“Do you do well in small planes?”
I don’t fully understand the question until the horizon tilts to 45 degrees, and the plane cabin hops over the wake of our jet stream. I’m in the jump seat of Heather Wilson’s Cessna 206, and until today, the smallest plane I’d been in was the commercial 40-seat Ravn Air flight that brought me here to Alaska’s Cold Bay.
Behind the yoke is Wilson, a biologist pilot for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. She’s not your typical cruising-above-cloudline flier: With wings at 500 feet, Wilson skillfully and swiftly banks the plane towards the lagoon below, locking her eyes on a blur of flying Pacific black brant geese while she recites what she sees into the helmet-wired audio recorder.
We are here to count birds—thousands of them.
At the tip of the Alaskan peninsula, Cold Bay occupies a strip of land hugged by two tides emanating from the Pacific Ocean to the south and Bering Sea to the north. Cold Bay is 768 miles south of the Arctic Circle and 335 miles west of Honolulu: a place so remote that its permanent residents include 38 households and a rotating cast of brown bears, wolves, foxes, caribou, and lots of birds (at this time of year, about a quarter of a million).
Every fall, thousands of migratory waterfowl take refuge in the lagoons of the nearby Izembek National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and State Game Refuge, including the entire population (roughly 160,000) of Pacific black brant geese. Peppered amongst Emperor geese, Canada geese, and Steller’s eiders, brant annually reunite with their relatives to stage, or fatten up, on the world’s largest eelgrass beds before setting forth to their respective wintering grounds. Some will travel to protected bays along the Pacific coast of the U.S., though most are headed for Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and an ever-growing portion—about 30%—remain in Izembek due to the warming winters.
Wilson has been a part of the USFWS Migratory Bird Management program since 2007. One of a small group of people who have done this survey since its inception in the 1980s, she has flown more than 4,000 hours, and endless miles, over the wildest reaches of the American north. Counting the birds is extremely difficult, and necessitates the honing of an unusual skill. Before there were computer simulations, one way of sharpening the skills required for being an ocular counter was to throw a handful of rice on a table top. Using one’s best cumulative spatial judgement, the trainee estimates how many grains there are as fast as they can. But, unlike rice, birds fly away—quickly.
That’s no deterrent for Wilson. “I identify with air,” she says. “I enjoy every environment, but I feel the best in open, high places, especially the air, and flying. It just seems natural to study animals who are the same way.” She may be observing the geese, necessarily apart from them, but she relates to them, in a way: “The more you fly in windy places and among the birds, the more it becomes a part of you; they way I think it’s a part of them.”
Wilson’s work puts her at the frontlines of our changing climate, and her surveys inform wildlife regulations and conservation decisions. Being a biologist pilot, she says, is different to other jobs that require flight. “You always feel that you’re contributing to something bigger,” she says. “It’s not just about ‘getting there’; it’s our platform for observation, and ultimately conservation.”
In contrast to the rapid decline of songbirds, waterfowl are thriving. Most waterfowl are highly adaptable creatures, and some of the changes wrought by a changing climate are actually beneficial to the brant. Land that once froze over by November is now staying fertile for months longer, providing increased habitat and abundant eelgrass. But as the thaw continues, this may not remain the case. How these alterations to habitat and timing will ultimately play out for the birds is a story that is still unfolding.
When I first heard of Wilson, I immediately thought of Fly Away Home, the 1996 film inspired by the work of naturalist William Sladen; it tells the story of a girl who trains a family of geese to fly south by following her homemade ultralight aircraft. Wilson too is the heroine of a modern environmental story between woman and bird. Her life’s work has brought her to the skies to fly among the creatures she loves, above some of the planet’s most precious lands. She seeks answers about the planet’s health, and using the information she gleans, Wilson creates a portrait of our planet that displays the interconnection between land, birds, and people: a woman with wings.
