It’s feeding time at the Sanctuary on Sapelo (SOS), Emmy and Al Minor’s bird rehabilitation center on the Georgia Coast: time to thaw 125 pounds of fish (today it’s thread herring), split the frozen rat carcasses (leftovers from a zoo), and dice up donated beef hearts.

Retirement is not supposed to be like this.

Emmy and an osprey.

Photo: Gail Krueger.

“I’ve got myself into something I can’t get out of,” Emmy says. There’s no end in sight to the birds that need her help, and so Emmy continues to do what she has been doing for 18 years: mending wings, healing gunshot wounds, and slipping antibiotics down unwilling avian throats.

Emmy’s adventures in bird rehabilitation began in 1983, when she and her husband Al turned a good part of their 10 acres of wooded land into a bird sanctuary along the banks of the Sapelo River in rural McIntosh County, the heart of coastal Georgia. McIntosh used to be one of the poorest counties in the state, but its lovely landscapes gradually attracted developers, who have carved mini-estates out of the piney woods and built McMansions cheek-by-jowl along the estuaries. Similar developments are sweeping up and down the entire coast of Georgia, turning many local birds into refugees. The more people that migrate to the area, the more birds — pelicans, red-tailed hawks, ospreys, owls, and eagles — find their way into Emmy’s care.

“I’d say 99 percent of the birds we see have had some sort of run-in with people,” Emmy says. This contact isn’t so much with humans as with the artifacts of humanity: Terns are caught in six-pack rings, pelicans get errant fishhooks snagged in their pouches. Several birds have experienced seizures or lost their sense of balance, which the Minors believe is a consequence of pesticide poisoning or toxic chemical contact. According to Emmy, the worst case she’s seen in the sanctuary was a young eagle with rope tangled around its talon. The eagle flew into SOS, but Emmy and Al were never able to capture it. It died hanging by the rope from a tree branch.

That eagle’s sad plight illustrates both the need for and the limitation of SOS. The Minor’s high-ceilinged, low-slung coastal house is at the end of the road, both literally and figuratively. If an injured bird can’t make it here, it can’t make it, period.

Feathering the Nest

On a typical day at SOS, Al is preparing for the 700-mile roundtrip voyage to St. Petersburg, Fla., to buy more frozen fish. Usually, local fishers and shrimpers donate generously to the Minors and their flock, but last year, most nets along the coast were empty, so Al has been making the trip twice a month.

Emmy, meanwhile, is on the phone giving instructions on how to care for a wayward homing pigeon that someone found. “Yes, you can bring it here, but it probably just needs to rest,” she says. “Offer it some grain and call me back.”

Bird food for thought, delivered by Nan.

Photo: Gail Krueger.

Then it’s off to care for the birds on the premises. About 10 yards from the front porch of the Minor’s home, a large, fenced pen contains a cacophonous assortment of water and wading birds on the mend. Down a path, caged owls and hawks are busy rehabilitating. Elsewhere, an aviary houses three pairs of bald eagles that have been injured so severely they will not be able to return to the wild. The Minors are working with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to try to induce the birds to reproduce so their offspring can return to nature.

Today, an osprey recovering from a gunshot wound needs to be moved from one cage to another. Five months ago, a veterinarian treated the bird for free before turning it over to SOS. The osprey’s head hangs to one side, but it is recuperating, albeit very slowly.

Nan Page, a veterinary technician from Atlanta, has been working with the osprey every day. “Even ospreys need physical therapy sometimes,” she says. Nan helps Al and Emmy run SOS, taking on some of the heavier work that Emmy and her arthritic knees can no longer handle. Nan spreads her arm wide as if to take in the whole of SOS. “This is her passion,” she says of Emmy.

But Emmy’s passion, and her patience, is wearing thin. “If Al dropped dead tomorrow, I couldn’t hold the funeral until I fed the birds,” she quips. “You know anybody who wants to run this place?”

Nonetheless, Emmy believes that some things are getting better. At the shrimp docks where she begs fish, the dockworkers are picking up their trash these days instead of dumping it into the river. Kids are telling their parents why it’s bad to shoot hawks. Emmy suspects that people also value their surroundings more than they used to. It’s better because some people are more aware, she says, but it’s worse because there are more people.

As the coastal population continues to grow, Emmy hopes people will find room in their hearts for the birds and other wildlife that they are displacing. She hopes her effort to educate people about the value of the native wildlife will outstrip the pace of development, both for the sake of the birds and the people. Otherwise, “I think one day God is going to look down and decide he doesn’t like the way we’ve treated this place, and he’s going to squeeze us out of here,” says Emmy. “The Earth will heal, especially if we’re not around.”

