A wild WA island’s seabirds reveal strange signs of change

Editor’s note: Seabirds are among the indicator species that provide rich insight into the health of their ecosystems. This week we share an edited excerpt from Eric Wagner’s new book, “Seabirds as Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island” (University of Washington Press, March 10), in which Wagner follows a team of scientists as they seek to understand how climate change is affecting our region.  

DESTRUCTION ISLAND, when you first see it, is not much to look at: a squat slab of land rising out of the horizon in the North Pacific, about three miles off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula. The island is short, perhaps a few dozen feet in elevation at most, and its top is so flat as to seem planed, with steep bluffs and fingers of sandstone that reach out into the waves. The most notable feature, at least in silhouette, is the lighthouse that sticks up from the island’s western edge like a toothpick.

Completed in 1891, the lighthouse is 94 feet tall — about as tall as the island itself. For more than one hundred years it helped guide sailors along this perilous stretch of the coast. The U.S. Coast Guard decommissioned the lighthouse in 2008, but though the light is now dark, the island’s significance, its purpose, has not changed: People look to this place to show them the way.

EARLY JUNE, MIDDAY. Scott Pearson, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, slows his boat, the Puffin, and swings around the west side of Destruction Island. After the 17-mile ride from La Push, it is a relief to hear waves under a chorus of gulls — something other than the roar of twin outboards.

Peter Hodum, from the University of Puget Sound, clambers onto the gunwale as Scott points Puffin toward a cleft in the rocks. “Hop out and grab the ropes to hold us, will you?” Scott says to me. I step onto rocks covered with a carpet of algae. “Watch your footing,” Peter says. “That stuff is super slick.” 

I grab the ropes and strain to hold Puffin while Scott and Peter unload equipment: dry bags, black watertight cases, coolers of food, jugs of water. All of this I schlep to a sheltered beach while Scott and Peter tie up the boat. The beach is 50 yards wide and, at this point in the tide cycle, 60 yards long. I use a piece of wood to scour flat areas in the rocks. On these informal pads we will put tents, facing west through an alley in the rocks.

Once my tent is up I take in the scene. The island, so gauzy from a distance, comes to more detailed life. Kelp swirls in the water, and the green algae draped on the rocks shows how high the sea can rise. Perched on those rocks, cormorants hold out their wings to dry, while stocky pigeon guillemots bustle about. From the trees song sparrows sing, along with other small birds.

Left to their own devices, some of these creatures will spend their whole lives here. For them, the world beyond might as well not exist. But not all the animals think that way. On the rocks near the alley’s end harbor seals are basking, never once taking their black eyes off me. I want to assure them that they can go back to doing nothing, but I doubt they would be persuaded. They know an intruder when they see one.

AT ABOUT 33 ACRES in area, Destruction Island is the largest island off Washington’s outer coast. Its first recorded name, according to a book called “Washington Place Names,” is Hob-to-la-bish, given by one of the Indigenous peoples. The book does not specify from whom the name comes, but the Quinaults, Queets, Hohs, Quileutes and Makahs have lived in the area forever, and would visit the island, situated as it is on their marine borderlands.

Europeans arrived in the late 18th century and claimed all naming rights, among other things. Thereafter the island’s name changed to reflect competing colonial powers. First came the Spanish, anchoring near here in July 1775. A party went ashore and was killed by a group of Indigenous inhabitants. The Spanish, before they sailed on, named the area Isla de Dolores (Island of Sorrows). Twelve years later, in 1787, an English ship anchored at Isla de Dolores. The next day, a party traveled to the mouth of a river and was also killed; the English captain named the river Destruction River. Five years after that, Captain George Vancouver transferred the name Destruction to the island and renamed the river the Hoh, for the Hoh people who live on its banks.

Destruction Island remained Destruction Island until construction of the lighthouse began in 1888, after which it became the Destruction Island Light Station. In 1907, the island was included as part of the Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge, which was to contain “all small, unsurveyed, and unreserved islands lying off the coast of the State of Washington” from Cape Flattery down to Copalis Head.

Even though the island was a seabird refuge, rotating crews of lighthouse keepers continued to live on it until the Coast Guard automated the light in 1968. The last keepers left in the early 1970s. No one is allowed here now except for the occasional team of biologists, and, of course, all the birds, seen and unseen alike.

BY LATE AFTERNOON we have set up our tents, and Scott says we have time to do some probing. He opens a waterproof case. Inside is a long black fiber optic cable that ends in an infrared camera. The cable links to a battery the size of a brick, which also powers a pair of goggles. Peter opens his own case, takes out his own assembly. He and Scott strap the batteries around their waists and plug in the camera leads, put the goggles on.

“All right,” Scott says. “Let’s see if anyone’s home.” We head to the willows, which are so thick and low that to climb the hillside we have to stoop and wriggle. In dappled shade, it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. When they do, I see the hillside is pocked with holes. Most are about a foot in diameter. A few — the important ones, for our purposes — are marked with metal tags.

“So here we are,” Scott says. “I like to call this the catacooombs.” He hands me the notebook so I can take data while he and Peter go to a tagged burrow. They lie in the dirt, drop their goggles over their eyes and drape T-shirts over their heads to block the light. The synchrony of their ritual, presumably unintended, suggests members of an obscure religious sect doing obeisance to a moody subterranean god.

Scott feeds the camera cable into the burrow as if he is giving the island a colonoscopy. A few minutes pass, during which he grunts and mutters before he says, “Ah, there you are!” He withdraws the cable. “We got an adult,” he says.

