Avian holocaust

Some months ago I added a quote from Margaret Atwood's Payback to the side bar on this blog in which she expressed some hope for albatross species. In an essay published in The Guardian yesterday she writes:

In the United States, power lines kill 130 to 174 million birds a year – many of them raptors such as hawks, or waterfowl, whose large wingspans can touch two hot wires at a time, resulting in electrocution, or who smash into the thin power lines without seeing them (think piano wire). Cars and trucks collide with and kill between 60 and 80 million annually in the US, and tall buildings – especially those that leave their lights on all night – are a major hazard for migrating birds, leading to between a hundred million and a billion bird deaths annually. Add in lighted communication towers, which also kill large numbers of bats, and can account for as many as 30,000 bird deaths each on a bad night – thus 40 to 50 million deaths a year, and due to double as more towers are built. Agricultural pesticides directly kill 67 million birds per year, with many more deaths resulting from accumulated toxins that converge at the top of the food chain, and from starvation as the usual food of insectivores disappears. Cats polish off approximately 39 million birds in the state of Wisconsin alone; multiply that by the number of states in America, and then do the calculations for the rest of the world: the numbers are astronomical. Then there are the factory effluents, the oil spills and oil sands, the unknown chemical compounds we're pouring into the mix. Nature is prolific, but at such high kill rates it's not keeping up, and bird species – even formerly common ones – are plummeting all over the world.

'Intolerable beauty'

Chris Jordan's photographs of the plastic in the stomachs of baby albatrosses on Midway atoll are, he says, an attempt to communicate what is "an incredible tragedy symbolic on many levels":

Before going out there we met with a group of Hawaiian elders and received their teachings from Hawaiian spiritual tradition..one of the women said to me ‘don’t think of the birds as being victims. She said in the Hawaiian tradition they are sentient beings intentionally bringing to themselves the garbage of the world as a way of passing on a message. And whether or not you accept that as being true, I thought it was fascinating this idea that there’s a message that is being transmitted through the death of these birds...

...It was a very bizarre experience to feel the aesthetic beauty of something so horrible and yet [it] can be a portal...If I took ugly photographs of a scary subject no one would want to look at them. So I think by presenting these things in a beautiful way it not only honors the complexity of the issue, it also draws the viewer into...a difficult conversation with himself that he might not otherwise be willing to have.

In a statement on his web site, Jordan says:

...The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.

All of this is convincing and useful. But we also need the phrase 'intolerable ugliness'.

Widening gyre

One Rainbow runner...had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.

-- from Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash by Lindsey Hoshaw.

At the time of writing the background to the header of this blog is a detail of trash found in the stomach of an albatross. See also photos by Chris Jordan.

Alba-cam

'From the Eye of the Albatrosses: A Bird-Borne Camera Shows an Association between Albatrosses and a Killer Whale in the Southern Ocean':

The images from our albatross-borne camera show at least four albatrosses (including the camera-mounted bird) actively following a killer whale while it was breaking the sea surface. Only a few previous studies have documented the association between albatrosses and killer whales, and these were mostly in shallow waters...

Although it is still difficult to quantify how often black-browed albatrosses associate with killer whales in the open ocean, our results, together with ship-based observations..., suggest that these associations may occur more frequently than previously anticipated and may be a part of foraging repertoire of albatrosses.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007322

Stuffed

The centre pages of today's Guardian newspaper feature a photograph of brightly coloured bits of plastic arranged neatly in rows and shading nicely through the colours of the rainbow, and from white to black. Individually, the objects are junk and jetsum: a battered cigarette lighter with "my shop" on the side, a mangled toothbrush, bottle tops. Together, so arranged, they resemble semi-precious stones laid on dark velvet in a cabinet. You wouldn't be surprised to see it as a collage of 'found art' in a degree show.

The punch comes in the caption. All these pieces were found in the stomach of a fledgling Laysan albatross at Kure atoll, and killed it.

I cannot find the photo online, but here is an image from the same imagino-morpho-gut-space, posted by Zern Liew in 2007.


See also here