Mournful Cry Of A Loon Still Echoes Long After Exxon Valdez Has Gone

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground at Bligh Reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil and creating the nation's worst environmental disaster. Mary Ann Gwinn was part of The Seattle Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for coverage of the spill and its aftermath. This piece, which first appeared April 4, 1989, was one of the most memorable accounts of the effects of the oil on the wildlife of Prince William Sound.

VALDEZ, Alaska - I had tried to prepare myself for Green Island, but nothing can prepare you for the havoc wreaked on the creatures of Prince William Sound.

From the helicopter that took me there, the 987-foot tanker Exxon Valdez, stuck like a toy boat on Bligh Reef, was dwarfed by the immensity of the Sound. It was hard to believe that we could fly 60 miles, land and walk right into the ruination of a landscape, so far from that broken boat.

The helicopter landed on the beach of Green Island. Its beaches are broad and slope gently, in contrast to the rocky, vertical shores of many of the other islands in the Sound. For that reason, Green Island is favored by wildlife. Now the oil has turned the gentle beach into a death trap.

No sooner had the Alaska National Guard helicopter roared away than a black lump detached itself from three or four others bobbing in the oil-streaked water. It was an old squaw, a sea bird normally recognizable by its stark black-and-white plumage. The tuxedo plumage had turned a muddy brown and orange.

It staggered up the beach, its head compulsively jerking back and forth, as if trying to escape the thing that was strangling it. Tony Dawson, a photographer for Audubon magazine, and I watched it climb a snowbank and flap into the still center of the woods.

"They move up into the grass, along the creek beds and into the woods, where they die," Dawson said. "It's like they're fleeing an invisible enemy."

Dawson used to be a veterinarian. He said documenting the oil spill makes him feel like a photographer in Vietnam: "Every day, a new body count." As in that war, helicopters drone across the sky, boats beach on shore, men land, size up the situation and depart.

Eleven days into the spill, scientists are trying to decide which beaches to clean and which to leave alone, reasoning that disruption would hurt some more than it would help. Very little actual beach cleanup is taking place. Most of the animals are going to die, a few dozen or hundred every day, by degrees.

I walked along the beach, which in some places was glutted with oil like brown pudding; in others, streaked and puddled with oil the consistency of chocolate syrup. The only sounds came from a few gulls and the old squaw's mate, which drifted down the polluted channel toward its fate. Far away, a cormorant spread its wings and stretched in a vain attempt to fluff its oil-soaked feathers. A bald eagle passed overhead.

Mournful cry

It was then that I heard a sound so strange, for a brief moment all my 20th century rationality dropped away.

Something was crying in the vicinity of the woods, a sound not quite human. I looked into the trees.

Whooooooh. Whooooh. Whoooh. Up and down a mournful scale. Something is coming out of those woods, I thought, and is going to take vengeance for this horror on the first human being it sees.

Then I saw a movement in the grass at the end of the beach. It was a loon.

Loons have become something of a cause celebre to bird lovers. They are beautiful birds, almost as large as geese, with long, sharp beaks, striking black-and-white striped wings and a graceful, streamlined head. They are a threatened species in the United States because they need large bodies of water to fish in and undeveloped, marshy shorelines to nest on, and most shoreline in this country has been landscaped and pruned.

Compelling cry

The most compelling thing about the loon is its call - something between a cry, a whistle and a sob, a sound so mournful and chilling it provoked the word "loony," a term for someone wild with sorrow, out of their head.

This was an arctic loon in its winter plumage, brown instead of the striking black and white of summer. It had ruby-red eyes, which blinked in terror because it could barely move. It was lightly oiled all over - breast, feet, wings, head - destroying its power of flight. Its sinuous head darted here and there as we approached. It flapped and stumbled trying to avoid us, and then it came to rest between two large rocks.

As Dawson photographed it, it intermittently called its mournful call. Its mate swam back and forth, calling back, a few yards offshore.

I could see it tremble, a sign that the bird was freezing. Most oiled birds die because the oil destroys their insulation.

"It's like someone with a down coat falling into a lake," Dawson explained. The breeze ruffled its stiffening feathers. As Dawson moved closer with the camera, it uttered a low, quivering cry.

After 10 minutes or so, I just couldn't watch anymore. It was so beautiful, and so helpless and so doomed. We had nothing like a bag, sack or cloth to hold it in. I walked around the point.

Then I heard Dawson calling. He walked into view holding the furious, flapping loon by its upper wings, set it down on the grass and said, "Come here and help me. He won't hurt you."

I was stunned by the rough handling of such a wild thing, but it developed that Dawson, the former veterinarian, knew his birds. He had grasped the loon exactly in the place where its wings would not break. He would tell me later that most bird rescuers are too tenderhearted or frightened of birds to contain them, and let a lot of salvageable birds get away.

We had to wait for the helicopter, and Dawson had to take more pictures, so I grasped the loon behind the upper wings, pinning them together, and took up the loon watch. The bird rose, struggled and fell back to earth, then was still.

I was as afraid of the loon as it was of me in a way that touching a totally wild thing can provoke.

We waited, together

But I began to feel its strength. It was warm, it had energy, and it could still struggle. I could hear it breathing, and could feel its pulse. It turned its red eye steadily on me. We breathed, and waited, together.

Dawson returned, took a black cord from a lens case and neatly looped it around the bird's wings.

The helicopter dropped out of the sky and settled on the beach. I held the string as the loon, unblinking, faced the terrific wind kicked up by the machine. Then Dawson neatly scooped up the bird and settled into the helicopter.

The loon lashed out with its needle beak until David Grimes, a fisherman working with the state on the spill, enveloped it in a wool knit bag he carried with him.

The bird stilled.

Dawson and I were both streaked with oil and blood from the loon's feet, lacerated by barnacles on the beach.

He gave me a small black-and-white feather that had fallen from the bird's wing.

We took the loon to the bird-rescue center in Valdez. I don't know if it will live. Dawson thought it had a good chance. I thought of the mate we had left behind in the water.

Afterward, we talked about whom bird rescues help more, the rescued or the rescuer. Most rescued birds don't make it. And tens of thousands more from the Valdez spill will die before they even get a chance.

I know only that the loon told me something that no one other thing about this tragedy could. If only we could learn to value such stubborn, determined life. If only we could hold safe in our hands the heart of the loon.