Next to the burrow number I write “AD.” Scott crawls to another burrow and repeats the procedure. “Got an adult in this one, too, with an egg!” he says. “You want to take a look at it?”

“Sure!” I fit the goggles over my face, try to make sense of what I see in the square viewfinder. I can make out the rough texture of dirt, some sticks and vivid white strands of hair — plant roots dangling from the tunnel ceiling. Then in the upper right I see a white flare: the eye of a rhinoceros auklet. A shape assembles: a head, a bill, a body, folded wings, a tail. The bird’s feet are tucked under its belly. The chamber in which it sits is small and round.

The auklet cocks its head at the camera. When it does its belly rises, and I see a hint of white shell. The bird blinks its glowing eyes, but then returns to its original pose on its egg.

“Does it know I’m looking at it?” I ask.

“Nope.” Scott says. “It feels nice and safe in the dark.”

THE RHINOCEROS AUKLET is a stout bird that can weigh more than a pound and grow to be about 15 inches in length, with a wingspan of around 24 inches. Its plumage is a study in grays — dark gray above, a lighter gray below. When breeding, both sexes grow wispy white plumes above their eyes and across their cheeks like muttonchop whiskers, while a stubby horn sprouts at the base of their orange bill. This horn inspires both the species’ common and scientific names — Cerorhinca monocerata translates roughly to “horn on the nose / one horn” — but it is a seasonal ornament. Grayness defines this auklet regardless of its sex or age.

The auklet is the sole member of the genus Cerorhinca, but it is part of the large family called the Alcidae, or alcids. More widely known as auks, theirs is an ancient family. Their number includes, among others, the common murres we saw in flocks on our way here, the pigeon guillemots nattering on the rocks, the tufted puffins that will start nesting on the island in a few weeks.

Alcids live throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and the rhinoceros auklet is one of the most widespread of them, breeding across much of the north Pacific Rim. Some of the species’ largest colonies are here in Washington and just north in British Columbia; the colony at Destruction Island has more than six thousand pairs at last count. At their colonies, rhinoceros auklets nest in burrows that might be up to 20 feet deep. The female lays a single egg in May. Pairs will use the same burrow year after year if they can.

Most seabirds do not spend much time on land, but rhinoceros auklets take that aversion to an extreme. Even now, during their breeding season, they shun land as much as they can, leaving the island before sunrise and returning at night under cover of darkness. If they have to be here because they have an egg to incubate, then they stay hidden in their burrows all day.

In this, bird and place would seem to be made for each other: a shy species making its home on a shy island. But Scott and Peter know that comforting sense of isolation is false. They have been coming to Destruction Island for 15 years. In that time they have seen just how much this island is bound to larger human and biological currents, and one current in particular: the California Current.

THE CALIFORNIA CURRENT flows from southern British Columbia to Baja California — more than 1,800 miles. Fueled by cold, nutrient-rich waters, it supports one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet. Or it used to. Now scientists are less certain what the future holds for this part of the Pacific.

Oceans all over the world are changing in different ways, testing what were once familiar if complicated relationships between them and their dependent life. Here on the West Coast, strange signs have started to appear. In the past few years, thousands of seabirds have washed up dead. Fishing boats haul in species normally associated with tropical waters, sometimes in place of the salmon they seek. Diseases ravage whole classes of organisms, upending local ecologies, perhaps permanently. With each event people wonder: Is this abnormal? The new normal? No one is sure.

For Scott and Peter, making sense of these signs is one of the reasons they keep visiting the rhinoceros auklets of Destruction Island. Sitting as they do near the top of the marine food web, auklets serve as environmental indicators, ecosystem sentinels. By tracking their natural history — when they come and go to the island, what types of fish they eat and how hard they have to work to catch them, whether or not pairs are then able to raise their chick until it can leave on its own, and ultimately how their population rises or falls — Scott and Peter can learn how changes in the environment manifest in their lives and glean critical information about the state of the seas. String enough years together, and they can see how the small story of the rhinoceros auklets of Destruction Island fits into the larger story of the northeast Pacific.

HOURS LATER WE ARE BACK at camp for dinner. Tomorrow we will do it all again, going from burrow to burrow. Over the summer we will make two more trips here: one in late June when the chicks are young, and another in the middle of July, when they are about to leave. Thus will we attempt to learn the ecological intertwinings of the Pacific.

After the dishes are clean, Scott and Peter retire, but I stay out to wait for the auklets to fly in for the night. The sun has set. Fog rolls over the island like a damp towel. Then I hear the fupfupfupfupfupfup of wingbeats: the first auklet. It is gone before I get a good look at it, but I am ready for the second one, ready as it streaks in low and quick, too quick, it seems, to control its body, for it splays its feet to brake as it swoops above the willows, and then stalls in the air and drops. There is a light crack when it lands, and I hear its thrashing progress through the branches.

Another auklet flies in, and then another. They zip in over the rocks and water, the air ripping across their bodies. Suddenly 15 come in at once, bunched tight like a fist, but then the fist bursts open and the birds make for their own parts of the island.

The colony comes to life as the auklets start to cry out to one another: Waa-Waaaaaa-Waa, Waa-Waaaaaa-Waa. Their voices are nasal, their song simple and morose. Four more auklets fly in, then two, then six. These newcomers add to the growing cacophony. The calls come from everywhere now, a depthless avian chorus.

The sun is gone, the wind rises. Destruction Island resounds with the songs of besotted auklets. Lying on my back, letting their songs wash over me, it is easy to believe that thousands of birds live here. I close my eyes. I should get some rest, but I cannot bring myself to leave as the auklets hurtle in. They whip over my head, gray as the uncertain sea, as the still darkening sky.