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So when, 15 years later, young Richard O. Willis, standing atop Haystack Rock at the height of the nesting season in 1968, signaled his distress to the watching Beach Patrol, he was essentially summoning a hurricane to his rescue. That hurricane soon arrived, in the form of U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Alexander Klimshuk’s rescue chopper. “I went down slowly so the birds could get out of the way, but I wasn’t going to hover 100 feet above the rock just to save a ... cormorant,” Klimshuk told Portland Oregonian reporter Jim Kadera. “We are in sympathy with birds, or else we wouldn’t fly. We don’t like to disturb birds, but we aren’t going to tell a guy to climb off a rock by himself just to save birds. One human life is worth more to us than all the birds on the coast.” And so Willis got his ride back to dry land ... and all over Haystack Rock and the surrounding sea and sand, hundreds of hatchling cormorants, tufted puffins, gulls, and other seabirds rained down out of the sky, blown out of their nests by the propwash. Local resident Jack Bentley told reporter Kadera more than 100 dead baby birds washed ashore the next day — and that’s just the ones that were found.
The Department of the Interior hadn’t specified that nobody was allowed to enter the bird sanctuary — after all, birdwatchers were a big part of why there were bird sanctuaries, and if the birdwatchers couldn’t come watch birds, they might withdraw their support. But there was definitely a sense that when the visitors’ activities disturbed the birds, that was crossing the line. And when the visitors caused an entire generation of baby chicks to wash up dead on the beach, that was more than most local residents were willing to tolerate for the sake of personal liberty. Fine, they thought; be an idiot, get yourself killed; but if in the process you make every other beach user miserable for several days and damage the local wildlife population, your idiocy is no longer just your problem.
Not yet, it wasn’t. But that oversight would now be addressed with lightning speed. So one week after the rescue, Haystack Rock was sporting a brand-new “Do Not Enter” sign. And when, less than a month after that, a Portland teenager scrambled to the top of the rock on a dare, he was greeted at the bottom with a nice big ticket, which the local cops were no doubt very pleased to present to him. The teen told the police he’d seen the sign — he’d practically had to step on it to climb the rock — but claimed not to have realized that “do not enter” also meant “do not enter and climb the rock.” And a month or two after that, in October 1968, Oregon State University professor of pyrotechnics Ralph Reed was asked to blast away the ledge from which climbers started their attempts. This was done — although it took two tries. And the rock has been almost entirely unmolested since. Today, it’s part of the Oregon Islands Wildlife Sanctuary — as are all the rocks and islands off the Oregon Coast, except for Tillamook Rock, site of the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse — and it’s illegal to set foot on them, or even to fly a drone within 2,000 feet of them.
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