Sterna Paradisaea
Arctic tern as metaphor
The Arctic tern’s migration is longer than any other on the planet. A 2019 study led by scientists from Newcastle University followed terns for three years and found they travel 90,000 km annually, up to 670 km a day: “Over its lifetime, the record-breaking tern could be flying as far as 3 million km between the Farne Islands and Antarctica, the equivalent of nearly four trips to the moon and back.” Mapped over the globe, their roughly s-shaped flight patterns intersect over the Atlantic to form the shape of an infinity symbol. With our lifetimes of heartaches and questions, it’s tempting to affix meaning to this unending journey. How else could we make sense of such a ritual?
When I felt like I’d survived the longest winter, I had an Arctic tern tattooed below the crook of my elbow. Whenever I see it winging away from my body, my arm is always a little extended, the pale of my wrist always upturned, a gesture of offering. Or surrender.
Arctic tern as perpetual motion
Although every tern’s journey is different, they tend to settle on land briefly: from late December to February, fishing off Antarctic pack ice, and in June to July in the north Atlantic to court and nest and to raise their young. Even in the weeks when they are most earthbound — when they warm their eggs beneath their bodies — they land tenuously, white wings pointed at the sky, as if reluctant to let go of flight. Beyond these brief visits, these moments of equilibrium, they’re almost always on the wing. In physics, perpetual motion is purely theoretical: the natural laws for the conservation of energy mean nothing can constantly use energy unless energy is added from an outside source. A hand must lift the pendulum.
I used to swing from a thick vine that hung from the oldest tree, an ancient maple shaped like the dying heart of the forest. All I remember the day when the aging branch broke is the rushing sound of saplings bending or breaking under my body as I fell to the rocks below. Then, blackness. Too many improbabilities coincided. I did not die. It’s a precise point I can identify as the time my life continued to swing forward. I imagine an enormous, invisible hand cupping beneath my bent back. I once held a dying nestling like that—a starling that had fallen from its nest.
Arctic tern as design solution
Arctic terns’ wings are long and slender, shaped like a bowie knife. The sun glints through the feathers to reveal a precise arrangement of points, the primary and secondary feathers: a plan, a blueprint for lightness. Wings such as theirs — narrow and long — have a high aspect ratio, which is described by the ratio of length to width. Low-aspect-ratio wings are short and broad, like sparrows’ wings, good for dipping and dodging through branches. Aspect ratio is a matter of balance. A ballet dancer’s outspread arms distribute mass to keep her balanced en point. When she pulls her arms into a pirouette, she can spin in the air. In birds and airplanes, wings with high aspect ratios are built for gliding or soaring over a distance — like albatrosses and airbuses — and low-aspect wings are built for maneuvering — like passerines and fighter planes. When a bird or airplane flies over the sea, the high-pressure wind lifts up, curling over the wingtips. Wingtips create induced drag (which, if you could see air, would look like spirals), resistance that ultimately uses up energy. The sharper the wingtips, the less energy they expend. Thus, the Arctic tern’s globe-spanning flights are made possible by its wings, which can glide using as little energy as possible. Efficient and elegant as a blade.
As a lonely child, I rode my bike down the middle of the road, arms outstretched and fingers playing the wind like wings. With the wind in my feathers, I was limitless.
Arctic tern as repetition
Arctic terns nest north of the 60th latitude, when the days are long and golden and cottongrass nods in the wind and sunset idles. They summer in the Antarctic, where the sun merely grazes the horizon before rising again, and where little silvery fish are plentiful. They follow the sunlight, solstice to solstice, summer to summer, pole to pole. Maybe it seems to them like the light is ever receding, a Sisyphean pursuit? Perhaps it’s the other way around, and daylight follows the Arctic tern’s long migration? As if tugged by a thread.
Ezra Pound says an epic is a poem with history in it. What history am I trying to understand here? Is it that I lived in the hills in a house with no heat? Cold woke me early, and I had silence all to myself. The line of the sun slid across the valley until it hit the empty vegetable garden, and my father rose to split the wood. Before crawling from under the quilts, I listened to the house creak back to life. Each day like the one before, the light just a little earlier, until spring unthawed us. How did this way of living, this childhood closer to the elements, make me who I am? I learned how hard it is to lose the cold once it gets into your bones. I learned patience. I learned to see how light moves.
Arctic tern as scissors, needle, thread
Arctic terns hover in convection currents. They dip, quiver, and then disappear in splashes of white salt water like needles stitching in and out of cloth. Small fish flashing silver metal in their bright beaks. The terns and the cold salt wind are sharp — that’s the only way to describe it — how fiercely they cut through the fabric of things.
