The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (15 page)

In the mid-eighties, Peter told me, a biologist was walking back to the house in the last, foggy light of day when he noticed a woman with long dark hair standing on the marine terrace in a filmy white dress. Figuring it was one of the two female biologists on the island, albeit in a fairly strange getup, he continued on his way into the house—where he immediately encountered the two women, sitting on the living room couch. He turned on his heel and ran back outside, but the woman in the white dress had vanished, though there was really no place she could have vanished
to,
short of jumping into the ocean. “And he was Mr. Science!” Peter recounted, snickering. “A guy who would do things like rebuild the transmitter. He said it made a believer out of him.”

On another occasion a visiting botanist was intercepted sleepwalking out the front door in the middle of the night, screaming, “NO! I’m NOT going up there!” When someone tugged on his arm and woke him, he explained that a dark-haired woman was trying to entice him to climb to the lighthouse with her.

“What about you?” I asked them. “Had any ghost action out there personally?”

They both nodded vigorously.

“Oh, I’ve had scary experiences,” Scot said. “You get the
creeps.
It’s the feeling of a presence around you. It usually happens when you’re alone. At night.”

For Peter, one incident in particular stood out: he awoke to loud, thudding footsteps on the stairs, followed by the front door slamming, an attic trap door in the Jane Fonda bedroom stuttering rapidly, and a chill wind that blew through the house, rattling the windows
from the inside,
after the door shut. At the time he was one of four people on the island, all of whom were cowering together in one bedroom, scared witless. There was no extra set of human feet that could possibly have been pounding up and down the stairs that night—they all knew it, and they all felt it. This had occurred more than a decade ago, and I could see that telling the story still gave him a chill.

“Certain rooms are scarier than others,” Scot said, fingering his glass. “That Jane Fonda room…the one you stayed in…”

“Yeah, that’s the one where most things happen,” Peter agreed. “I’ve never liked that room either.”

“I stayed there for a while. Man, I couldn’t wait to get out of that room.”

DURING BIRD SEASON, WALKING WAS RESTRICTED TO CERTAIN PATHWAYS
and, even then, extra care was required to make sure no one felt the delicate crushing of fluff beneath one’s boots. There were chicks in every crevice, downy balls bunking down in the most unexpected places. They were even wedged into the front steps of the house. Territory meant everything to these animals; it was the difference between survival and death, and every square inch of it was staked.

Along with the twenty-five thousand gulls, there were one hundred thousand murres on the island right now, packed tight as bowling pins on the sea cliffs. There were also about forty thousand cassin’s auklets, twenty thousand cormorants, four thousand pigeon guillemots, and assorted other homesteaders in smaller numbers, including 120 tufted puffins. Every bird needed its own little stomping ground, and they arrived in late fall and hunkered down for months before breeding, simply to hold the spot. The smaller seabirds—the petrels and auklets in particular—had evolved strategies to gull-proof their offspring. They were nocturnal, flying only at night, hiding themselves in underground burrows during the day. (And still, the gulls managed to eat a lot of them.)

For everything on the island with two wings, the point was not simply to hatch chicks, but to successfully “fledge” them, get them flying and diving and fending for themselves. The fledging process was especially dramatic for murres. Before they ever learned how to fly, the chicks were walked to the cliff’s edge by their parents, and then they tumbled into the sea, sailing away on the currents like cotton puffs and, if they were lucky, figuring out what to do when they hit the water.

By August, plenty of chicks had fledged already, and those that hadn’t yet were thinking about it. I walked along with Russ and Jen as they checked their rhinocerous auklet study plots, reaching their hands into burrows to determine if anybody was home, or whether the occupants had decamped until next season. After months of watching specific birds struggle to make it, the biologists felt like they were viewing a soap opera. On many days, the story lacked a happy ending. Tens of thousands of chicks, and even some adults, succumbed to what was noted in the field as “PIH,” or “Pecked-in-Head.” This was the gulls’ signature mode of killing, and it involved rushing at another bird and, as the acronym attested, knifing their beaks into its skull. Any bird could end up PIH; the gulls murdered their kin as exuberantly as they went after other species. When the fledging attempts began in earnest, a sort of PIH-alooza ensued as chicks wobbled around testing their wings, and stumbled onto a mature gull’s turf. At present there were PIH casualties strewn everywhere.

