I am a nature writer, not a reporter, but last summer I decided I had to go down to the Gulf to see the oil, and the story, for myself. I’d grown tired of sitting on the lap of the national media while they told me their story, a story that sounded curiously like an adventure fit for Boys’ Life. Will they cap the well? Will they fire the evil BP guy? Stay tuned.

One thing the media loved to do was trot out pictures of oiled pelicans, something that I, and many other people, soon grew sick of.

“All summer long the same damn picture of the same damn bird,” a construction worker in Mobile said to me. “I hope’s that bird’s living a good life somewhere in a cage with someone spoon-feeding him. He deserves it. After this summer he must be tuckered out.”

Pelicans, particularly the oiled variety, became the media darlings of the spill, and while gannets and laughing gulls and tricolored herons must have bristled with resentment, pelecanus occidentalis claimed center stage. In my head I began to call whatever the biggest, latest accepted story was “the oiled pelican.” The oiled pelican was anything obvious or anyone who tries to treat anything, in our complex, messy world, in a simple, obvious way.

The local consensus, early in the summer, was that the oil was being over-reported. By fall, that consensus had shifted: the oil, we were told, was now being underreported. In other words, the fall’s oiled pelican was that there were no more oiled pelicans. It was educational, if dumbfounding, to watch the media nod and accept this idea. On the same day you spotted oil on the beach you could read that there was no oil on the beach. The truth was that by late summer the disaster had exceeded the national attention span and the news people were ready to move on. Once the obvious symbols––the oiled pelicans––went away, the media could too.

But if theoretical pelicans became a dark symbol for me, my encounters with the actual birds stripped me of my cynicism. One of the things I had heard before I traveled to the Gulf was that access was hard for reporters, but I found it was anything but. Maybe this was partly dumb luck, as the lodge where I was staying in Southern Louisiana also housed the Cousteau film team. I had come down with no real plans but they scooped me up like an orphan child, taking me out to the rig in a helicopter and out on the bays and bayous in their pontoon boat. On one of my last nights in Louisana I was heading back to my room, exhausted, when the Cousteau gang came bustling into the lodge.  

“What’s going on?” I asked Brian, a cameraman and scuba diver who had become a friend.

“We found an oiled heron out on the water,” he told me. “We’re bringing it to the Fort Jackson rehab and filming the whole thing.”

The next thing I knew I was signing in at the security booth and telling the guards, ––as Brian had coached me to––that I was a key grip. Once inside, the Cousteau team tended their bird, allowing me to wander off on my own. The building was a large aluminum shed that had been transformed into an impromptu MASH unit. Rows and rows of plywood boxes lined the floor, and at the end of the rows sat metal tables that the birds were cleaned on. Hundreds of bottles of Dawn lined the shelves in neat rows. Everything I encountered—trash cans, barrels of fish, towels, and the boxes that held the birds themselves—was labeled with masking tape and marked as either “oiled” or “not oiled.”

I walked down through rows of plywood boxes. On the first box was a sign that said “Escape artist—be careful,” though I couldn’t see inside to determine who the avian Houdini was. But it was the second box that stopped me in my tracks. Inside were six pelicans, huddled together, obviously stunned with fear, their great sword-like bills pulled into their chests. They had come in just that afternoon, according to the tag on the box, and they clearly didn’t know where they were. Their excrement mixed with oil stains on the white sheet below them. A small tub of fish in the corner went untouched. They seemed too black for pelicans, and when one stretched out its three foot long wing, it looked more like the dark wing of an eagle. I stared into the bird’s lightless eyes. I know pelicans well from having lived on Wrightsville Beach, and had always seen the birds as a kind of embodiment of imperturbability. But this bird was clearly perturbed. It made a point to keep contact, by wingtip, with another of the enormous birds, its fellow prisoner. It needed to touch something or someone it knew. Its expression seemed to say “What the hell has happened to me?” It looked scared and confused and, despite its attempt to cluster near its mates, very alone.

The sight cracked me open. But I couldn’t stay cracked. I retreated to my brain. I thought of how I fell hard for pelicans when I first moved south. I loved their nobility, the way they swooped through troughs of waves, the way they hovered above me like pterodactyls above me when I walked the beach. I have had moments when pelicans lifted me out of my own life, usually brief and ineffable moments of delight. But what I was experiencing as I stared into that box was a different sort of moment.

I stayed with the birds for a while. I looked into their black eyes. This is what we have done, I thought. The Gulf has been called “our national sacrifice zone,” and it is.  Unwilling to sacrifice anything ourselves, we designate other places and people and animals to serve in our stead. I felt a sudden and deep empathy with the pelicans. What would it feel like to be covered in a black-orange substance, like a melted Baby Ruth bar, and then be so dramatically displaced? They shuffled and stared. They didn’t know they were serving as sacrifices. They just knew they had been ripped out of the place they knew of as home and brought here. They tried to rest, but fidgeted nervously.

I was staring at the pelicans still when I heard a minor commotion in the corner where the Cousteauians were. Apparently one vet, tired of writers and photographers and camera people, had decided it was time for the lot of us to leave. I had been surprised at how accommodating the vets were when we first arrived, explaining what they were doing for us and answering questions while cleaning off oiled birds with Q-tips. But now they, or at least one of them, had had enough. The Cousteau crew had been trying to film the triage being performed on their tricolored heron, and while they were the most polite and least obtrusive of crews, they were now being hustled out. It would have been nice to film the complete journey of the bird that they had rescued, but you couldn’t help but empathize with the vets. By that point everyone in the Gulf was pretty sick of being filmed or written about. The vet was right: enough was enough. It was time, at least temporarily, to expel those of us who were chronicling the oiled pelicans, and get back to the real work of tending to actual birds.

—David Gessner

Read more of his thoughts on writing at Cocktail Hour.