A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  “Doug worked like crazy on the campaign, but he had fun,” said Badinella, the art director. “I’ve worked for a lot of companies with very sophisticated clients that knew a lot about communications. But to have the combination of abilities that Doug had? To be able to know what you’re talking about? Know about the media at your disposition to achieve your goal? And then to trust in the people you’re working with and leave a door open for them so that they can create ideas? That’s difficult to achieve. If you ask me if, in seven years working with Doug, if he ever messed up, I’d say probably not. And as everyone who works in advertising knows, generally when the client sticks their nose in too much, they usually screw it up.”

  While the HidroAysén consortium continued behind the scenes to try to move its project forward for a few more years, the political support never returned, and it got stuck in an endless environmental approval process. By 2014, the project was stalled, and then HidroAysén’s backers quietly abandoned the project a few years after that. “The Patagonia Sin Represas campaign became something cultural,” Cruzat insisted years later. “Before that, if you asked someone in Chile ‘Where are you from?’ they might answer ‘from the south.’ Today people say, ‘I’m from Patagonia.’ There are Patagonian restaurants, Patagonian food, arts and crafts from Patagonia found throughout Chile. All that has occurred in less than ten years.”

  Down in Patagonia, Kris and Doug Tompkins were delighted. The pro-Patagonia campaign cost $6 million. It was a small fortune for any environmentalist and could have funded the building of many miles of hiking trails, hundreds of acres of organic farm upkeep, or thousands of Alerce seedlings. But Doug found the money exceptionally well-leveraged: with $6 million the Patagonia Defense Council had stopped a project budgeted at $3.2 billion. By the end of the seven-year battle, Doug had drowned the dam in bad publicity.

  Part IV

  Chapter 18

  Puppet Shows for Parrots

  Unless we learn to share the Earth with all the other creatures on the planet, our own days are numbered. And that means demanding of our governments to make biodiversity conservation a priority. The primary means to this end will be more protected areas and, best of all, more national parks.

  —DOUG TOMPKINS

  Piloting just 100 feet above Iberá as he surveyed his vast acres of property in the remote Argentine wetlands, Tompkins marveled as hordes of caimans basked in the humid semitropical sun and herds of capybaras (the world’s largest rodent at 100 pounds) trotted through clearings on the floating islands. The abundant birdlife made piloting hazardous. A stork ripping through the single engine of his plane could send him crashing into the wetlands.

  As he piloted at low altitude or kayaked through reeds, Tompkins eyed the wildlife with the eyes of a naturalist and the heart of a rebel. He wanted to buy it all and then let nature recover. The dozens of lawsuits in defense of the Iberá wetlands that he had spearheaded were succeeding. Forty-seven court rulings were issued—each in favor of environmental protection. Not only were the waters of Iberá flowing again, but wildlife populations were increasing. Restoration had begun.

  Tompkins savored the legal triumphs and the early signs that habitats could bounce back far more quickly than anyone predicted. Yet he knew that it was a fragile victory. Kris, Sofia, and Marisi brainstormed: How could they encircle this wonderland with a moat of defenders? Much of the solid ground was owned by a few elite and wealthy owners. The vast majority of the local population, poor and living outside the formal economy, was clustered in a dozen small towns that suffered a constant epidemic of “brain drain.” The young and the educated were abandoning the region for opportunities in larger cities including Buenos Aires and Rosario. Local culture was fraying.

  After ten years battling with powerful economic interests in Chile, Doug and Kris had learned the importance of team building. And the more they talked with locals in Iberá, the more they realized these Correntinos were political orphans. Like the Chilean settlers in the rain forest on the other side of the Andes, these rural Argentines felt extraneous to the decision-making process. Ignoring their needs, desires, or demands carried virtually no political cost. Rarely were they courted or counted. “Some of these small towns have almost no budget, or even much participation. The province is very poor, and these were some of the poorest municipalities; just that we contacted them and met with them made an impression,” said Heinonen, the Argentine wildlife biologist. “We invited all the mayors and their wives to Pumalín.” Doug cooked a curanto, a traditional Chilean dish. He gave a tour, took care of them, and even flew them over the park. “Doug told them, ‘This is what we are thinking.’ The mayors saw all that and couldn’t believe it. They started talking about a future,” she reported.

