Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

  We like to imagine our children as miniature noble savages, moving peacefully and naked among the beasts—“the naturals,” as the first colonists called the Indians. But they’re more like the colonists: greedy, vindictive, wary, shortsighted, and firing panicky musket shots at any rustling in the woods.

  It’s not their fault. They are behaving like children.

  —

  WANDEE RIGGED Isla onto her back, and the three of us tramped into the dunes. We’d come to meet Jana Johnson and her students, who’d driven up from Moorpark to collect their Lange’s metalmark foundresses for the year.

  After weaving through some oak trees in the valley between the power line towers, we found Ken Osborne, a veteran lepidopterist who assists Jana in the field. Osborne, who has the twiggy gray beard and long hair of an Allman brother, was stalking a single Lange’s on a buckwheat leaf. He motioned for us to stand still. “That’s large enough to be a female,” he said to himself quietly. “So, yeah, we’re going to take that.” He swooped at it with a deft flick of his wrist, and laid the net, with the butterfly inside, on the ground. Then he knelt, put on his reading glasses, and said, “Yeah, female.” He transferred it into a vial and handed it to one of Jana’s students.

  Jana had set up an impromptu command center on a folding table at the end of the dirt road into the refuge. She seemed not exactly stressed but focused; she compares collecting foundresses to bringing patients into an ICU. They would be taking home four females again, and as each one was hustled in from the dunes in a vial, she and her students worked quickly to feed it honey-water with a Q-tip, transfer it onto a potted buckwheat plant, encase the top of the plant in a deli container and begin monitoring it for egg-laying. “This one’s fat and really doesn’t like being in the thing,” one student observed.

  Isla watched the whole collection procedure intently, from capture to coleslaw container. But she had no discernible reaction. (Frankly, she wouldn’t seem to care much about the butterflies when I took her to the dunes the next summer, either, when she was three, though she did intently keep a lookout for Humphrey the Humpback that year, just in case the whale happened to pass down the river again—I’d been reading her a picture book about the rescue called Humphrey the Lost Whale: A True Story.) Clearly, Isla was interested in the Lange’s metalmark only because the rest of us were so interested. She seemed to be puzzling out why such energy and attention were focused on these bugs, but was too shy to ask in front of the crowd of strangers. (Later, clicking through photos from that first trip, I would notice that, in every shot, Isla is looking not at the butterfly but at whoever was making the effort to point it out to her.) Ultimately, she spent most of the day down by the riverbank with Wandee, rambunctiously chucking sticks into the water, digging for snakes, and sticking her fists in the mud. Then, having worn herself out, she fell right asleep on the car ride home. I’d been flying around North America looking at wild animals. Suddenly, I realized that, all along, I had one of those at home.

  Over the next year, though, I’d watch strains of her wildness begin to disappear. As two-year-old Isla became three-year-old Isla, they were replaced by irrepressible signs of personhood: a person who distinguished between Safeway and Trader Joe’s and could swipe her way around an iPhone. One morning, when I took several minutes on the sidewalk to explain, rather elaborately, how a cement mixer worked, I could tell that most of what I’d just blabbered about was actually being absorbed and deciphered. She was becoming just a little bit reasonable, learning to scrunch her unruly urges into intelligible complaints and requests. She’d also stopped biting us—it had been a big problem—but if she was especially furious, or just frustrated, would still occasionally mash her lips against the leg of my jeans, straining hard to keep her teeth back.

  It was astounding—but also slightly sad to watch. I felt the same pang that I imagined people felt in 1985, watching Humphrey come in from the wide-open ocean and bolt up the river, into the more limited, dirtier world the rest of us have to live in. Isla was becoming one of us, but she was losing something, too. Maybe it was only some false authenticity that I’d projected onto her. But every hint of its disappearance still bummed me out.

  This is what was behind my urge to show Isla these animals in the first place, I realized. She’d come into the world as an animal. I watched it happen—it was magnificently, bloodily biological. I wanted to keep her feeling like a part of that expansive natural world, and not just of our self-contained human one. For me, wildlife has always been a reminder of all the mystery that exists outside my own experience—out there, beyond the suburban rec room I felt trapped in as a kid, watching Wild America on PBS. There’s a special amazement that comes from watching a grizzly smack a salmon out of a river, or even from seeing just how hideous certain bottom-dwelling fish look. It enlarges your sense of the world, the way looking out from the top of a tall hill does. It’s the perspective that William Temple Hornaday feared American kids would lose if they only stared into microscopes instead of strolling through the woods with a field notebook.