Because I was a patient child, my mother put me to work cutting rhomboids and triangles, which she sewed into quilts and then hand-embroidered. The pieces came together into compasses, cubes, and stars. Winters when it was dark by 4 p.m., I got lost in a trance of tracing shapes and cutting them out with the good scissors. The scissors’ clean cut made a sound like boots walking in fresh snow. Sometimes, I’m amazed I even exist. Just now, I cut up the pieces of this essay, stepped back, and tried to see the order. There must be some order to it all that holds an answer to this history.
Arctic tern as mother
All terns are defensive, territorial, fierce motherfuckers. Walk near their nesting grounds and they’ll swoop down, screeching like vengeful angels.
When my mother marched into the Putnam County police station to pick up my father, they made her sign some forms. Under “occupation,” she wrote “mother” so hard the pen tore the paper. This is the only story I have to explain how she loves too fiercely, how hard it is to be her daughter. I’m becoming my mother. I’ll never be a mother.
Arctic tern as collective noun
Arctic terns skim from circling turning schools of minnows forced to the surface, a metallic mirror ball of fish bodies churning in synchronicity. Fish sense the bodies of those around them, and each individual moves instinctively in response to the others. They perceive partly through their eyes but also through an organ along their sides to sense subtle waves caused by another fish’s flicker. Scientists are baffled by exactly how schools maneuver in complex dashes and dodges when pursued by predators. We’re always struck with a bit of awe by collective movement. Any time we happen to see a school of fish or a flock of starlings slicking across the sky or salt water, it’s just a little beyond our comprehension.
Terns are individualists and don’t fly in flocks. Their colonies are usually a chaos of white wings. However, sometimes, the entire colony stops and becomes a harmony. In “upflights,” the colony rises straight up in the air, a concurrence of screams. In “panics” or “dreads,” their usual racket falls abruptly silent, and the birds fly away from their nest sites, as if their bodies were debris from a blast site. In synchronicity, they skim low over the water until they rise up to return, in their usual disorder, to their nests. Such dreads are frequent in early spring and have no apparent cause beyond innate responses between birds.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard leans over a log bridge to look for fish and sees them only when they flicker across her shadow. The point is we see things, if we see anything at all, in accidents of light, in being in the right place at the time. Only once, I’ve heard this: a band of coyotes in the night — the snow amplifying their calls. First one long note, then another. The calls became shorter and more frequent until there was a rainfall of tones. I woke at the right time to hear this beautiful horror. Coyotes scented the deer in the right place in the vast woods for me to witness. Sometimes, I’ve found the remains when walking in the woods: raw ribs surrounded by hundreds of pawprints blooming pink in the snow. “No,” Dillard writes, “the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.”
Arctic tern as binomial nomenclature
Sterna paradisaea. A boat’s stern slices through salt water. Familiarity with suffering setting in. Sailors live several years on these vessels, fishing, whaling, or shipping. Like Arctic terns, their journeys are long, globe-spanning, motivated by necessity. The graveyards in their small coastal towns are filled with stones reading, “Lost at sea.” Their wives get a letter a few times a year whenever their ship happens to meet another heading to the mainland. Think now of how vast the sea is, how trivial the ships crossing its surface are. A sailor gives a shout when he sees the stern swing to point at a far-off island. A welcome break from the pitch of the sea. Through the looking glass: heath-covered rock shore, a mayhem of white wings arcing over the island like a restless cloud. This shore of white wings is a wholly untouched place. A haven, a hope, Elysium, Paradisaea. This is how the Arctic tern gets its name. As the ship nears, the sailors hear the screaming. Screeches and cries, a bright cacophony, as blood red beaks dart at their heads, warning them away. As much as the sailors ache for land, they don’t throw the anchor. One man hauls the rudder, and the stern swings away to another horizon. Now they know: ghosts protect this cruel paradise.
I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard them many times. From the lower floors of an abandoned carcass of a building covered in graffiti in Providence, RI. In winter pines. As a violin sliding from an open window. Some things just need to be released.
Arctic tern as planetary rotation
In sleep, the Arctic tern tucks its beak into the soft of its scapulars. Consider the tern’s sleep as a point in space: the sun circles the point, never sinking, just touching the horizon at midnight and noon. Golden hours. Time turning the bird’s shadow in a slow waltz. It’s so clear and visible at the poles: the planet’s axial tilt balances between the moon tugging her tides and the sun turning her spheres. In sleep as in migratory flight, the Arctic tern knows such smallness, such gravity, such pull.
I once looked through a high-powered telescope while an astrophysicist I’d just met explained stars appear to twinkle because wind’s density acts as a lens between the eye and the star, but wind flows are inconstant. The star, meanwhile, burns the same brightness: too far for the human eye to see flames flicker. Now, any time I walk at night in winter and the wind is blustery and biting, I imagine I can see it flowing like a clear river up there, with the stars as the river’s stones.