What a babe.

Optimism comes as naturally to Williams as the tide comes to the beach. It has to, because sea turtle conservation in Georgia isn’t easy.

“Awareness is higher than it’s ever been and that gives me hope,” Williams said. “Conservation programs are rampant, particularly in Third World countries where there were none before, and that gives me hope.””

The Caretta Research Project — named for the caretta caretta, a threatened loggerhead sea turtle species — has been watching over sea turtles on Wassaw Island National Wildlife Refuge, a Georgia barrier island, for 28 years. Williams and the project won the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Environmental Hero Award for 2000 and are credited by Georgia wildlife officials with helping keep Georgia sea turtle populations from crashing.

Not too bad for a sometimes shoestring effort that has often gotten by on little more than good will and wishful thinking. The museum that originally sponsored the Caretta Research Project closed its doors several years ago. The project now stands alone, willed on by Williams — who, to make ends meet, works at Victoria’s Secret on the side — some board members, and devoted volunteers.

A loggerhead turtle gets a helping hand.

USFWS.

The project’s many volunteers buoy the Turtle Babe’s spirits. More than 2,000 people have pitched in over the years, paying their own way for the privilege of working with nesting loggerheads for a week at a time. By moonlight they patrol the beaches for turtles; by daylight they try to sleep in sweltering rustic cabins. A number of them come back year after year. Seduced by sea turtles, some even end up moving to coastal Georgia.

“This is not just for us,” Mike Frick, assistant director of the project, said of the NOAA award. “It’s for all the volunteers, the former directors, all the people who help year after year.” Frick started with the project as a teenager 14 years ago. He, like some other project volunteers, turned to a career in biology after spending time on Wassaw.

Fins Sins

Georgia’s sea turtles had a pretty good year in 2000, with a total of 1,070 confirmed nests, below 1999′s record-breaking 1,417, but nothing to cry about, Williams said. And fewer turtles washed up dead on Georgia beaches this year than last — 155 versus 269.

Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, fins intact.

David Bowman, USFWS.

Still, one of the deceased turtles that did wash up challenged even Williams’s optimism. It was a highly endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, well-fed but with its fins cut off, perhaps by hostile fishers who caught it by accident.

And the number of strandings on beaches can be a poor indicator of what is really happening to sea turtles, said Mark Dodd, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. “The lower numbers could be a result of fewer turtles around, reduced fishing and shrimping efforts, or simply a factor of prevailing winds washing the dead ones out rather than in,” Dodd said. Several studies have shown that only about 10 percent of turtles that die actually wash ashore and are counted.

Despite high compliance with U.S. regulations that require shrimpers to use turtle excluder devices (TEDs), which help turtles escape from shrimping nets, repeated captures in these nets are still thought to be the leading cause of sea turtle mortality. However, use of newer TEDs seems to helping, Dodd said — and this is the type of positive development that Williams likes to point to.

“There are fishermen out there just as concerned about the ocean as we are,” Williams said. “I always try to remember the many good ones.”

Nice T-shirt!

When she was in college in New York, Williams wanted to study marine mammals. One summer while working in a Long Island grocery store, a customer walked in with a turtle conservation T-shirt on. Williams liked it. She talked the customer into giving her a summer internship with the Okeanos Conservation Project tracking Kemp’s ridley turtles in Long Island Sound. She never looked back to marine mammals, and she worked her way to the Caretta Research Project, which she has now managed for four years.

The turtle’s all right (maybe).

USFWS.

The recent approval by President Clinton and the U.S. Senate of an innovative treaty to protect six turtle species, the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles, came as no surprise to Williams. Of course the president would do the right thing by her beloved sea turtles, Williams reasons. Who wouldn’t?

Despite some good news this year, it’s still hard to say how Georgia’s sea turtles are faring overall. Turtles nest in cycles of about four years’ duration with a couple of peaks and lows in each cycle, making it hard to see population gains or losses.

While some turtle projects, like the one on Wassaw, are long-lived, others are not. Dodd said he has 12 years of data for the state as a whole and will need 16 years worth to discern a significant swing in the turtle population one way or the other. The best information available now indicates that Georgia’s sea turtle population is holding steady, at numbers about half of what they were 40 years ago.

James Holland — he doesn’t
wear fleece.