  It was in Hornaday’s time, after all, when this nostalgia for wilderness arguably first took hold in the United States. And even then, Americans were quick to cast nature as a refuge for our children, a way to escape the society we felt ambiguous about bringing them into. In 1909, the New York Times praised the shift in children’s toys, from baby dolls to the new fad of stuffed animals, as working this same magic. The terrible thing about dolls was that they were little replicas of us, the Times wrote—they “concentrate a child’s attention upon his own human qualities.” Teddy bears did not. “And to get the child free from himself is the great modern problem.”

  Isla didn’t need any reminders yet. She was still free from herself—still wild. But before long, she wouldn’t be. Her toothbrush in the shape of an orca had first given way to one with Winnie-the-Pooh on the handle. By the time she turned four, she would have one emblazoned with Disney princesses. Soon, the research explained, the animals would be receding even from her dreams at night. Before that happened, I wanted to plant one of her actual feet in their world.

  10.

  THE SOUP STAGE

  Satoshi Tajiri grew up in a town west of Tokyo called Machida. The Machida of his childhood, in the 1960s, was bucolic. There were ponds, gushing rivers, rice paddies, and quiet forests to roam. Tajiri spent his youth prowling that countryside, observing and collecting insects. He dreamed of being an entomologist. “Every new insect was a wonderful mystery. And as I searched for more, I would find more,” he later remembered. His friends called him “Dr. Bug.”

  But by the late seventies, with metropolitan Tokyo bulging outward, the town of Machida had changed. Railway lines and roads slashed through the landscape. Apartment buildings and shopping malls appeared. Insects were harder to find. “The change was so dramatic. A fishing pond would become an arcade center,” Tajiri said.

  He adapted. As insect habitats dwindled, he funneled that attention into the video game arcades that replaced them. He became mesmerized by Space Invaders. He dismantled a Nintendo to see how it worked and learned to program his own games. By the time he was an adult, Tajiri said, “Places to catch insects [were] rare because of urbanization. Kids play in their homes now, and a lot had forgotten about catching insects. So had I.” So, in the nineties, he designed a Nintendo game that tapped into his childhood impulse for bug hunting—a virtual world, bursting with fictional biodiversity. It now contains more than 640 precisely named “species” of critters, all of them waiting to be collected and traded with friends. Tajiri’s game is Pokémon.

  The Pokémon franchise has evolved into films, television shows, and comic books. Most conspicuously, it’s evolved into Pokémon trading cards, letting kids physically sort and classify the creatures they collect, just as kids once organized and reorganized species in their bug collections.

  It’s often said that kids are born taxonomists. There’s a certain satisfaction to making sense of
the world by chopping it up into increasingly specific categories. It was a love of collecting and identifying insects at an early age that had sent nearly all the lepidopterists I was encountering into conservation—it was the experience that the lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle was talking about when he talked about the extinction of experience. Now, however, one study found that a typical eight-year-old in Britain can identify upward of 120 different Pokémon species, but only fifty different real plant and animal species native to his or her area, like oak trees or badgers. It’s the same great modern problem the New York Times had identified a hundred years ago: kids are being pulled away from nature and inward—which is to say, in the exact opposite direction I wanted to nudge Isla. Slowly, children’s innate flair for taxonomy—the science of knowing, naming, and ordering the many forms of life on Earth—is being transferred away from actual wilderness and applied to a world that Tajiri invented as a consolation prize for its loss.

  I spent much of the winter between my family’s two trips to Antioch Dunes learning about taxonomy. The subject had kept coming up, but, frankly, all those Latin names of butterfly species and subspecies had seemed too tedious to matter. I was wrong. It turns out that taxonomy complicates the story of the Lange’s metalmark, and maybe of any conservation, as powerfully as the problem of shifting baselines does. It would lead me into my own soup stage that winter. What I knew broke down into a writhing mush.