Arctic tern as conservation of energy
In the most grueling leg of their journey south, Arctic terns fly over the Indian Ocean without stopping. Not once. For 8,000 km, they feed on the go; they sleep on the wing. You could look at this feat of flight as either conservatively practical or wildly reckless. There is no in-between with these birds. One way of understanding it all is with this principle: energy remains constant within a system. To glide, terns measure wind currents, exerting as little energy as possible. Though a tern slips into wind like a filet knife into its sheath, no tern is a completely closed system. Wind rushing along feathers is the slightest of friction, uniting tern and wind (physicists would call this the “wind–tern system”) in a trade of energy. Thus, terns gradually lose energy to the rough-edged wind as they glide over the Indian Ocean. They arrive at their next stop exhausted. Exhausted.
In Luquillo, Puerto Rico, I saved a girl from drowning. She and her boyfriend called for help, and they seemed so close to shore. My husband tried to stop me, knowing already I wouldn’t listen. If I’d stopped to think, I wonder if I’d have swum out. The drowning girl hung onto my shoulders, like you would if you were riding on the back of a bird, and pushed my head under. I grabbed her arm and tugged her forward in heaving pulls. Exhausted, she felt like a weight, pulling me under. The salt water choked me, and my lungs burned. No matter how hard I fought, the shore stayed in the same place, and I knew with sinking certainty I couldn’t keep going, I was going to die. And I let go of her hand.
Arctic tern as simile
The mated pair greet each other with their beaks vectoring to the sky, then into the ground, their sharp tails making angles, a pair of scissors opening and closing. For a nest, the male scrapes a hollow in the hard-packed ground or takes advantage of a natural dip in stone, preferring open spaces. The Arctic tern’s eggs are olive brown, speckled, and splashed in black like a Jackson Pollock painting. Though the pair will pull nearby bits of grass or twig to the edges as they brood, the nest stays spartan. Following the rhythms of the tides, they bring each other fish, a gentle-seeming gesture, a contrast to their life of few comforts and strict routine. The eggs are lusterless, like low clouds, and when an egg tooth cracks the shell open, it’s like the sky opening, like peeling the lid off the Earth. The new life claws out gasping, desperate, determined.
The riptide pulled her boyfriend farther out so when the waves parted I could see him smaller each time the distance and the panic in his voice growing I will never forget the sound of his voice I saw my husband pacing the shore close enough I could see fear on his face and I thought please don’t let him watch me die I yelled his name again and again but he didn’t hear and the drowning girl prayed in Spanish and somehow I noticed she wore pearl earrings.
My memory clutches these images like eggs held in a hard nest. Still.
Arctic tern as cartesian point
Terns are among the birds that can hover. That is to say, they can fly at a single point over a nest or fish or foe. Headwinds hold them in place mid-air, and though their position doesn’t move, their wings beat furiously to perform this feat. Aspoints on the cartesian plane, they become translated functions: dropping straight into sea water or rising steeply in an updraft. They can become functions of reflection, here and not-here — a bird above the waves, a bird below the water line — a negative bird. They can become an infinite set of points,ectors on a map of the globe or parabolic arcs swooping in the sky. The Arctic tern is a thing of precision.
I let the drowning girl’s hand go. This is not a brave history. I let her hand go. My husband had gotten the attention of a kite-surfer who towed the boyfriend to shore, then brought the drowning girl the rest of the way to the sand. I swam back alone. She and I knelt in the sand and hugged over the boyfriend’s body. We both wore bikinis, and I’ve never held a stranger so nakedly. He gasped beneath our touching bellies. The surf made his thick arm flop in the sand like a dead fish.
Back on shore, I breathed and sipped Goya peach nectar, and everything looked normal as if nothing had happened here. I gave an extra Goya juice to the drowning girl and her boyfriend, and we sat ten or twenty feet apart, none of us talking. Just looking at the waves breaking. Before they left, the drowning girl came over to me and said it was her birthday. That she believed in patterns, that this meant something.
Arctic tern as eternity
There’s something impossible about them. Because they settle only and alternately in the planetary poles, Arctic terns see more sunlight than any other animal on the planet. In the lonely poles, living things must have a tolerance for extremes. The light and the food sources pendulum between plentiful and scarce. Life adapts, continues its creep. Time moves slower in the Arctic and Antarctic. Perhaps terns could measure time as lichenologists measure years in the slow stretch of lichen over stone. These symbionts — fungi and algae — feed each other, growing only millimeters a year next to the nesting terns. One particular map lichen in the Arctic has been dated at 8,600 years old. Of course, Arctic terns don’t live as long as lichen does, but the chain of terns nesting in the place of their birth, generation after generation, could provide a measurement of ages and ages like lichen does. Look at the tern and see prehistoria, dinosaurs. To look at the Arctic tern is to see how little we know and how little we are. There, Ezra, is your little bit of history.
