Take Your Kids to the Beach

Take Your Kids to the Beach

In recent weeks, beach-goers from Santa Barbara to San Diego have discovered over 1,000 dead and dying sea lion pups on the beach. Apparently undernourished from birth, these pups did not put on enough blubber from mother’s milk, and once weaned, failed to find enough to eat on their own.

Without an adequate layer of blubber, sea lions cannot maintain the body temperature that a warm blooded mammal needs to survive in the cold water, so they come up on the beach to sun themselves, and warm up. Unfortunately they don’t find anything to eat on the beach either, and eventually they expire from starvation.

Wildlife rescuers in Southern CA have been overwhelmed with calls about these poor pups, but there’s little they can do. No one has the facilities to care for hundreds of starving sea lion pups. Everyone equipped to handle sea lions, has their hands full right now. Sometimes they relocate the pups to more secluded beaches, in hopes that they will find more food. Sometimes they euthanize the animals.

Last year, persistent readers will recall, I wrote about starving pelicans here on the Northern CA coast. Pelicans and sea lions both eat fish, or at least they would, if they could find them. These deaths are not the result of some exotic new disease spreading through the ecosystem. These deaths indicate a precipitous drop in the ocean’s fecundity. It’s a very bad sign. I don’t want to call it a “wake-up call”, because so many so called “wake-up calls” have gone unheeded, so I’ll simply call it another ghastly, heartbreaking consequence of deliberate human indifference to the natural world.

At least people see them. People should have to see this kind of thing. Take your kids to the beach. Show them a dying sea lion pup, starving to death on the sand. Explain to them that because we’ve replaced most of the phytoplankton in the ocean with pulverized plastic from soda bottles, shrink wrap, plastic bags, toys, medical equipment, electronic gadgets, car parts etc etc, the ocean can’t provide enough oxygen or food to support as much life as it did fifty years ago, or even ten years ago.

Remember that famous scene in The Graduate, where the older businessman whispers to Dustin Hoffman one word of advice for his future? “Plastics”, he says. Around the same time Andy Warhol predicted “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. With the ubiquity of plastic today, it’s hard to remember a time when soda came in returnable, not recyclable, glass bottles, when they made car bumpers out of chrome plated steel instead of easily shattered plastic, and when electronic devices had metal or wood cabinets, and lasted for decades.

Fifty years later, an island the size of Texas, newly recognized by the United Nations as “Garbage Island”, composed almost entirely of plastic, has formed in the Pacific Ocean. Today, plastic has its own homeland, and it grows every day. Every day, tons of plastic debris finds its way into the Pacific Ocean to make the pilgrimage to Garbage Island. Over the course of decades, endless churning, salt water and sunlight slowly pulverize it into microscopic bits.

These microscopic bits of inorganic, non-biodegradable plastic absorb sunlight, preventing it from penetrating the ocean’s depths and choke off phytoplankton, the foundation of the ocean food chain, and the source of most of the world’s atmospheric oxygen. In less than half a century, about half of all the phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean has been replaced by these microscopic bits of plastic.

Oddly, considering how long plastic lasts, plastic has become the foundation of our disposable economy. Almost nothing lasts longer than plastic, and almost nothing can digest it. Yet, we produce billions of one-time-use products from it, every year. When burned, plastic produces deadly bio-accumulative carcinogenic poison, in landfills it lasts almost forever, and in the ocean, it gets ground into fine floating particles that choke out life.

No, it’s not a wake-up call. It’s too late for that. Go to the beach. Look those pups in the eye as they die of starvation, and explain to your children what has happened in your lifetime. Tell your kids that fifty years ago, they would have seen thousands of healthy sea lions, as well as seals and otters, and that there was plenty of fish for all of them to eat. Tell them that for every bird they see, there were once twenty or forty, but that they all died so that you could live a high-consumption, middle-class fantasy, and now, even that fantasy is dying.

What We Can Learn From Starving Pelicans

What We Can Learn From Starving Pelicans

 

If you don’t live here on the West Coast, you probably haven’t heard about the pelicans. Hundreds of dead, starving and distressed pelicans have shown up on beaches from San Francisco Bay to Peugeot Sound. Here in Humboldt County, the animal rescue group Bird Ally X have now gone into crisis mode for the second time this year with another overwhelming influx of sick and injured pelicans.

Bird Ally X found most of the distressed pelicans around here suffering the same kinds of problems that birds caught in oil spills exhibit; oiled feathers compromising the bird’s natural insulation and waterproofing, leading to hypothermia and death. However, the oil in the birds’ feathers did not come from an oil spill, but from public fish-cleaning stations. A lot of sport fishermen use these cleaning stations to dress their catch before heading home, and the oily fish waste has become irresistible to the starving pelicans.

Pelicans have evolved over millions of years to catch small fish by diving into the water after them. Pelicans do not do very well on a diet of salmon heads, guts and bones, and the fish oil that pervades all of this fish waste, if it gets on their feathers, will do them in in a matter of hours. Please, support Bird Ally X and other groups now working frantically to feed, care for and rehabilitate literally hundreds of sick and injured pelicans, but recognize that starving seabirds is a bigger problem than these groups can solve.

This is not the first time starving seabirds have made headlines in recent years, but mostly, people seem to have gotten used to seeing dead birds scattered all over the beaches. The last time I went to the beach it looked like an avian Auschwitz, littered with dead gulls as far as the eye could see. This ain’t right folks. This is a symptom of something very serious.

In the news reports, they tell us that pelicans were once driven to the brink of extinction by the use of chemical pesticides like DDT, industrial pollution, and habitat loss, but the brown pelican has made a dramatic recovery in recent years and have again become common on the North Coast. They then explain that now that pelican populations have returned, there’s a lot more competition for food, so of course, some of them, mostly juveniles, starve.

That makes sense, right. Starving pelicans is not a tragedy. No, starving pelicans is a success story. These pelicans are only dying because there are too many pelicans, and there are too many pelicans because we’re just so damn good at wildlife conservation these days. Are you buying this?

Sure, pelicans have made a comeback, but consider this: 95% of the wild birds in the US have been wiped out. That includes pelicans. The few seabirds you see at the beach these days represent only a tiny fraction of historic populations. When Eureka was full of redwood trees, at least twenty times as many pelicans, gulls, cormorants, osprey, plovers, muriletts and who knows how many other species that have completely disappeared, made their homes around Humboldt Bay, and up and down the Lost Coast.

 

one of over 4,000 pelicans to die in Peru this year

Today, as the ghastly scene playing out on North Coast beaches reveals, our coastal ecosystem no longer supports enough life to maintain even these diminished bird populations. Far from a success story, this tragedy reveals how badly we’ve failed at wildlife conservation, and how little we know about the marine ecosystem.

I see people at the beach, doing their best to ignore the horror show going on around them. It’s bad folks. It should bum you out. Beaches should be strewn with sea shells, not bird skeletons. Don’t try to blow it off with the speculation that this is some cyclical thing that just happens from time to time, like they did with global warming. This is what we have done to planet Earth. Face it.

Look into the eyes of those starving birds, surrounded by their dead kin. Feel their anguish, their desperation, and their courage, as their world falls apart around them. Learn what you can from them, because its going to happen to us too.