Where I now live, in Bloomington, Indiana, far from any ocean, my year is punctuated by the departure and return of the Canada geese. As the tasks invented by life in middle age accumulate, the rough cries of those geese in the spring and fall—their “ya-honk” of which Walt Whitman spoke—will have to do as my occasional reminder that there’s more to the world than this small college town.
About an hour or two from here, though, in the Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area, shorebirds from far-flung places are now regular visitors. This spring, the first black-tailed godwit showed up in nearby Oatsville—a sight bordering on the miraculous in a state that, apart from a slice of Lake Michigan, doesn’t have a coastline. But how on earth did this bird get from Iceland, or central Russia, to Indiana?
The migrations of birds were a cause of wonder to the earliest observers of nature and gave rise to many stories remarkable mainly for their ludicrousness. Birds were said to spend their winters hidden in holes, where they would bide their time until the spring, or to dig themselves deep into the mud under lakes. Some surmised that certain species would simply morph during the cold months, so that the redstart, for example, would re-emerge as a robin.
As naturalists began to study birds more systematically, the mystery of migration only deepened: “Whence they come, and where they breed, is to me unknown,” complained Mark Catesby, author of the earliest comprehensive description of the New World, about the blue herons he saw. Today, we know so much more, but the wonder remains.
Take the red knot, a plump, short-legged, medium-sized sandpiper equipped with an archaic-looking serrated bill good for holding on to slippery food. Red knots have been around for much longer than human beings, perhaps even for as long as 16 million years. And while they did not leave a fossil trail, we know that they adjusted when the planet last donned its deadly skullcap of ice, as Alexander von Humboldt called it.
The red knot is not an elegant bird, by any means, but its somewhat unathletic appearance belies the bird’s capacity for extensive travel. Each year, red knots travel more than 9,000 miles from the “bottom of the world” to their arctic nesting grounds. John James Audubon knew almost nothing about the bird, except that it made for good eating—a fact that, at least by some accounts, also gave the bird its memorable name. Red knots were alleged to have been the favorite food of the Viking king Canute, or Cnut the Great, ruler of the North Sea Empire.
In the spring, these birds, having begun their annual voyage from their winter residences in Latin America, descend on the beaches of South Carolina, Delaware, and New Jersey, and they once did so in such numbers that people felt that they had stepped into some avian fairyland. Over 30 years ago, naturalist Pete Dunne counted as many as 95,000 red knots on the shores of Delaware Bay.
Deborah Cramer, during her recent visit to that same bay, saw (according to the estimate given by the bird conservationist who accompanied her) around 4,000, a catastrophic loss. The subspecies of the red knot that is the subject of this volume—Calidris canutus rufa—is now considered “federally threatened.” What happened?
In this haunting, unusual book, Cramer, author of the well-received Great Waters (2001), a “biography” of the Atlantic Ocean, weaves a complex (and, as I am tempted to pun, knotted) tale about this bird. Guided by biologists, environmentalists, fishermen, and hunters, she follows the knot along its migratory path, gathering what facts she can to show how deeply connected we are to it.
She begins her story in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, but the heart of The Narrow Edge is the chapter set in Delaware Bay, where the lives of the red knots intersect with ours—and they do so through another animal, one that is even more ancient than the knot: the horseshoe crab.
Each spring and early summer, these crabs arrive on the beach en masse to lay their eggs, about 4,000 per square yard. They were once so plentiful that some beaches had as many as 500,000 eggs per square yard. Their eggs are a delicacy to the red knots, a source of the fat they need to sustain themselves during the arduous next leg of their trek. But these crabs also matter to our own survival—not so much as food (though fishermen use them as bait in eel pots), but as biomedical testing devices: The blood of crabs coagulates around toxins harmful to us.
Each year, crabs are harvested in large numbers for enforced blood donations. Once they are released again, many of them are too traumatized and disoriented to spawn. Quite a few of them die. The consequences for the hungry knots are easily imagined.
Deprived of at least some of their food source, the red knots encounter other challenges to their survival during their journey, from habitat destruction due to rising sea levels to the lethal blades of offshore wind turbines to, finally, fluctuations in the population of lemmings in their arctic breeding grounds that will cause foxes and other predators to lay a “yellow eye,” as Emily Dickinson would have said, on their nests.
If the red knots hover on the narrow edge of destruction, so, ultimately, do we—or at least so does the world we know. Our numbers might not decline like those of the birds around us, but our survival is connected to theirs, in ways that we only imperfectly understand. The Narrow Edge is not just another lament for a world wrecked by human shortsightedness, though. It is, first and foremost, a deeply moving declaration of love for one particular bird, a love for which the author will spare no effort.
In an affecting moment early in the book, Cramer cradles a red knot in her hands, thinking about the distances it has traveled. And though she does not burden her narrative with much autobiographical detail, we do get to see her on an isolated beach in Bahía Lomas, Chile, her eyes tearing up in the stinging wind; being tossed around and feeling sick on a small plane off the coast of Texas, looking for knots that don’t follow the Atlantic flyway; and trudging through the snow on Southampton Island in Nunavut, slowed down by her heavy clothes, her equipment, and the 12-gauge shotgun Environment Canada has required her to carry.
The Narrow Edge is, by turns, lyrical and fact-heavy, depressing and uplifting, nostalgic and forward-looking. Inevitably, this is a book about numbers and about people who count: the numbers of red knots and of crab eggs, the miles these birds travel, the profits people make or don’t make off the animals they catch.
But even more, it is a book about those people who, by caring about what happens to the red knot, also care about our future, above and beyond predictable political alliances. Deborah Cramer points out that it was the hunters’ organizations that first took responsibility for bird conservation: While they are already protecting the homes of the birds they shoot, we still need to learn to secure those they don’t—perhaps by paying an excise tax on binoculars and other outdoor gear? And Cramer acknowledges the fishermen who have developed alternative bait, landowners who have turned their properties into managed wetlands, and chemists who are working on synthetic endotoxin detectors that would allow us to keep the horseshoe population intact.
Cramer has written a book very much like the red knot itself. Each chapter deals with a different location or problem, and she moves effortlessly from ornithology to invertebrate biology to medicine to geography, from birds to crabs to humans, and then back again. The Narrow Edge is not an elegy but an insistent plea for avian and human survival, an assertion of the bond that unites us with all living things.
At times, despite its subject matter, the book is also deeply funny. When Cramer joins the crew of Jerry Gault, owner of Gault Seafoods, on Lucy Point Creek in the South Carolina low country to watch them pick up horseshoes at sunset, Jerry and his men end up with so many animals that they are standing up to their shins in them. When their boat won’t accelerate, the crew begins to discuss, facetiously, whether their problem is too many crabs or “too much weight from writers.”
With 4,500 pounds of crabs wriggling around them, the question answers itself. But unlike Jerry Gault’s boat, The Narrow Edge never founders under the somber weight it carries. Instead, when Cramer pays tribute to the people who give a voice to the birds and crabs that cannot speak for themselves, her book soars.
Christoph Irmscher, provost professor of English at Indiana University, is the author, most recently, of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.
