Crude Awakening
Remembering a wildlife rescue legend
It hasn’t been a good season for birds. Last month, the U.S. Committee of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative released its latest status report, a succinct warning that habitat loss, invasive species proliferation, pollution, and climate change will tighten their stranglehold on the avian world without intensive conservation efforts. Rock pigeons may always thrive, as will house sparrows — they’re remarkable adapters to the urban environment. What remains of many species outside of the city limits a century from now is another matter.
Birdwatchers are a dogged bunch, and masters in the art of getting things done when it comes to protecting their muses. But as I read the report, I thought of a man missing from the battle plan, someone whose life was dedicated to reversing this trend of decline, one bird at a time. I pictured him decades ago, walking along a fouled California beach and picking up a seabird coated with oil — unsure of whether it could be saved, yet somehow concluding, Here’s what I’m going to do with my life.
A mensch and legend in the obscure world of saving wildlife affected by oil spills, Jay Holcomb died June 10 at age 63. Few people had his ability to work effectively with the petroleum industry during high-profile spills without compromising environmentalist bona fides. It’s complicated, dirty work, and it was Jay’s mission that drew me to wildlife conservation. I started volunteering at his organization, International Bird Rescue, several years ago while working at Condé Nast in Los Angeles, and it changed my life.
On the afternoon he passed away in Modesto, Ca., I reflexively googled “cancer” and “petroleum exposure.” Jay had responded to over 200 spills during a four-decade career. Some of these events happened before the donning of personal protective gear was as widely mandated as it is today. During the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, he struggled through crude so deep it spilled into his boots as he tried to save a common loon calling out in distress. The bird sank before Jay could reach it.
Other stories from his animal rescue adventures are more uplifting, if bittersweet. In the 1970s, Jay worked at a Northern California wildlife center, then home to a brown pelican with a severe wing injury that made her a permanent resident. At shift breaks, he would sit on the bare earth of the aviary to watch the pelican, a bird that often possesses a dog’s curiosity of humans, a colleague of Jay’s once observed. The bird in turn would eye Jay for a few moments before waddling over to perch on his leg, finally preening Jay’s ears and eyelashes with the hook on the end of her bill. His desire to help animals arose at the age of five, and during the course of his life, he simply allowed it to unfold, the way I think we all wish our own natural ambitions could.
“Birds may look like other birds of the same species, but each one has its own distinct personality traits, likes and dislikes,” Jay wrote from the trenches of the BP oil spill in 2010. “They are individuals with their own purpose, not just members of a flock.”
Today, social media is addicted to these animal idiosyncrasies. Cat shenanigans, of course, are the prevailing online currency, but you can’t scroll through Facebook without seeing a brown bear save a drowning crow at the Budapest Zoo, or a crested black macaque in Indonesia grin for a selfie. Jay built a career celebrating animals and their unique capacities long before such displays became clickbait.
It’s the oiled birds that propelled Jay’s career, however, because spills were one of the few times when the public paid attention to his work. The reason is simple: No image of human environmental impact is more reliably heartbreaking and politically handy than that of an innocent creature, soiled in one of the world’s most vital and despised resources.
The Gulf spill didn’t reach its narrative frisson until Associated Press photographer Charlie Riedel’s shot of a brown pelican, one coated so heavily with chocolate-like oil that it appeared to have been fondued, hit the wires. In these moments, consequences come into sharp focus — and opportunism often takes over quickly afterward. “Watch,” Jay emailed me at the time. “Here’s when it gets interesting.”
Politicians and others seeking adjacency to the good work being done swarmed the sweaty emergency center in Fort Jackson, La. where Jay’s team cared for hundreds of birds. A national environmental advocacy group smelled fundraising potential and deployed cameras. They staged rolled-up-sleeves interviews with their own staffers, some of whom spoke as though they’d just finished washing and rinsing a combative roseate spoonbill.
As the summer of 2010 unfolded, headlines such as “Rescue Workers Save Oil-Soaked Birds” deteriorated into “Gulf’s Oil-Soaked Birds: Rescue or Kill?” More harm than good was being done to the animals, a German biologist told Der Spiegel in an article that was spirited across the Atlantic as gospel.
To Jay, this was a flat-footed assertion. Achieving a successful rate of rehabilitation and release for animals impacted by petroleum depends on multiple variables: the species affected, the extent of contamination, the length of time a bird is oiled prior to capture, and the expertise of the team managing its treatment (the cost of such work is a tiny fraction of the overall cleanup bill). A decade earlier, in a marvelously successful effort, Jay watched as endangered African penguins saved from a bunker oil spill off the coast of South Africa scurried from their cardboard carriers and returned to sea. Over 90 percent of some 20,000 oiled birds cared for survived.
Jay shrugged off the criticism of his work that always irked me. “We’re the ones who get to help,” he told me. “Stop complaining and think how lucky you are.”
For someone whose life was continually interrupted by misery, Jay had a trust-me-things-will-all-work-out mindset, one that often showed up in frenetic text messages punctuated by non sequitur Emojis. Given the opportunity, he would have shown up to his own memorial service wearing cut-off jeans and a T-shirt with a northern gannet dressed as Che Guevara.
I envied him, because there isn’t much to smile about in the world of seabird conservation. Cut open a dead fulmar, and chances are you’ll find a handful of plastic shards, each piece mistaken for prey. Climate change will likely decimate emperor penguin colonies in the coming decades. And albatrosses literally hang around our collective necks; several species of the mythic bird are critically endangered, their numbers obliterated by commercial long-line fishing.
Perhaps most baffling is that over four years after the Gulf spill, we’re not much better prepared to save oiled animals in an ecosystem that supports over 15,000 species of marine life. More money seems to have gone to bogus settlement claims than wildlife disaster contingency efforts.
“It’s crooked and it sucks,” Jay said, refusing to spend much time railing about the post-spill morass. There were battles he knew he couldn’t win, but there were always birds he could save.
I don’t have any talent for hands-on animal care. But I remember my own first time picking up an oiled bird, a western grebe with fiery red eyes and a slender, curved neck. During courtship, pairs race in unison across the water’s surface. The ritual is so stunning that it frequently commands symphonic scores in nature documentaries.
It was early morning, and I was a wary volunteer at the Los Angeles Oiled Bird Care and Education Center, where seabirds were being transported by the dozen from a small spill of unknown origin. When we peeled back the bed sheet covering his net-bottom pen, the grebe jabbed at my hand with his pointy bill before flopping over in exhaustion. We tube-fed him blended fish and kept him warm.
By late afternoon, I found the grebe dead. His companion, also oiled but vigorous, shrieked as we stood over them.
I’ve struggled to find my own individual purpose among the human flock. But never during the course of that day did I think to myself: Why bother? Jay taught me that. You can worry from afar about the environment’s seemingly inexorable decline, so much so that it renders you helpless. But you can never ignore what is right in front of you.