The rough-hewn Holland — with his missing front teeth, ninth-grade education, and fierce determination — embodies the new environmental movement in the Deep South. This movement is led by people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a trendy coffee shop. They buy the trappings for a wilderness trip from Wal-Mart and the Piggly Wiggly. They don’t have memberships in the Sierra Club. Rather, they are folks who make a living off the land they love just like their daddies did. They are sick and tired of having the natural resources they depend on poisoned by big money and ignored by big government.

Blue crabs depend on clean estuary environments, just the right balance of pure fresh and salt water. Over the course of his career, Holland watched his crab harvest drop from 1,500 pounds a day to 160 pounds, thanks to the steady degradation of the Altamaha ecosystem.

Remember the Altamaha.

Photo: Camille Heaton Archibald.

In 1996, Holland and a few other angry crabbers decided to do something extreme. They formed an environmental group, an unprecedented act by crabbers in the small south Georgia town of Darien.

“The crabbers finally learned we need clean, fresh water,” Holland said. “They’re getting a lesson that the environment does matter. It took a long time to teach ‘em.”

The River Wild

The Nature Conservancy has called the Altamaha River basin one of “the last great places.” The group’s Altamaha bioreserve program headquarters is in Darien, down the street from both the Riverkeeper office and the office of the Coastal Center of Sustainable Development. Thanks to efforts to restore and protect the Altamaha, there are probably more employed environmentalists per capita in Darien than in any other Georgia town.

The Altamaha is still fairly wild. Until a couple of years ago, it was dotted with ramshackle plywood houseboats where barefoot families spent the summers without benefit of plumbing.

The Altamaha River system.

The river runs flat, broad, and undammed for 138 miles from the Georgia piedmont to the salt marshes along the coast. More than 100 rare plant and animal species live along the waterway, which meanders through hardwood floodplains and cypress swamps that have never been cut. The cypresses on Bear Island, in the Altamaha estuary, are said to be more than 1,000 years old.

The Altamaha flows through Holland like blood does through other folks. You hurt the river, and you hurt him.

“When we were little, we didn’t know no better. We dumped stuff in the river, everybody did,” Holland said. ” But now we know. Now we know what it’s worth and we may lose it.”

Sewage runs through it.

Photo: Altamaha Riverkeeper.

Plenty of people still dump in Holland’s river, though. There are more than 100 state permits allowing treated sewage and other pollutants to be discharged into the Altamaha. There is untold runoff from timber plantations and farm fields. A private utility wants to take out fresh water for future development. The level of nutrients in the river has doubled in the past 20 years. Fish kills are noted each summer, and now a parasite triggered by pollution is turning the blood of adult blue crabs into a milky soup.

“It’s got so bad out there it [the crab industry] may crash this year,” Holland said. “It’s much worse than last year. The only thing that keeps some of them boys going is demand is strong.”

Feeling Crabby

Though Holland is a vigilant advocate for the river and the crabbers it supports, not everyone in Darien likes him. The crabbers who have not joined his group say he’s done it all for personal gain and fame.

“It’s all crap,” Holland said of his critics’ charges. “I’m still in the river, in the mud. I still get dirty.”

But now, instead of tugging heavy crab traps into a small boat, Holland pulls water samples from the river and nabs polluters. Last week he drove 150 miles to deliver some diseased blue crabs to a biochemist for analysis. On the way, he took a dozen water samples to be tested for fecal coliform.

Up for crabs.

Photo: NOAA.

Holland is too busy these days to crab himself, but he hasn’t lost touch with the trade. His wife and daughter have taken over his crab wholesale business and one of his two sons crabs for a living.

Holland has his fans, too. Some activists say he’s the best thing to ever come along for the south Georgia environment. To the college students who work as interns in the Riverkeeper office between biology and chemistry classes, Holland is a genuine hero. The real thing.

He might have acquired even more admirers had he attended the International Water Keeper Alliance conference in California in June, along with Robert Kennedy, Jr., and representatives from other water keeper organizations. The water keeper movement has taken hold in 40 areas throughout North and Central America, with citizens, biologists, and lawyers working together to reclaim their rivers, bays, and other local waters. But Holland didn’t make it to the meeting. He won’t set foot on an airplane.

Ask Holland if he’s hopeful about the Altamaha and he chews the question over awhile like a piece of gristle. Finally he says no.

“I’m not hopeful when every way you look you see things minimized by what people are doing and how they continue to get away with it. But maybe we can turn some of it around.”

Once more into the breach.

