Juvenile Brown Booby

We were running barefoot in the gritty sand toward the blob that from 300 yards away looked like a dark-colored, abandoned backpack. It was positioned right at the shoreline; red tide season in Southwest Florida—probably another poisoned bird. I assumed it was a cormorant, a species that is especially susceptible to the effects of Florida red tide. My partner and I had taken two cormorants to the von Arx Wildlife Hospital at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida last week.

I had not heard this bird’s voice before. The calls of seabirds tend to be foreign to human ears; birds that spend their lives at sea are not common sights other than to those whose livelihoods depend on the ocean—mariners on long-haul voyages, sailors, those who fish in deep water.

Her right paddle had likely been bitten through by a shark as she danced across the waves. Her pace had propelled her high enough above the water to escape the clenching jaws, but it was not quick enough to save her. The stub that remained was a ragged brownish-yellow wrapped in red. She managed to expel a mid-range sooty squawk as the beach towel we threw up into the sea air billowed gently into place over and around her on the sand. Nature told her to flee, but there was nothing left. Neither her thick wings nor her normally powerful neck could press motion into her remaining paddle. She collapsed into capture, her cry a subdued, sad acknowledgment that she would have preferred a different ending.

She created the despondent, forlorn call again as we gathered the towel around her exhausted body and lifted her slowly from the shoreline. She was in my arms, secured tightly by the cloth and my grip, to prevent further injury. Our uneven long walk in the dry, sugary grains to meet the car my partner had urgently sprinted three miles to fetch was silent; I only heard my own heaving lungs.

Even emaciated and dismantled, she was a heavy bird—about the weight of my newborn son as I first embraced him. I took in her scent, fooled for a second, anticipating a baby’s powdery freshness. The 75-degree rising sun accentuated her body’s odor—damaged and wrung out, she smelled of dread. The obviously treacherous experiences that had brought her to our shore—a place she would have never chosen—wafted from her dusky copper feathers and mixed with the humid, salt-laden air. 

As I slid into the passenger seat for the ride to the animal hospital—Josh Groban’s comforting timbre emitting from the car stereo thanks to Thomas’s natural sense of compassion—she adjusted her body inside the towel, clicking her long, straight, sharp bill a few times, as if air were stuck just beyond her reach. I hurriedly checked to make sure that her head had easy access to the car’s air conditioning, but I knew it wasn’t a gasp for breath; it was a message for another of her kind that would never be received. Was she listening to the music? Were we foolish to believe that the positive vibrations we received from the melodic, skilled voice could soothe her as it buoyed us?

“She’s lost a lot of weight,” the expert said as I handed the bundle over.

The hand-off to the waiting arms of the veterinarian, well versed in wild animals’ traumas, became an ending.

“She hasn’t been able to hunt for food for a while.”  

The vet’s words shattered the hope I had put into my embrace around the seabird; the bird’s calls and clicks had signaled more than her fear and anxiety at the unknown; it was the worst possible scenario. She had been suffering.

People say, some people, that the dying process is peaceful and painless. I have heard the process—if one is granted the process, described as a release, a passing, a transition, passage from darkness to light, eternal sleep: old ladies humming sacred hymns from their hospice beds; words of gratitude spoken into the ear of an adored elder in a sterile hospital room; the gleeful giggles that erupt as memories flood the unconscious as the brain stem shuts down; the peaceful depth of the last breath. 

I listened as palliative care doctor and author Kathryn Mannix explained the sounds of death in an IMHO Ideas short film from the BBC . She said death’s sound was gentle. She said to consider the death rattle—the tickle of saliva that happens in the back of a dying individual’s throat. It is the gentle sound of someone “… who is so deeply relaxed, so deeply unconscious, that they’re not even feeling that tickle.”

But in meeting up with a dying animal in the wild, it is difficult as a human to assess whether the individual is dying. How do different species move through the process? As the seabird had first come into focus on the sand my mind had raced through several other scenarios that could have been playing out: she was cold; she was startled by the presence of humans on the beach and playing possum; she was attracting a mate; she was waiting for her flock.

I will always remember the exquisite seabird’s voice—her symbolic call came from some ancient place, possessed by a haunting knowingness augmented by the urgency of her ending.

Weeks removed from our meeting her abandoned call is a memory I hear in my dreams.