point is: that’s not a given in our world. There are countless places that once supported characteristic species and no longer do so, due to suburban sprawl, logging, plowing, wetland draining—the suite of threats to a place’s endemic wildlife.

Birds are a signal of larger realities. That signal just happens to be the most detectable for me, rather than the most important signal overall.

The thing that birds signal at Race Point is that you’re in a strange zone, a meeting place of the ocean and the shore. My two trips there—once in February and once in August this year—helped rewrite my understanding of Cape Cod from a vague association with the Kennedy’s and pricey real estate. Now instead I think of a northern gannet flashing along the horizon, its huge wings held out for a steady glide. Two right whales courting a few dozen yards offshore, rolling around in the shallows and spouting. Hundreds of seabirds diving at a school of fish in a turbulent tide-rip. Seals giving you a curious look. Always, the unseen but felt presence of sharks.

***

Arriving at dawn at Race Point Beach, part of the National Parks system, you get in before the ticket gate is operating. High dunes separate the parking lot from the beach. Earlier this month, I pulled up to find fellow birders Dan and Rachel taking pictures of a red fox patiently eating a leftover salad in the parking lot.

Leaving the salad fox behind, we began our trudge of two miles or more to get to “the rip”—the place near shore where racing currents stir up sediments and prey for schools of fish, which in turn attract birds.

Along the way, least terns knifed into the water, squeaking like bath toys. Adult piping plovers led juveniles, scrambling from the marram grass to the waves and back again.

With Dan and Rachel’s help, I slowly learned the distant profiles of the shearwaters. Sooty shearwaters, dark above and on the belly. Great shearwaters with a white collar on their neck. Manx shearwaters with strongly contrasting black upperparts and bright white bellies. Cory’s shearwaters flapping slowly like gulls. On the one hand, it’s a matter of distinguishing far-off patterns of black, gray and white. But through their low, confident flight along the waves, the fish they dove at, and their unseen origins on island breeding colonies, these birds marked the place as different, as tied to the open ocean—somewhere different than the muddy bays and tidal rivers where I started the day.

Great shearwaters zipping by.

Just offshore, the Cape’s ever-changing sandbars and currents, the cause of thousands of shipwrecks, attracted fishing boats that seem too small for the scale and force of the place. I envied the close looks at seabirds that the anglers were getting, but not the currents they contended with in the boats. The tides here are powerful. You can see it from a distant look in aerial photos—the way the sand is swept around the point. The beach is reshaped every day. Pools and channels appear where smooth sand was yesterday.

The rip that birders (and birds) are looking for is visible as a distinct line in the surf: two masses of water pushing past each other, creating turbulent flow. At the beach near the rip, we met up with a long-time Cape birder named Peter—the first person we’d seen in miles. All four species of shearwaters we hoped for were diving at fish there, letting me compare them directly and gain more confidence. For the other birders, it was not a particularly exciting day—they had seen these shearwaters many times, and there wasn’t much else new to see that day, despite some interesting gulls of late.

Peter spotted a Wilson’s storm petrel, a tiny seabird that’s among the most abundant birds on the planet. I wasn’t able to fix it in my binoculars—maybe next time.

But of course, new birds aren’t the only point of being here. Nearly every birder I know is a holistic naturalist rather than a single-taxon obsessive. They can tell you about plants, dragonflies, and in the Northeast, whales and fish, too. When there aren’t many birds to see, birders talk about what might happen next week, what they saw five years ago, making predictions and comparisons, trying to locate themselves precisely in place and time. I just try to listen and learn.

Around 8:30 or so, the birds had slowed down and we began chatting, taking breaks from staring out to sea. Someone shared a gnarly story about a seal and a white shark. I glimpsed a spout of water out of the corner of my eye. Sadly, it didn’t occur to me to say “there she blows.” Cameras and binoculars swiveled to the source. A huge gray back surfaced and arced underwater, with a proportionally tiny fin towards the rear. A fin whale, it was decided. It’s second largest whale on the planet, and primarily a deep-water traveler. Yet here it was.

“That’s a life whale for me, I guess,” I said. Murmurs of approval. When the wind isn’t howling, I try to speak in murmurs. By 9 a.m., it’s been a long day already.

Flower of the week: Field wormwood

Field wormwood (Artemisia campestris) is one of those plants that’s perhaps less appreciated as a flower, because the flowers aren’t showy. But look closer and you’ll see that like goldenrods, it’s a member of the sunflower family (Asteraceae.) It’s a tough-as-nails plant that lives in dry sand, disturbed ground, or a rock with a sprinkling of soil. Wormwood is also, along with other Artemisia species like mugwort, a big producer of sneeze-inducing pollen.

That’s right folks—it’s late summer pollen season. Your newsletter host is a proudly allergic individual (though these days I do my sneezing well away from anyone else.) My allergies limit my ability to put up with being outside for long stretches of time before feeling completely miserable and wanting to crawl into a small, dark, hypoallergenic box.

There are lots of things that can change your experience of the outdoors, from your background and past experiences to whether you got enough sleep last night, and seasonal allergies are just one mild example. I’m one of those ecologists that tries to consider people’s differing tolerances for environmental conditions on outings, i.e., not saying things like, “If you can’t tough it out today, you don’t deserve to be here”, believing that dehydration is somehow redemptive, or claiming that only extreme field work is real field work. (I’m saying this because these ideas are incredibly common!) That ends up undermining efforts to make ecology and outdoor experiences inclusive and welcoming. We all have our own challenges and our own ways to contribute to conservation. Keep drinking that water!

Racism is a public health crisis

This week in Quincy, we marched on City Hall to demand that Mayor Koch declare that racism is a public health crisis, as the mayor of Boston and other nearby towns have done but which he has resisted.

Methods of oppressing people overlap, as the speakers that night pointed out. Access to healthcare is distributed unequally. Quincy, a segregated town in a segregated metro area, is the largest city in the state without a hospital and may soon lack an ER. Developers are building a natural gas compression station that places polluting facilities and the risk of explosive accidents next to communities of color in Quincy. If you start paying attention to nature in a U.S. city, you quickly realize that access to parks and green spaces is unequal and driven by decades of segregation. The same system that allocates green space unequally also leads to police violence targeting Black people: white supremacy in our economy and in our political institutions.

Declaring that racism a public health crisis recognizes these connections and acknowledges that racism in healthcare, in the placement of polluting facilities, in education, in policing and so many other systems leads to worse health outcomes for Black people. Saying that would be a meaningful first step for Quincy to begin addressing its problems.

Questions or comments? Send it to the mailbag: possum.notes.substack@gmail.com

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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.