  Corrientes senator Sergio Flinta, who had clashed often with the hard-headed gringo, went along. Flinta had doubts about the trip to Pumalín Park. He feared the political fallout if it became public knowledge that he was fraternizing with the “enemy.” Tompkins sweetened the offer. If Flinta would fly to Pumalín and spend a week investigating the possibilities, Doug would purchase and rehabilitate a waterfront parcel in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini. He would donate the land back to the town as a community campground. The deal insulated Flinta from charges that he had nothing to gain by meeting the gringo loco. For Doug and Kris, the campground was valuable as a cornerstone to their relationship with locals and the land. Upgrading a campground would serve to blunt arguments that the couple were just the latest greedy patrons coming to loot their riches and horde them for themselves. The campground would include boat docks, which provided public access to the wetlands, something local communities had long been missing.

  In Reñihue, Tompkins strapped the burly senator Flinta into the backseat of his Husky and revved the engine. They hurtled down the craggy airstrip in his front yard, then Tompkins banked steeply up as he whirled into Doug’s airspace—a world he knew so well that no one else could provide such a panoramic, informative, and terrifying tour. They circled above the pristine organic gardens, buzzed by the remodeled ferry terminal, nearly brushed the face of a waterfall, and photographed a sea lion rookery teeming with dozens of the playful creatures. At night, by a campfire, Tompkins and Flinta drank wine, argued, and laughed. Late in the evening a grave misunderstanding erupted into an argument and then a bitter shouting match. Tompkins had been pressuring Flinta to endorse not a regional park but a national park. Flinta stated that local passions burned with a desire to be independent of the authorities back in the nation’s capital. There would be no national park. The men started screaming at one another. Their entire fragile alliance fractured over a single phrase lost in translation. The next morning the two men hardly spoke. Flying to the heart of Patagonia for a visit to the Chacabuco Valley conservation project, Flinta felt miserable. “The row I had with Doug deprived me of enjoying the most amazing landscape I had ever seen, which was flying from Pumalín to Valle Chacabuco, soaring over the Patagonian Andes of Chile from the air. There’s nothing like it in the world. But I was ready for the trip to be over.”

  Landing in Valley Chacabuco, Flinta was surprised that Kris awaited him with cheer and food. Though she had been warned, she acted as if she had no idea about the blowup. They toured the organic garden and ate roasted lamb under copper-plated lamps worthy of a Buenos Aires opera house. “Kris silently took care of it. She even got me to cook in her house, all to raise my mood,” said Flinta. “She raised our spirits with her warmth, her candor, and her love. That’s why I always say that you can’t talk about Doug without talking about Kris.”

  Flinta overcame the bitter campfire argument and returned to Argentina mesmerized by the sights of national parks that he felt seamlessly integrated local tradecrafts and traditions while keeping out the chain hotels, the cheap furnishings, and the consequence of short-term thinking. No matter what, he still had that waterfront campground for his constituents.

  Protecting the wetlands of Iberá was just the first
salvo. Rewilding the park with native animals could take decades. Neither Kris nor Doug assumed they would be able to finish the rewilding efforts in their lifetime. Yet they had a clear dream and a rough sketch of how to begin.

  Doug wanted to start with the jaguar. It was majestic, magic, and as an apex predator could be hugely important to the overall stability of the lands. Kris fought the idea. It was too soon. The Argentine team pushed for an alternative: Why not start with the giant anteater? Through the foundation that they managed, Kris and Doug agreed and budgeted tens of thousands of dollars to first build and then staff a rehabilitation center for the giant anteater, perhaps the most bizarre-looking animal on the continent.

