National Geographic Planet or Plastic: Wisdom

Wisdom

Ping!

I raced over to the computer upon hearing that familiar chime. It didn't really matter how fast I moved; I was waiting out a thunderstorm that was sitting in park over Midway Atoll, so the computer was nearby. But darn it, I had to have something to do.

Two words filled the subject line.

Z333 Autopsy

Given hindsight, I wished I hadn't looked. This one email was a cruel reminder of the bird I had found dead at her rookery three days ago. Before I wrapped her corpse in ice packs at the delivery point, I had noticed her right leg was wrapped in an aluminum US Wildlife and Fisheries tag with the characters "Z333." The lettering was white, standing out against the red backing.

In any line of work, there are little nuances that you memorize just because you see or hear them so often. In my case as an ornithologist, the red-and-white Z333 had essentially achieved lore-like status.

She was a Laysan albatross, but more importantly, she was the oldest tagged bird known. She was first tagged in 1956, and her tag had been replaced several times. I was the last human to replace it. I knew this for a fact because I had done it this past December.

Her name was Wisdom.

I took a deep breath and double-clicked on the attachment.

I glazed through the report, hoping this was all some kind of hallucination, until the word "ingested" popped out like it was on its own neon billboard.

Subject ingested large amounts of manmade plastic, including a lighter, three large clothing buttons, two bottle caps, and a USB stick. Several of the items show structural weakening, suggesting increasing impaction over a period of time. Ingestion probably occurred inadvertently while preying on fish and squid in the ocean.

I stared blankly through the computer for a good minute, then reread those few sentences.

Why couldn't she have died of something natural, like unfortunate predation? Heck, even a death from the damned mice snacking on the birds would have felt more acceptable.

Humanity's negligence was the reason she died three days ago.

I clicked the "Forward" button in my email account and typed my supervisor's name in the address bar. Without typing anything in the body of the email, I clicked "Send," finally resigning myself to reality.

She'd know what to do with the report, and she'd be the one to authorize a press release.

It was just one bird, and I knew only a few people would actually care about this. The Midway Atoll Refuge workers and the occasional followers on social media would send their condolences, but the rest of the world was going to continue turning without ever noticing its plastic refuse ended an important animal's life.

She was just one albatross out of hundreds of thousands here, but there was only one Wisdom.

I'm going to miss updating her social media profiles.