The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

by Diane Ackerman

  Citywise animals are mainly invisible to us, hunting at night or creeping in shadows, and if we do encounter them, they surprise us by being out of place. We forget that the animal kingdom is a circle of neighbors who often drop by unannounced. Even if the previous residents have skedaddled, or rerigged their schedules, new species may begin showing up like furtive relatives from who knows where. By the time you realize they’re not just visiting, they’ve shot down roots, claimed a little fiefdom, disturbed some of your neighbors, and added a tiny codicil to daily life. Not always a welcome one.

  Before the 1990s, no one saw coyotes on the streets of Chicago. Now the city offers refuge to two thousand, which prefer parks, cemeteries, and ponds and generally flee from people. But some have been tracked crossing more than a hundred roads a day and moving into residential neighborhoods. Moose regularly pay house calls in Alaska, stomping into yards and onto porches, looking for grub. Giant antlers and all, they can leap chain-link fences. On many a golf course in Florida, alligators create an extra water hazard, and lakeside settlers know to keep their Chihuahuas indoors. Mountain lions forage in Montana cities; cougars stalk joggers in California; elk stroll through housing tracts in Colorado. When one Jacksonville woman lifted up her toilet seat, a water moccasin leapt out and bit her; another woman, in Brooklyn this time, found a seven-foot-long python in her toilet. Leopards prowl the streets of New Delhi by night. In the Royal Botanic Gardens, in Melbourne, Australia, endangered gray-headed flying foxes built a colony of thirty thousand bats, drawn to the garden by all the cultivated native plants: eighty-seven healthy tree species with the fruit they preferred, a year-round oasis. Why risk the outback? And, maybe strangest of all, prairie dogs, those ground-dwellers of the open range, have begun digging their towns in our cities.

  However, as it’s beginning to dawn on us that there’s no sharp line between the untamed and the built up, more people are trying to help wayward creatures find their way through our mazes.

  When a lost eight-month-old coyote strayed into downtown Seattle, he became confused by the streets and buildings and grew frightened and disoriented. Dashing for what must have looked like a dark haven, he ran through the open door of the Federal Building, skidding on polished floors and around narrow hallways, bumping into glass, walls, and people in a panic. Then he spotted a cave to hide in—an open elevator—and darted inside, and the doors closed. For three hours, the poor creature paced that metal box until people from the state fish and wildlife department trapped him and set him loose outside of town.

  It’s surprising how disruptive even a slow, lowly terrapin can be. One June day recently, more than 150 diamondback turtles scuttled across Runway 4 at JFK, delaying landings, halting takeoffs, foiling air traffic controllers, crippling timetables, and snarling air traffic for over three hours. Cold-blooded reptiles they may be, but also ardent and single-minded. Never mess with a female ready to give birth.

  Graced by beautiful rings and ridges on their shells, diamondbacks look like a field of galaxies on the move. We think of the shell as a lifeless kind of armor, but it’s actually attached to their nervous system, not just a bulwark but an integral part of their inner world. They inhabit neither freshwater nor sea but the brackish slurry of coastal marshes. Mating in the spring, they need to lay their eggs on land, so in June and July they migrate to the sandy dunes of Jamaica Bay. The shortest route leads straight across the busy tarmac.

  Don’t the plucky turtles notice our jets? Probably not. Even with polka-dot necks stretched out, diamondbacks don’t peer up very high. And unlike, say, lions, they don’t have eyes that dart after fast-moving prey. Ploddingly slow, they abide by seasonal time, so the jets probably blur into background—more of a blowy weather system than a threat. But planes generate a lot of heat, and the turtles surely find the crossing stressful. Not to mention the roundup. After a little light banter between pilots and air traffic controllers, Port Authority crews descended, scooping turtles into pickup trucks and ferrying them to a nearby beach.

  “We ceded to Mother Nature,” said Ron Marsico, a Port Authority spokesman. “We built on the area where they were nesting for generations, so we feel incumbent to help them along the way.”

