Free Lost Woods by Rachel Carson Page A

the old birds leave for the south. The young remain behind until their wing feathers have grown strong enough for the long journey down across the two Americas. By late July the older sanderlings are seen on our beaches again, and a few weeks later we begin to see young birds.
    This is the story that I have told in the first section, against a background of Carolina beach and Arctic tundra.
    Book II – The Gull’s Way
    The central character of the second section is another long-distance migrant, but this time a fish. In this section, which pictures the strange world of the open sea, I have written the biography of a mackerel, beginning, as biographies usually do, with the birth of my central character. There could scarcely be any stranger place in which to begin life than the surface waters of the open sea. Yet these waters are a sort of nursery where literally hundreds of kinds of sea creatures deposit their eggs, and where the young get their start in life. Parenthood in the sea is a relatively simple matter, for as a usual thing the parents do not care for their young and probably never even see them.
    The open sea is a strange place for anything so fragile as a mackerel egg to be set adrift: just sky and water, and great silences, but teeming, incredibly abundant life. In the first place there are the eggs of all sorts of animals – fishes, crabs, shrimps, clams, worms, starfish, and the like. From all these eggs larvae or young animals are hatching. Almost immediately, each larva is on its own resources. It begins to swim about and seek food, eating almost anything that is small enough to take into its mouth, or to overpower and swallow. All sorts of enemies of young fishes prowl through these surface waters: small jellyfish with enormous appetites, little, transparent worms with sharp, biting jaws, schools of small fishes that eat smaller fishes, and larger fishes that eat them. Just to give an idea of some of the hazards of sea life: a full-grown mackerel may produce half a million eggs in a season, or a large cod may shed three or four million. But the destruction of the young is so enormous that, on the average, only two young mackerel or cod will survive out of all the potential offspring produced by the mother fish during her whole life. This ceaseless ebb and flow of life – the constant destruction of individuals contrasted with the survival of whole species – is one of the most impressive spectacles which the sea presents.
    As the young mackerel grows rapidly during the first months of life, sea animals that were once deadly enemies become his prey as he, too, joins the ranks of sea hunters. After spending the summer in a sheltered New England harbor, he and other young mackerel wander out into the open sea again. There new and larger enemies await them: fish-eating birds, swordfish, tunas, and fishermen. In the concluding chapter of this series, I described the setting of a mackerel seine from the viewpoint of a fish – something that I do not believe has been done before.
    In many ways, I found this section the hardest to write, and so I get a good deal of satisfaction out of the fact that most reviewers and readers seem to like it best. I believe it was hard because of the endless waste of waters – no fixed points around which to orient one’s characters. I said a few minutes ago that I really lived the things I wrote about, and I don’t mind admitting that I was very thankful to climb out on dry land in beginning the concluding section.
    Book III – River and Sea
    For the last section of the book, I had left the gently sloping sea bottom from the tidelines out to the edge of the continental shelf, and the deep Atlantic abyss. There was one fish whose migrations include all that varied undersea terrain – the eel. I know many people shudder at the sight of an eel. To me (and I believe to anyone who knows its story) to see an eel is something like meeting a person who has travelled to the most