  With a snout as long as a vacuum cleaner tube and a retractable tongue that carries barbs and sticky glue to catch ants, the anteaters filled an important niche in the ecosystem. The animals have a three-foot-long bushy tail and claws that look like they belong on a dinosaur. An anteater appears gentle yet is capable of gutting a person. With a keen nose but limited eyesight, the giant anteaters were killed, leaving behind clutches of orphaned anteater pups. “The grand majority of the anteaters that come to Iberá are orphans that have been rescued because their mothers have been killed or hit by cars in traffic accidents, during hunts or in fights with dogs,” explained Alicia Delgado, a lead biologist in the rewilding initiative. “When people find the babies they take them home.”

  Local residents found that baby anteaters made cute house pets. They were adorable babies that needed to cuddle and be nursed for eight months. But when fully grown, the anteaters were untenable as pets and were seen as a nuisance and a dangerous house guest. “We could not have reintroduced a more appropriate species. It’s weird looking. It’s shocking. Harmless, for the most part, unless you corner one,” explained Kris. “The anteater is so adorable! Orphans are coming in one door to quarantine, and out the back door as we reintroduce them. They have names, and people follow them. They’re in puppet shows, they’re on TV, they’re famous. The anteaters are rock stars!”

  Following the successful reintroduction of giant anteaters, veterinarian Gustavo Solis, a leader of the Tompkins couple’s rewilding team, proceeded to investigate the feasibility of reintroducing other species, including the pampas deer and the initial moves to reintroduce wild jaguars. Solis committed his time and energy to understanding the intricacies of bringing the wild jaguar back to the swamps, wetlands, grasslands, and marshes of Iberá. Solis knew that this vast landscape was ideal jaguar habitat—and for hundreds of years, the jaguar had been revered by the native Guarani people. The word jaguar is derived from the Guarani term “yaguarete,” which is how most Argentines call this species. Now the revered cats were nearly gone. “In Argentina there are only three separate jaguar populations, and we estimate that there are 200 jaguars. Every territory that is lost is a threat to the species,” said biologist Maite Ríos Noya. “The disappearance of the jaguar would be a catastrophe. I don’t even want to think about jaguars as we think about dinosaurs—as an extinct species.”

  When a student came to Ignacio Jimenez and asked to study the jaguars, he politely told her that it was impossible. There simply weren’t enough jaguars left to research. Jimenez suggested that she study popular attitudes about jaguars. If there was going to be any chance of reintroducing the symbolic feline to the Iberá grasslands, Jimenez knew that it would take broad community support. And that required outreach. Jimenez needed the raw data, so he sent the student off, and when they analyzed and quantified the results of 432 interviews, the entire team was stunned.

  Locals loved jaguars. They identified with the cat as a regional symbol of their warrior culture and rebel nature. For Doug the synchronicity was a welcome tailwind. Instead of battling against local misunderstandings as had been the case so consistently in Chile, here he might be able to tap into a latent love for the very species he so passionately wanted to rewild. Doug authorized construction of massive pens to hold the jaguars—and as local construction crews commenced they were hammered by unusually strong rains, turning the project into an epic, mud-soaked challenge that lasted two years. Meanwhile biologists, veterinarians, and members of the Tompkins team visited India, Brazil, South Africa, and Spain in an effort to understand the complexities of big cat breeding.

  Despite misgivings from Doug and Kris, the rewilding team also pushed to bring back the red-and-green macaw. Hunting, poaching, and smuggling had eliminated the local macaw population a hundred years earlier. In wild corners of South America, further from human encroachment, the parrots still survived in native habitats, but locally the parrots were only found as pets. When word filtered out that the new gringo owners would provide homes for parrots, donations trickled in. “They were macaws but they acted more like people than birds,” laughed one veterinarian. “We had to teach them to fly.”

  Reluctantly Doug and Kris gave the go ahead and hired staff to feed, care for, and ultimately prepare the rehabilitated macaws to live in the wild. The project failed spectacularly. The parrots learned to fly in such a limited way that when released they were promptly snarfed up by local predators. On the first release, all died except one. “The macaws were attacked by other birds after they were released,” said Nicolas Carro, a veterinarian on the team. “Birds are very territorial, and birds like the Strange-Tailed Tyrant and other smaller birds treated them as intruders. The macaws ended up living on low ground in the spiny plants and were killed by foxes and alligators. They were like office workers stuck into a professional football match—quickly exhausted.”