  Mounted on the shoreline of Jamaica Bay and a federally protected park, indeed almost surrounded by water, JFK occupies land where wildlife abounds, and it’s no surprise that planes have collided with gulls, hawks, swans, geese, osprey, and even milky-winged snowy owls (an influx from the Arctic). Or that every summer there’s another turtle stampede, sometimes creating lengthy delays. As a private pilot, I remember well how airports used to treat animal “hazards”—at gunpoint. It’s heartening these days to find other solutions, from relocation to relandscaping, with canny coexistence the preferred option.

  In my town, we’re blessed by lots of wild animal visitors, from star-nosed moles and eagles to otters, wild turkeys, foxes, and skunks. White-tailed deer are so numerous that they qualify as residents. Last week I was shocked to see a coyote toe stealthily up to the bird feeder outside my kitchen window, below which sat a plump seed-gobbling rabbit. When I opened the window to address the coyote, he turned tail and trotted into the tall grasses lining the driveway. Yesterday evening I caught sight of him once more, this time as a streak of yellow dots and dashes weaving through the bushes in my backyard. It took a moment for my brain to decode the pattern, and another moment to start worrying about the two baby rabbits eating clover on the lawn.

  On a rainy morning so gray a dappled mare could get lost in it, my village held a public hearing to decide the fate of our local deer. Over a hundred residents spoke out against the proposed amendment to the firearms law, which would invite wildlife exterminators to bait and shoot the deer as long as they were at least five hundred feet from houses, schools, and yards. Lured with corn, the deer would be killed by high-powered bows and rifles. Because ricocheting bullets and arrows are possible, the village plans to take out liability insurance in the multimillions. If this sounds like a dangerous and extreme solution to the deer problem, you’ll understand the passion of the protesters.

  Homeowners defended shooting the deer, which they regard as vermin. For them, it’s either the deer or the landscaping. Several gardeners conceded that deer had eaten many of their plants, but argued in favor of deer fences, not gunfire. One man grew tearful as he implored the board to live in harmony with nature. A psychologist accused the board of “groupthink,” in which deer have become a new demonized minority. Mothers worried over the safety of children walking home from school or playing outside amid stray bullets—and also over the psychological damage of witnessing the death of wounded deer.

  One little girl asked her mother: “If they shoot all the deer, how will Santa deliver the presents?”

  Another mother said that in her child’s elementary school, peaceful arbitration was being taught. She asked: “How can I begin to explain the hypocrisy of grown-ups solving their deer problem by hiring killers to gun down the deer?”

  “There are so many deer fences—it’s like living in a war zone!” a kill-the-deer man cried. To which a save-the-deer man replied: “And you think snipers firing bullets around the village for the next ten years will be less like a war zone?”

  Most protesters pleaded with the board to give fences and sterilization a good chance. Others argued that the board was legally bound to follow majority rule and should start shooting. Some debunked long-held myths about deer and Lyme disease (the white-footed mouse carries the agent, and killing the deer won’t banish the Lyme tick, which feeds on twenty-seven species of mammals, including cats and dogs). Or the idea that deer cause the most traffic accidents (speeding and alcohol do). Or that birth control methods fail (immuno-contraception has worked in national parks). Contraception is expensive, but so is hiring sharpshooters every year and paying for liability insurance.

  What struck me as some kill-the-deer people spoke was the tone of dread and loathing, a panic about being invaded by
wildness and roughly overtaken by the chaotic forces of nature. It’s as if we weren’t talking about the deer at all, but about what Freud called the Id, that wild demon of the psyche we keep just barely in check, and which otherwise would be slobbering, rutting, and killing all the time. What if its sheer feral exuberance took charge? Soon, neighbors’ yards would teem with tall gangs of unruly weeds. Or they might stop raking the leaves, and then clots of color would smother everyone’s lawn. Four-legged predators inspire the most panic, but if wild turkeys and deer can find their way into suburbia, can fiercer animals be far behind, ones with fangs and teeth, whose red eyes pierce the night?

  Yet, at the same time, something deep inside us remembers being accompanied by animals. There was a time not very long ago when cows, goats, horses, and other animals slept indoors beside us, or at least shared the same roof. In some parts of the world, they still do. But most humans have pitched their plaster-walled tents in cities and suburbs, crowding out animals, especially wild animals, and pushing them farther and farther away, to the perimeters of daily life.

