THE HARDEST WORKING BIRD

What I don’t know may make my admiration for the work ethic of the oyster catcher misplaced. Every day this past week a pair of black oyster catchers (Haematopus bachmani ) has been out on the edge of the surf probing and prying among the tightly packed carpet of mussels. While the surf surges back and forth only a foot or two away, the birds wrestle out of hiding small worms, limpets, and other invertebrates whose deaths keep the oyster catchers alive. They will often continue to work until water reaches their thighs.

When I think of them as the “hardest working birds I know,” I also know that this is my human impression. The measure of hard work is what part of a bird’s necessary calorie intake is spent on gathering food.

When evolution gave small dinosaurs wings and flight, the price was a heavy food demand to feed the wing muscles. Does a humming bird flapping wings at 75 to 200 times a second use more energy than the oyster catcher? (At the higher speeds the hummingbird is likely in courtship mode rather than hovering to feed.)

Thus I concede that my assessment of the oyster catcher’s work ethic is a poorly informed human impression. With that admission I continue to be an admirer, especially when I stand on a rock above the tide flats enjoying myself while their work is to them a matter of life and death.

I also realize that my ancestors only two or three centuries behind me in Scotland, England, and Bohemia spent most of their days working for food and shelter. Only through the benefits and burdens of technology has the human species saved us from devoting most of our hours to hunting and gathering, then sleeping so we might hunt and gather the next day. No so long ago we worked as hard as the black oyster catcher. I watch them with the knowledge that they are something like distant cousins for whom centuries have not brought the leisure of liberation from which they might watch me.