Joseph Smit(1836–1929), Catalogue of the birds in the British Museum (1896). Volume 25 (Plate. III)
As a biologist I always found the idea of the supernatural preposterous. The closest thing to the afterlife was in my mind, metabolism. The process of death and decay that provides materials for life-sustaining chemical reactions, giving place for the emergence of new organisms. A sensational thing by itself.
But a research sojourn to the Chincha islands made me reappraise these views. We had been granted a few thousand dollars to look into the conservation of marine birds in the western coast of South America. The Chinchas are rather small, at less than a square kilometer each. But it still took our party a whole three days to rig up the area with monitoring equipment. We intended to track the breeding sites of the erratic and ominously named ringed storm-petrel.
The Chinchas had been heavily exploited for its guano in the 19th century. While the resident birds were mostly disturbed by meddling humans scraping the ground for their excrements, the latter suffered from harrowing abuse by investors and their foremen.
The “Chinese graveyard,” a small area in the central island, attested to this violence. Populated by rotten planks and metal crosses erected over nameless graves without corpses, it was worthy of spooky tales. While installing acoustic sensors there, I couldn’t keep my mind off the thousands of coolies, black slaves and indentured Indians who jumped off cliffs to flee from disease, overwork and lacerations.
Although lectured about this at school as a jaded teen tasked to memorize that President Castilla built railroads and abolished slavery with the fallacious prosperity of guano, I never saw its relation to the issues I now faced as a professional. After guano, the islands remained empty of their previous bustle. Chirps, hoots and caws were no more and with them also left the shrieks of pain and howls of those miserable labourers.
Days later in the lab I browsed the folder where my colleagues had uploaded thousands of .wav files from our field trip. One of them was labeled and included a note insisting it should be revised immediately. I ran it through the spectrogram and found it full of peaks indicating recurring activity. After highlighting a section, it automatically played in my headphones.
I stood in awe at the alarm call of our elusive bird. In the background, however, like a traceless noise, the lamentations of a man spoken in what sounded to me like Chinese, seemed to converse with the agitated storm-petrel.