  Members of the rewilding team asked around. Hollywood animal trainers prepared animals for movies, so maybe they could help train native animals to live in the wild? Through his network, Tompkins heard of an expert bird trainer, an Argentine said to be the best in the film business. But Fabian Gabelli’s resume lacked one key skill set: he’d never trained birds to be wild. In fact, he had spent years domesticating parrots and getting them to perform on camera. Faced with the request from the Conservation Land Trust, he was asked to invert his skills. Could he perhaps “undomesticate” a macaw?

  Gabelli leapt at the challenge. Right away he understood the failure of the Tompkins team’s initial efforts to reintroduce the macaws. The Iberá wetlands are a vast ecosystem with small islands of forests and trees that allow the parrots to forage and nest. With weak chest muscles—a result of living in cages without the opportunity to fly—the birds tired easily, so when they landed on the marshlands they were easy prey. At first the Conservation Land Trust team didn’t understand Gabelli, and there were a number of arguments. Sofia said, “Fabian, birds love to fly!” And Fabian explained, “No! Birds fly because they don’t have any other way to solve their problems! It’s a very human viewpoint to think that birds love to fly just because we would love to be able to do that. In nature, birds fly to find food—that’s their life. Flying is just the means to do that.”

  Gabelli put the macaws on a strict food and exercise regimen. The Tompkins team built a training center for parrots consisting of an eighty-foot-long enclosed track with bird feeders at each end. When the birds completed the circuit, they were rewarded with food. Reviewing the failure of the first attempt at rewilding, Gabelli noticed that the birds were fed communally, all from the same feeder. The dominant birds ate all the fruit, and subordinate birds had to make do with the leftovers. Neither group received a balanced diet. So the vets and biologists separated the birds into groups and divided meals into individual portions. Within three weeks all the birds were developing their pectoral muscles, which they’d need for extended flights.

  Marianella Masat, a biologist working on the project, was bedeviled by setbacks as her team designed artificial macaw nests. The initial nests, made of plastic, were too heavy, and when she switched to wood-based nests, these were colonized first by bees, then by owls.

  The veterinarians knew that macaws eat a variety of native fruits and seeds, and that while flitting, flying, and defecating
on the move, they disperse those same seeds over hundreds of miles, helping to regenerate ecosystems. Biologist Jimenez called the birds “forest builders.”

  As the birds grew stronger and could fly faster, Noelia Volpe, an Argentine biologist working with the birds, added more obstacles to the course, and more problems for the macaws to solve. “We train their muscles so they have resistance when they fly, because before they had only flown in zoos,” she said. To reinforce the bird’s grip, poles of varied diameters were used to fine-tune their muscles. Individually tailored diets of fruits, seeds, and plants were introduced. Feeding stations set up along their training routes were set further apart and, with obstacles along the way, grew more difficult to locate. The times the birds took to complete the course, and the calories they consumed, were all recorded to measure their progress.

  “The birds were treated like elite athletes,” explained Gabelli. “They had to receive their calories for each day and complete exercises, with all the information about their performances recorded and studied. It was magnificent to be training animals for wild environments instead of something related to humans.”

  Extending the curriculum, Gabelli began teaching the parrots how to recognize predators. He built an amphitheater for his birds, in which the main stage was a puppet show depicting the dangers of life in the wild. Gabelli opened the show with a puppet of an eagle. The parrots didn’t react. Having never been in the wild, they had no fear of—perhaps even no recognition of—the eagle as a prime predator. Gabelli tried a new tactic: What if the eagle attacked a parrot and at the same time he broadcast the warning cry of the macaw? “We staged an attack and the birds reacted like crazy, and moved away like they were watching predation in real life,” said Gabelli, who forced the birds to watch the attack scenario over and over. Sofia visited while Gabelli was rehearsing. When he finished she said, “This is theater. I can’t believe we’re doing puppet shows for parrots!”