I stood on the lighthouse path, poking one of them with my toe. The bird’s beak was frozen open, midsquawk, as though it had been hurling insults right up to the moment the lights went out. Above me, pigeon guillemots peered cautiously from their burrows in the craggy hillside clefts. They were sleek, black birds, with ballerina necks, dove-shaped heads, and sexy detailing: each wing had a crescent-shaped white accent like something Coco Chanel had carefully designed, and both their webbed feet and the insides of their mouths were colored a hot lipstick red. Unfortunately, the pi-gus, as they were known, greeted the nose less pleasantly than the eye—they smelled like rotten fish.

Several yards below, Russ deftly pulled a rhinocerous auklet out of a hole in the ground. The rhino was a regal-looking bird with pale, thoughtful eyes and a horned bump on top of its sharp beak. He held it up for me to see. It looked pissed off. “These birds are a combination of beauty and badass,” he said, as it bit him hard on the thumb. “They’re puffins, basically. And they’re tough.” I’d caught sight of a tufted puffin earlier in the day, standing on a rock at North Landing, staring out to sea philosophically through red-rimmed eyes. Its vermilion beak was shaped like a pair of wire cutters and could take off your finger with similar ease.

We moved up the path. Russ bent down to pick up a dead bird. The bird was small and entirely black, no markings. Its eyes were gone. He broke off part of a wing and held it to his nose. “Petrel,” he said, handing it to me. The feathers smelled musky and heavy and sort of smoky, like the bird had been part of an all-night poker game. Its tiny body was covered in gull regurgitation, leaving little doubt as to how it had died.

A few steps farther up the hill lay another victim, a cassin’s auklet, a crush of gray feathers the size of a grapefruit. This one was fresh, staring straight up at the sky, and it looked pristine, until Jen flipped it over. The back of the auklet’s head was missing.

As we walked, gulls rushed us. Sometimes it was a bluff, but other times they meant business. “They know when you’re not looking, and they’ll coldcock you,” Russ said. Much of the time, the biologists wore hard hats. But that only seemed to make some of the birds more determined: One kamikaze gull had slammed into a biologist with such force that it died on impact.

The rhino rounds were done and I wanted to see the murres, the beleaguered bird so tied to the history of this place. In order to do so, Russ explained, we’d have to climb a near-vertical rock face to the murre blind, a rickety shack just big enough for two folding chairs. It was there that the biologists perched for hour after hour, studying the colony below. Walking among the murres was forbidden, as it would cause them to flush. Recently, a starving sea lion had charged through the colony, sending the murres off in a panic and gobbling chicks. The gulls followed in his wake, gleefully bolting down the unguarded eggs. Pete, who was in the blind at the time, watched in horror but there was nothing he could do. It wasn’t a biologist’s job to interfere with nature, only to observe it.

Looking down into the murre colony from the blind was like viewing an enormous protest rally from a helicopter—it was hard to tell where one head stopped and the next one started. In order to make sense of the mass of birds, the area had been divided into manageably sized plots. Russ, who was Canadian, took pride in pointing out the ones that had been named after provinces: “There’s Alberta. Oh, and there’s British Columbia, over there.” Everything about these birds was painstakingly recorded as part of a data set that was thirty-three years old, and counting. Only after cataloging the population for three decades were the scientists beginning to see the patterns emerge. In El Niño years, the warmer Pacific produced less food and the sea-dwelling animals suffered, breeding in far fewer numbers. Other years, things boomed. As it turned out, seabirds offered a perfect parallel for the overall state of the ocean, and a bellwether for ecosystem troubles. Such long-term research on a single marine habitat had never been compiled before. Just another pioneering bit of natural history going down on these desolate rocks.

ALL DAY THE AIR HAD BEEN DAMP BUT NOT COLD, AND THE SKY WAS A
soft gray. This was gentle, mild weather, a Kleenex draped over the island. We were in a tropical depression, apparently, and there wasn’t a hint of wind. This calmness, combined with the peak of the waning moon, created an ideal opportunity to go out and catch birds in the dark. So that’s what we were planning to do after dinner.