I remembered then, this strange synchronicity: two years before, on the same day, the day after Christmas, on the same stretch of beach where families listened to Afrobeat and drank liquor and punch, I saw the only dead body I’ve seen. It lay stretched out under a ludicrous beach towel, feet sticking out the end. People stood around talking and gesturing too calmly. A lone ambulance was parked with the lights off. The feet sticking out from under the towel were so small my stomach lurched — I thought it was a child. Later, I read that the person who drowned was an old man. I felt a terrible relief.
Arctic tern as mystery
Because the Arctic is vast and cold and there are so many ways for people to die chasing after these birds, there are few studies of Arctic tern behavior. Scientists have managed to attach trackers to several terns in a colony to map their circumpolar course, but even these studies have limited data — 17 or 20 individuals in a study, for example. Now, we know the total energy expenditure over a three-month migration is 30,000 kJ, only 25 percent of Arctic terns’ annual energy. We like numbers. There is still so much that cannot be known, that we’ve been unable to measure or count.
We don’t know about sleeping or roosting during the long migrations. Do they sleep in flight like their fellow laridae, the frigate birds? Do they land on the water like flotsam and hope for the best?
Who can resist the romance of birds that mate for life like barn owls, albatrosses, swans, and sandhill cranes? It’s a beautiful idea. We know little about the fidelity of mated pairs of terns season-to-season. Does a bird whose survival depends on long journeys also depend on long love?
Migrating Canada geese fly over the same landmarks and rest in the same ponds every year, but terns fly neither for familiarity nor efficiency. They follow the fickle patterns of wind and fish and tide. We have no idea how or why.
Of course: there are many ways of knowing, and not-knowing is a kind of knowledge, too.
I’ve tried to write about the drowning girl many times — the way she held onto me, the letting go. The story is like one of those intricate puzzle boxes I keep turning over and over in my hands, trying to understand what it means.
Arctic tern as portent
There’s a long history of seeing signs of the future in the behavior of birds. In ancient Rome, augers were seers skilled at interpreting the calls and flights of birds, known as birds’ “auspices,” to determine the will of the gods and what future actions man should take. One could hire an auger before an important event. Today, we still look at the sky to say if something is auspicious or inauspicious, but we do so to consider the effects of weather, storm clouds or open blue sky, on our plans. We have weathermen instead of augers.
As birds feed on the surface of the ocean and reside at the extreme ends of the Earth, Arctic terns are auspices of climate change. Rising water temperatures damage plankton blooms, which diminishes the fish that feed on them, which harms the terns that survive on the rich proteins of the littlest fish. Rising temperatures melt the ice floes where they winter in the Antarctic and reduce their breeding grounds in the Arctic, pushing land predators such as mink closer and increasing competition with other sea birds for space and resources. So much of the workings of the world is a mystery, not least of which is the life of the Arctic tern, and scientists don’t have enough of a baseline — however much it has shifted over the last century — to measure the current losses and the future of the species. However, if you watch carefully the flights of the Arctic terns, they’re auspices of what’s to come for our changing planet. Better listen and look to the sky.
The drowning girl said her name is Angelica.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Sources
California Lichen Society. “Lichen Q & A.” Online: http://www.californialichens.org/resources/q-and-a/#growth_rate
Hatch, J. J., M. Gochfeld, J. Burger, and E. F. J. Garcia (2020). Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.arcter.01
Khan Academy. “What is conservation of energy?” No date. Online: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/work-and-energy/work-and-energy-tutorial/a/what-is-conservation-of-energy
Macdonald, James. “How Do Fish Schools Work?” JSTOR Daily. June 21, 2017. Online: https://daily.jstor.org/how-do-fish-schools-work/
National Park Service. “Lichens.” Glacier National Park. May 22, 2016. Online: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/lichens.htm
Newcastle University. "Overland migration of Arctic Terns revealed." ScienceDaily. 25 March 2019. Online: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190325080451.htm
Science Learning Hub. “Wing Aspect Ratio.” Science Learning Hub – Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao, University of Waikato, www.sciencelearn.org.nz
ξ
M Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal, 2018). Her essays appear in House Guest and Grist and poems appear in The Fairy Tale Review, Hunger Mountain, Palette, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. M Jaime is the recipient of a 2020 St. Botolph Society Emerging Artist grant, and her work was recently featured in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the exhibition "Fabric of a Nation." She serves as the associate editor for Sixth Finch and a senior reader for Ploughshares. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA.