Shearwater Journeys

“Pink-footed Shearwater! Coming in on the boat’s wake! You can see with the naked eye! Naked eye!” Ashy Storm-Petrel! Arctic Tern! Sabine’s Gull! Northern Fulmar! By 2 pm, all the humans were exhausted, their eBird checklists as checked as they were going to get for the day. Several clients assembled near the chumming station and asked Debi the question that was on everybody’s mind: Was this really it? Was she really cleating off this incredible life she’d built at the end of this season?

Debi found the incredulity funny. “I’m not sailing off into the sunset. I’m going full gallop!”

Then we motored away from Fisherman’s Wharf and out into Monterey Bay. A raucous football team of barking California sea lions cheered (and jeered) us from the rock jetty. Debi started into her calls. She reads the seabirds on the ocean as if the boat were a clock. A bird off the bow is at 12; a bird off the stern is at 6.

“Tourists out on the balcony in their bathrobes—11 o’clock!”

“Two Pelagic Cormorants at 8 o’clock!”

This bay—the fish below and the seabirds above— has been Debi’s elected home nearly her entire adult life. After she missed the Texas birders in the parking lot in Austin, she finally caught up with the group and saw “all these people standing there with binoculars looking at birds. I was like, ‘Wow.’ ” The birders themselves were more important than any bird she’d ever seen—they were her people.

Debi Shearwater’s data has been vital in identifying steep declines in Sooty Shearwaters and changed our understanding of where the birds gather in rafts to molt—a stage when they’re particularly vulnerable. NOAA adjusted shipping lanes off the California coast to avoid whales that Debi helped document as well.

The place is vast and wild, “as amazing as Yellowstone or Yosemite,” she said, though to the untrained eye it just looks like water. The terrain below splits into cold-water canyons to about 12,000-feet deep, not far from shore, and upwelling currents supply nutrients for the plankton blooms that anchor the food chain of all marine species.

All the records Debi has kept trip after trip, year after year, in her black-and- white composition notebooks have become an invaluable resource of their own. Take the 40 years of relative abundance data she has on Ashy Storm-Petrels. The elusive nocturnal bird had been proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act but FWS didn’t list it when petitioned because the agency didn’t have data to prove the population was unstable. “It’s very difficult to get a population count of Ashy Storm-Petrels from breeding sites because they come and go in the dark,” Scott Terrill, senior ornithologist at California ecological consulting firm H.T. Harvey & Associates, told me. The thousand data points Debi collected on Ashies is the best tool we have for estimating the global population. The seabird’s numbers are declining, and while FWS decided not to list the species, Debi’s records helped inform a range- wide conservation plan.

On land Debi plans to bird San Benito County, a relatively untapped area, just like Connie Hagar birded Rockport, Texas, and Debi herself birded Monterey Bay. The data she collects will help track the health of local bird populations. She plans to volunteer, as she does every year, for the California Tricolored Blackbird Survey. She also volunteers for the California Roadkill Observation System, calling in dead badgers. But she said her official daily schedule, now that Shearwater Journeys is up for sale, is “sleep, walk dog, read, walk dog, gardening, walk dog.”

The American Bird Conservancy lawyers asked Debi to join their lawsuit to protect raptors. They’re cited in Shearwater v. Ashe, the 2015 lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior, which challenged the “30-year take rule.” The rule would have authorized FWS to grant wind developers permits to kill or “take” eagles for 30 years without penalty—replacing the existing five-year limit. Debi’s side won, and the ruling is known as the Shearwater Decision.