  In the mists of the mind, we’ve lost our time-honed knack for coexisting with other creatures. We erect walls to keep nature out and take pride in scrubbing dirt and dust from our homes. Then we adorn our houses with bouquets of flowers, and scent absolutely everything that touches our lives. We seat windows in our walls, install seasons (air-conditioning and heat), and fasten at least one noonday sun in every room to shower us with light. Confusing, isn’t it?

  Even indoors, we surround ourselves with pet companions who help bridge the apparent no-man’s-land between us and nature, between our ape-hood and civilization. A dog on a leash is not really tamed by its owner. It’s a two-way tether. The owner also extends himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, the part that just wants to eat, sleep, bark, mate, and wet the ground in joy. We’ve all felt it.

  Nature is dynamic and haphazard, and so are we—not a serene combo. Maybe it’s one that’s best described in paradoxes such as organized chaos, but we’re not beings who feel comfortable with paradox. Paradox tugs the brain in opposite directions, confounds our quest for simple truths, and throws a monkey wrench into the delights of habit. Faced with paradox, our brain automatically slaves to solve or squash it. And so here we find ourselves, disorderly beings, blessed or cursed with order-craving minds, in a disorderly universe we’re fully capable of bringing increased order to—but not absolute order, and not forever.

  I SOMETIMES WONDER what Budi would make of our metropolitan jungles. Just like city monkeys the world over, leaping across rooftops, shimmying down drainpipes, nesting at night in the canopy of iron fire escapes, Budi would adapt to the hard surfaces of city life. On school playgrounds, children might see him using the monkey bars and jungle gym with a simian ease they only dream of. He’d find fruit to steal on many corners, densely treed parks where he’d mingle with the other species of great apes, many his own size and mental age, though physically much weaker and easily hurt. Some of the same urban animals that scare us would scare him: bears, coyotes, mountain lions, and such. Would he regard the city as another natural landscape, with blockish mountains, vast herds of humans, and their many watering holes and bazaars? Most likely he would. He’d not only adapt, he’d change his behaviors to suit the new realm, just as so many other urban animals (including us) have been doing with surprising success. It seems obvious that a city, or a cage in a zoo, is not what we mean by a “natural” environment, but in the Anthropocene, it can be hard to say what is.

  IF WE DON’T want even more animals living with concrete sidewalks and feeding off human garbage, we must intervene. At this point, preserving the wild is not just a matter of hands-off, as traditional conservation decrees, but also the hands-on of creating other kinds of habitats, such as wildlife corridors. In my mind’s eye, I see flashes of the tiny green rainforest on Brazil’s Atlantic coast, an Amazon-like realm where the highest concentration of endangered birds in the Americas and the remaining golden lion tamarins cavort in small pristine Edens atop mountains riven by highways and towns. A dozen years ago, when I traveled there as part of the National Zoo’s Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program, another team was busy building a wildlife corridor, Fazenda Dourada, to link up the mountaintops and extend the birds’ and tamarins’ range. Not far away, snaking from Argentina all the way up into Texas, the Jaguar Corridor has gifted the scarce, almost mythic spotted cats with space to roam. It only seems fitting that, having rent the fabric of the wild, we at least stitch some green sleeves back together so that animals can rejoin their kin and migrate along ancestral routes. Around the globe countries have been avidly building these links, prompted by a fruitful mix of compassion and self-interest. The United States has some lengthy wildlife corridors, such as the Appalachian Trail, a thousand-foot-wide greenway running two thousand miles along ridgelines from Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. In India, the Siju-Rewak Corridor protects 20 percent of the country’s elephants from collisions with human civilization and its toys. Kenya has created Africa’s first elephant underpass, a tall tunnel beneath a traffic-snarled major road, which gives two elephant populations long divided by human dwellings a chance to migrate, mingle, find mates, and avoid terrified humans or terrifying traffic.