David Wiley, National Marine Fisheries
Service.

After this year’s dismal right whale calving season, the poetry that comes to Slay’s mind is darkly pessimistic. The rarest whale of them all may be getting rarer.

The Northern right whale, the most endangered of the big whales, travels south each winter from Canada’s Bay of Fundy to give birth in its only known calving grounds, the warm, shallow coastal waters off south Georgia and north Florida.

Few whales showed up, though, for the 1999-2000 calving season. And only one birth was confirmed by a photo despite teams of researchers combing the area in planes and small boats for 38 days, logging more than 26,000 miles. A second calf was spotted, but not confirmed.

Researchers like Slay, of the New England Aquarium, are worried. He doesn’t want to say he’s seeing the last Northern right whales, but extinction is a strong possibility unless more babies are born.

“I don’t think any of us working with these animals are ready to throw in the towel,” he remarked. “Many of us don’t want to readily admit that these whales might be on the ropes, but there’s definitely blood on the mat.”

Map: Office of Naval
Research.

Scientists estimate that only 300 to 350 of the Northern right whales are left — so few that researchers know the females by sight and by name. The number of calves born has been falling steadily. Twenty-one births were recorded in 1996, 18 in 1997, six in 1998, and four in 1999.

Not only babies were missing this year. Fewer adults — less than a half dozen — were seen. During a normal season, 35 or 40 adults and juveniles are spotted.

It’s enough to leave Slay quoting the darker lines from T. S. Eliot (“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper”) and Dylan Thomas (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”).

Love at First Right

Slay saw his first right whale in February 1988 while he was working as an observer on a dredge that was digging a channel for the Navy’s submarine base in Kingsland, Ga. — right in the middle of an area now identified as right whale critical habitat.

“She was number 1704 and I’ll never forget her,” Slay said.

A few years earlier, Savannah-based naturalist Cathy Sakas found a dead right whale calf — umbilical cord attached — on a remote Georgia island. It was the first proof anyone had that right whales were present and giving birth in Georgia waters. Until then, all right whale research was done in the Bay of Fundy, where the whales appear each summer.

Having a whale of a time.

Chris Slay, New England Aquarium.

After his encounter with 1704, Slay wrangled a part-time job with the New England Aquarium’s summer whale program in Fundy. He’s been watching whales professionally ever since — traveling to the calving grounds in the winter and to Fundy in the summer.

This is the most dismal year he’s had.

But there are a few bright spots. For one, the port of St. John, New Brunswick, on the Bay of Fundy is considering shifting local shipping lanes to get ships out of the way of whales. “It’s a big deal to be discussing that sort of change,” Slay said.

Historically, collisions with ships have been the leading cause of death for adult right whales. In the Southeast, Slay and others run an early warning system that alerts ships by radio when a whale is in the area. There have been no ship strikes of right whales in the Southeast in several years.

The fishing industry presents another obstacle for the whales, though. Two to four adults get entangled in fixed fishing gear each year in the Northeast. Sometimes whale watch teams are able to get close enough to cut the gear away. Usually, though, entanglement results in death.

“[The gear] is all very heavy; it does not rot,” Slay said. “So it cuts deeper and deeper. It’s a slow, agonizing, horrible death.”

With a population so low, the loss of even one individual — whether from ship strike or entanglement — is a body blow to the population.

Krilling Me Softly

This year, when whale watchers expanded their search into waters off the Carolinas, north of the calving grounds, they found whales farther off shore than normal. It’s possible that the whales have been kept from their usual territory by three years of abnormal weather — caused by the swing between El Niño and La Niña — and unusually warm coastal waters.

There she blows … for now.

National Marine Fisheries Service.

Some scientists theorize that weather anomalies, which can stir deep sea currents, hamper the whales’ search for food. The huge mammals, which have no teeth, feed by straining tiny tidbits — krill and microscopic shrimp — through modified hairs in their mouths called baleen.

The females might not be finding enough food to support a successful pregnancy. And pregnancy intervals — the years between giving birth — may be lengthening.

This is bad news for a struggling population. Whales take a long time to reach sexual maturity and only a healthy birthrate will guarantee the species’ survival.

Researchers will hold their breaths until summer, when the whales make their annual appearance in the Bay of Fundy. Perhaps a few mothers and calves will show up.

A last bit of hopeful news: A lot of known young females in the remaining population are coming into their reproductive years and some older females are due for a calf. If global weather patterns normalize, researchers hope they could be tracking as many as 20 calves next year.