Terra Affirma: Our World Is Stitched Together By Birds

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Terra Affirma: Our World Is Stitched Together by Birds

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Access: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Our World Is Stitched Together by Birds
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Terra Affirma: Our World Is Stitched Together by Birds

The freedom to move is a survival strategy.

Why you can trust us

By Sarah Gilman

< 1 MIN READ

May 23, 2024

An full-page illustration by Sarah Gilman that has a deep purple-blue background. A spiral of birds cascades down the middle. Handwritten text reads:

Once, people believed that when swallows disappeared from Europe in winter, the birds went to the moon, or hibernated on the bottoms of lakes and rivers. Later, naturalists learned that swallows flew to Africa—just one of the hundreds of species who chase temperance from north to south to north again, as native to seasonal abundance as they are to any geographic location.

Vultures and hawks merge into flocks of hundreds of thousands on their way from North to South America. They catch thermals through the narrow pinch point of Panama, so thick in the air that they sometimes ground planes. Swarms of bright songbirds and shorebirds wing south, too. Swifts might never land during their southern sojourn, eating and sleeping on the wing. People watch the airborne masses from streets, from clearings, from the top of a reclaimed U.S. military radar tower—old infrastructure built to support nation states, now repurposed to spectate the animals who subvert their arbitrary borders.

Short-tailed shearwaters make one of the most monumental of these migrations, flying nearly 20,000 miles round trip from breeding grounds on Australian islands and headlands to feeding areas in the ocean off Alaska, Russia, and Japan. Also known as moonbirds or yulas, shearwaters are dark gray with sharp, narrow wings. They return to the same nesting burrows each year in September and October. Pairs mate and rear a single fat chick through the Austral summer. They raft up by the thousands offshore, diving deep for krill and squid and fish, and foraging thousands of miles out. When the time comes to journey north in April, the shearwaters average 520 miles per day. Once they reach the boreal summer, they track the waters richest with food. Sometimes, their journey is fatal.

The illustration continues on this page. The cascade of birds contines to dive, only this time there are green-scaled salmon in their mouths. In the bottom left-hand corner is an urban park with human figures watching the night sky. Here is the handwritten text:

Pink salmon, supplemented heavily by human-run hatcheries, surge in number in northern seas every other year, devouring creatures the shearwaters also rely on. When the birds are unable to build enough reserves for the long migration south, countless emaciated shearwaters wash up on Australian beaches—a form of mass death known as a “wreck.” Warmer ocean temperatures can lead to the same. Fewer birds breeding means declines in the marine nutrients that their guano brings, leading to shifts in what plants grow on their home islands.

The short-tailed shearwater is among the many migratory species who reveal that the well-being of one place depends on that of many others. As farms and other human development consume wetlands, grasslands, and forests, some conservationists, governments, and citizens are collaborating across nations to preserve stopover sites where birds refuel on their travels. Others campaign to darken cities to keep lights from disorienting and drawing birds off course into urban areas where they strike windows, get hit by cars, or are eaten by domestic cats and other predators. And then there is climate change, changing everything, pushing spring green-up ever earlier and suitable habitat farther northward, leaving many species lagging behind or racing to catch up.
For now, short-tailed shearwaters remain one of most numerous seabirds on Earth, with a population estimated at 23 million. Once, there may have been as many as 100 million. Preserving their kind of abundance will require more of us to recognize that in this time of multiplying threats, the freedom to move is a survival strategy, and it, too, is endangered.

Sarah Gilman is a writer and illustrator covering the environment, natural history, and science. A contributing editor at Hakai and bioGraphic magazines, her work has also appeared in High Country News, The Atlantic, and more.

Summer 2024

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Access: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Our World Is Stitched Together by Birds

Access: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Our World Is Stitched Together by Birds

The freedom to move is a survival strategy.

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