Part 15

In spring and summer the terns are in constant bright evidence over the open water and the sands. The woodpeckers and the sparrows stay with trees or grasses; the terns are birds of the ocean airs and long white shores, their complement and grace. Thousands of terns nest at Tern Island, on the shore of Chatham Harbor, and through the summer months and early fall there are always a great many off Morris Island and Monomoy, diving for fish. They are sharply made, lithe fliers with a nervous excitability that is peculiar to them. Flocks will hover over a stretch of tidal water where schools of small fish are running and they will fairly batter the water, making a loud sound like paddle wheels as they cover it with points of spray. Hundreds, crying harshly, hover some five or six feet up, dropping and rising continually. Many of them dip forward with wings folded slightly, but others, a little higher up, make steeper dives, hovering against the wind, their wings beating hard, to drop, twisting slightly, and then dive with wings back and head down, sharply and precisely. I have thought that terns seldom miss when they have a fish in sight, but during this kind of mass fishing, particularly when they dip forward as if to pick the fish up and try again, it does look like a matter of trial and error. Also, depending on the season, there may be a number of immature birds in the flock that are not as skillful as their elders.

The terns are expert performers in every way. They are small and light with strong, angled wings that can carry them over thousands of miles. They have range, persistence, a bright balance that carries them through the mighty and punishing wilderness in which they live. At the same time, that lovely harsh crying excellence in the form of a tern is fragile, even ephemeral. Terns, in the early period of their lives at least, are expendable, like fish. Common terns especially have large breeding colonies that are extremely vulnerable to human encroachment as well as rats, cats, dogs, skunks, and other marauders, and they definitely need protection. Their existence as a race is hazardous under the best of conditions. The sandy islands or peninsulas which they use for nesting sites may be flooded by storm tides in the spring, destroying thousands of eggs or young birds. An adult tern might live to between fifteen and twenty years of age, although their annual mortality is 23 per cent, and their chance of reaching adulthood is fairly slim, tern mortality in the first year being about 92 per cent.

The hard statistics make short lives of many species, while the sun and sea keep their steady and infinite relationship. There is a quality of sacrifice in all life. Nothing is spared in its duration, and at the same time in the uniqueness of its making, as the fires burn. The results of evolution may seem haphazard in many respects, and the processes of nature to involve enormous waste; but natural continuity holds all things in high honor, through the fine balances of life and death. The forms of fish or tern, with their own transmutations of energy, are as excellent as they are perishable.

The tides run the channels with an almost sentient, purling calm during the burning days of summer and early fall. They lift into marshy shores and over sandy flats, and then subside. Sometimes the fog comes on in the afternoon and the deep foghorn groans through sheets of silver under the wind, a low curtain moving on and parting slightly here and there, the sunlight showing intermittently. Tiny black snails move over the flats at low tide, some absolutely still, others moving slightly with black antennae protruding and their feet probing forward. Small fish dart in the pools and hover in the tidal currents. There is an over-all mewing, chuckling, and crying, with an occasional “huh, huh” from a gull flying slowly overhead, as the light shifts with the breath of wind over water.

Gray and white ring-billed and herring gulls, occasional laughing gulls with black heads and red legs, and terns, preen, stalk, stand off in the distance, and fly up intermittently. Ringed plovers run hurriedly forward over the sands and through the shallows. A yellowlegs, tall and limber, stalks, bobs, and probes along an edge of the shore. Black-bellied plovers, big-headed, short-billed, stocky by comparison, trot through the waters, standing up straight at intervals, while the yellowlegs suddenly races back and forth on its hunt for food, turning back on its shadow. These shore birds fly off fast when disturbed, crying out, the black-bellied plover with a sweet whistle of its own.

Gentle rising and falling of the tide over ribs of sand; swirling fogs; burning sun with spokes slanting down through clouds over the rim of the world, letting in calm soft lights, green and pink and pearly across sand and rivulets and pools, or cruelly glittering diamonds over the water. Light and water and wings flow in and flow past, the motion of ages, all actions being synchronized, as the hovering and diving of the tern is synchronized with the fish it catches, part of the indefinite combinations of things in a universe of motion. Over these waters and receptive sands life crawls or flies, dives, halts, stops, and starts, wildly, with quick hearts beating, or scarcely a heart at all, blind, or vibrant with sight, probing with accuracy and speed or merely moving at random.

They are all elements in a great exchange--this ardor and play of one instant in time, an instant that is equal in importance to all others. I stand here at the apex of one day. Here out of a thousand years is another advent, another chance for action, another use for sight, in the beautiful agreement of all contrary, separate, and divided things.

I remember one evening at Morris Island in the latter part of August, with the day beginning to fall and the surf’s dull roar sounding from the sands of the great beach, a beach behind me, still beyond me, still in a sense not walked. The tide started to ebb, flicking lightly against the shore, lapsing with the evening as if the sea had an easy courtesy of its own, and with the smoky sunset low on the western sky, the waters moved out over gray sands. There was a perfect symmetry to the evening. Terns flew over, light, airy, floating with a swallow’s beat, but deep, sure, and strong. Little sanderlings and red-backed sandpipers, half-seen in the dusk, ran through reflections in the shallow waters at the edge of the tide, part of its coolness and flow, the little waves in banked rows rippling. The birds tripped forward and dipped to the mirrored salmon, copper and crystal in these waters, in a communication. The terns trilled harshly and sometimes their bodies trembled as they beat up against the light wind and changed position. A single herring gull stood still on a hummock at the tide’s edge like an Indian in a ritualistic acceptance of darkness coming on. The order of change and constancy began to take light’s fire and warmth and its colors away, in the graduated motion of the sky, along with all flying elements like the terns, like thought, and the unimagined combinations of being. The wavelets edged out. The sanderlings started to flit off and disappear. Finally there was no turning back the authority of night.

Transcriber’s Notes

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.

Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.