Tonight’s mission was to lure the island’s stealthiest seabirds, the ashy storm petrels, into a gossamer-fine mist net so they could be counted and banded. During the day the petrels hid in impossible places; despite the fact that the world’s largest colony lived on these shores, they were almost never seen. At 10:30 p.m. the six of us headed up to the net, which Pete and Russ had stretched between two posts on the side of Lighthouse Hill.

As we walked, our headlamps bobbing in the bottomless pit of a night, I asked Pete for his opinion about the ghost stories. He told me that he’d not had any encounters himself, but most of the biologists believed the island was haunted, and that a number of them had been scared by footsteps on the stairs, just as Peter had been. One of them, a friend of Pete’s, had awaked to a female voice urgently whispering in his ear, speaking in a language that he couldn’t understand.

Turning off our headlamps, we sprawled out near the net, pretty much on the exact spot where earlier in the day I had marveled at the carnage. “I smell something dead,” Melinda said cheerfully. “I’m probably sitting in it.” It would be hard not to. I was beginning to get used to being surrounded by dead birds, I was slowly becoming inured to the waves of PIH victims, but I really did not want to touch maggots, which everyone else seemed to accept here as a matter of course. (I also preferred not to contract bird lice, another seabird job hazard.) No one else seemed squeamish about lying on the ground, however, so I kept quiet and resisted the temptation to turn on my headlamp.

A scratchy cassette recording of petrel mating noises pierced through the darkness. The nocturnal birds all had eerie calls that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside them; this one brought to mind a heavily loaded Styrofoam box being dragged across a linoleum floor. Almost immediately the petrels began to appear. They were the approximate size of a moth on steroids and they came fluttering toward us with erratic, batlike motions, diving into boomerang turns when they got close enough to spot the net. Often, it was too late. When one of the birds snagged itself, whoever was closest jumped up, snapped on his or her headlamp for a second, and carefully extracted it from the mesh. Jen was doing this right now, and after popping the bird into a little sack to weigh it, she handed it to Pete. He pulled out a pair of pliers and affixed an orange metal band to the bird’s ankle, then blew on its stomach feathers. If the petrel was breeding, it would have a brood patch, an almost-bare spot of skin that rested directly on its eggs, warming them. This one did. He passed the bird to me. It was chinchilla soft, and its heart whirred in triple time. The petrel looked up at me with alert, obsidian eyes. There was nothing mean about it—no sharp beak, no raking claws. It had a tube nose: a shiny, two-holed appendage on its beak that served as a kind of portable desalination plant, enabling the petrel to stay at sea, drinking salt water and shooting the salt out of its nose afterward. “I’m
so
into petrels,” Russ said. “They’re just
absolutely incredible birds
. The
true
oceangoing wanderers.”

The petrel banding would continue until 2 a.m., but after a couple hours of lying in the bird graveyard, I became cold and decided to head back to house. There was no light beyond my headlamp and the lighthouse beacon sweeping the Pacific. In the utter darkness all sounds seemed amplified: the screaming gulls, the caterwauling nightbirds, the PIH scuffles, the crashing water. Vaguely gull-shaped things whirled in my direction, vying for a crack at my scalp. I began to walk faster, anxious to get indoors and with Alfred Hitchcock to thank for my state of mind. As I passed the coast guard house, solemn and mute next to its lived-in twin, a large white shape flew up into my face. Too big for a gull. I stepped back, frightened, and then froze for a moment. My headlamp illuminated a single, barren spot on the wall, but beyond the edges of its beam shapes of uncertain origin darted around. “There’s just no way this place needs ghosts,” I thought, resuming my pace. “Ghosts would be total overkill.” Now the wind was picking up, shaking things, and the air was fat with moisture. Tendrils of fog spilled across the path, licking my feet. It was moving in fast and low, erasing the edges, creeping onto the island like an animal.

Diving inside the house, I immediately hit all the light switches, before remembering that you weren’t supposed to do this; it blew the auklets’ cover. When light streamed out the windows, they could easily be seen by the gulls, guaranteeing a massacre. Reluctantly, I turned off every light but the kitchen’s, where I sat with a plastic cup of leftover dinner wine, trying to convince myself that I was not scared. It was rare to be alone in the house at night. In fact, it almost never happened. Which, judging by how I felt at the moment, was something to be thankful for.