  In Europe, the Green Belt Corridor will soon allow wildlife to ramble all the way from the tip of Norway through Germany, Austria, Romania, and Greece, deep into Spain, following ancient trails while searching for food, mild weather, and safe birthing grounds. Linking twenty-four countries and winding past forty national parks, it spans nearly 8,000 miles, some of it following the old historical line of the Iron Curtain, the 870-mile-long chain of fences and guard towers that once clawed the length of Germany, separating the East from the West. After reunification, what was once “no man’s land” lingered as a lifeless scar, until conservationists began reshaping it into a winding nature corridor. Transformed again by human hands, the blue-ribbon path now proclaims tolerance, not repression. The refuge naturally includes many different habitats, from sand dunes and salt marshes to forests and meadows. Ditches that kept vehicles from crossing are being crisscrossed by endangered European otters. Eurasian cranes, black storks, moor frogs, white-tailed eagles, and other stateless species are mingling safely.

  In France, China, Canada, and other countries, more corridors are offering tunnels, underpasses, viaducts, and bridges to help wildlife cross their native range, while protecting them from vehicles and us from them. In the Netherlands, six hundred such over- and underpasses allow roe deer, wild boar, European badgers, and their kind to navigate around everything from railway lines to sports complexes. All this adds to a renewed sense of kinship: animals trotting, shuffling, climbing, and winging safely among us, visibly a part of life’s seamless web. Like any other close relationship, living with wildlife requires compassion, compromise, and seeking solutions that will benefit all. If peaceful coexistence were easy, there would be no divorce or political strife, only households and empires of domestic tranquillity.

  Like many of my neighbors, I fence in the deer’s favorites: roses, rhododendrons, day lilies, hostas. In the front yard, I plant beauties the deer reject—iris, peony, cosmos, allium, false indigo, foxglove, monkshood, bee balm, bleeding hearts, sage, daffodil, veronica, poppy, dianthus, and many more—though they still find a lot to munch on. Instead of fencing in the whole property, I’ve left a corridor for the deer, foxes, coyotes, and other critters alongside a creek that ultimately winds north to Sapsucker Woods.

  I enjoy sharing the neighborhood with so much wildlife, a kinship that greatly enriches my life. I’d rather the groundhogs didn’t burrow under my study, and the raccoons didn’t play chopsticks on the bathroom skylight and stare down with bandit eyes—but I haven’t evicted them. I relish the swoop of brown bats at sunset, elegant and enchanting little creatures that eat hundreds of insects every night. Sex-crazed frogs and toads party in the backyard, making a ruc
kus that can drown out TV or movie watching, but I find their ballyhoo a hilarious part of summer’s jug band music. Plying the water below them and adding to the fiendish din are water boatmen, dark copper insects with olive stomachs who swim on their backs, paddling with two oarlike legs, while carrying a silvery bubble of oxygen to breathe as if they were early argonauts. Though small (¼"–½"), they’re adjudged the loudest animals on Earth relative to body size. During sultry summer nights, their singing penises (scrubbed fast over the stomach, washboard-style) can reach 99.2 decibels. That’s louder than standing near a freight train, louder than sitting in the first row of a concert hall during a thunderous symphony, even if the water muffles some of their clamor. I’m impressed by the platoon of male spotted newts doing he-man push-ups on the driveway and atop the fence, hoping to make females swoon. I’m delighted when a flicker beats heavy metal tunes on the stop sign—or even if he repeatedly rings my doorbell, as happened one summer. I enjoy spotting red-crested pileated woodpeckers, big as Cheshire cats, whacking the stuffing out of trees. Delving squirrels mean I have to plant bulbs under chicken wire, but I’m amused by their antics. I’m a bit sad I don’t have inquisitive black bears to contend with. Deer are the largest animals to pay house calls, and like the dogfighting hummingbirds, tree-climbing chipmunks, and rabbits engaging in an odd tournament of hopping jousts, they arrive unbidden but are welcome emissaries from the natural world.

  Each year, I line up behind a dozen cars on a busy highway as a caravan of Canada goose chicks waddles across in a single line between guardian geese, apparently unfazed by motorized honking and the occasional impatient driver. Most people, like me, sit quietly and smile. Like the turtles at JFK, they remind us that, even with egos of steel and concrete plans, we’re easily humbled by nature in the shape of snowflakes, goslings, or turtles—all able to stop traffic. They also remind us how conflicted we really are about nature.