A Stillness Beneath the Waves

A review by Charles Hagner

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan

W.W. Norton, 2017

364 pages, hardcover

I love Lake Michigan.

I have driven around its southern end more times than I can recall. I’ve traced its contours from the windows of jet planes. And I’ve crossed it by ferry. Still, I can’t help but marvel.

I just love all that water, and how often its appearance changes. Caribbean blue and glassy one day, its surface can be Baltic gray and roiled with whitecaps the next.

Most of all, I love the lake’s birds: the Snowy Owls and vagrant gulls that appear each winter, the scaup, mergansers, and goldeneyes that linger each spring, and the long lines of nighthawks that move south along the bluffs in August.

I also love knowing that Lake Michigan supports many more birds than the few I manage to see. Every spring and fall since 2012, the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory has hired an observer to count the birds that pass a watch site on the shoreline. From the beginning of March to May 20, 2016, he recorded no fewer than 187,000 individuals. From September to November that year, his tally was almost 180,000 birds, 125,000 of them Red-breasted Mergansers. And this spring, he identified over 176,000.

Numbers as big as these make you wonder how large the grand total would be if additional observers joined in, counting at the same time at additional locations around the lake or, even better, at locations around all five of the Great Lakes.

The observatory’s totals might also lead you to assume that Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario are as healthy beneath the waves as they seem to be above. But, as Dan Egan explains in this excellent, eye-opening book, you would be wrong.

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