  —

  ALL TAXONOMY STARTS IN IGNORANCE. To infants, every four-legged animal is a “doggie.” But kids gradually cue into subtler variations in size and shape, and features like stripes, manes, and snouts. All those doggies come into sharper focus as zebras, polar bears, and goats.

  In science, the process is the same. Organisms are named and grouped based on a small number of obvious differences. But the more closely you look at those animals, the more possibilities for difference you pick up on. And, as a result, the more differences you’ll see. You refine your categorization of animals just by noticing that new categories exist: the shape of a tail, the number of teeth, all the way down to minuscule variations in the splotches and colors on butterflies’ wings. Taxonomy is the science—or maybe just the art—of deciding which of those distinctions are ultimately worth making: where to split the spectrum of nature into freestanding groups.

  The theory of evolution complicated things for taxonomists. It revealed that a species isn’t an unchanging type but a snapshot in a long and unpredictable process. Suddenly, it became less obvious where taxonomists were supposed to draw their lines. In 1942, one evolutionary biologist proposed the “biological species concept,” defining a species as a group of organisms that breed with each other and not with outsiders. This had a simplifying effect, sweeping creatures that had been separate species back into larger groups. But the human instinct to make distinctions still needed an outlet. Taxonomists simply took all those different-seeming things that no longer qualified as species and called them subspecies instead. They started picking apart other species, too, establishing new subspecies. It got out of hand. The reckless proliferation of subspecies reflected, one critic wrote, “an undesirable trend toward taxonomic chaos.” Eventually, most fields reined in the problem. But lepidopterists tended to keep on naming and dividing at will. “Butterfly people have nothing else to do,” one veteran lepidopterist told me. “There are far fewer butterfly species than there are butterfly enthusiasts. So they love to come up with new names. They say, ‘Oh, they look smaller and darker here. So let’s give it a name.’”

  For butterfly people, the key to identifying a new subspecies has always been “good eyes”—picking out visual differences in size and in the patterns and colors on wings. There have always been rules floating around to standardize the process, but not especially functional rules. As early as 1953, scientists recognized that subspecies were “inherently subjective and even arbitrary.” They are human projections—matters of opinions with no agreed-upon empirical measures to check those opinions against. “A subspecies is anything that anybody who can wield a pen and get a paper published says it is,” another veteran of the field says.

  As a result, fights about the uniqueness of certain species and subspecies are common. As in many fields, lepidopterists divide into two camps: “lumpers,” who are comfortable gathering up large groups of different-looking butterflies under the same species or subspecies, and “splitters,” who prefer more painstaking divisions. (I found the antipathy between lumpers and splitters to be pretty shocking. Sometimes, profanity gets thrown around.) Quarrels over taxonomy sound geeky, like tiny feuds between the persnickety and slightly less persnickety. But they occasionally have broad consequences—namely when, via the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is deciding whether to throw its weight into saving one of the creatures being quarreled about.

  In an exhaustive essay on this issue, the environmental legal scholar Holly Doremus describes the Endangered Species Act as imposing a “static vision” on a “dynamic world.” The law is forced to fix the ambiguities of nature, like the blurry borders between species, into the binding certainty of legalese. The act does define “species” flexibly. (Subspecies can be listed as an endangered “species,” for example.) But even so, there’s often disagreement about how unique a critter actually is—and, consequently, whether saving it is worth redirecting public money and rewriting land use policies. There’s often even disagreement about how that uniqueness should be measured and judged. In 2005, for example, the Fish and Wildlife Service was asked to decide whether a particular mouse in Colorado and Wyoming, the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, was a discrete subspecies—and therefore rare and in need of protection—or merely part of another, widespread subspecies of mouse. The government got conflicting opinions from fourteen different scientists. Two scientists had done DNA analysis, showing the level of genetic difference between the two mice, but still reached the exact opposite conclusion. This was because there was no consensus about how different the two genomes needed to be for the mice to qualify as two different subspecies.

  To make things even messier, we are also quietly accelerating evolutionary change. In Europe, for example, certain songbirds have forked into different rural and urban species, each uniquely adapting to the habitat we’ve built around it. Around the world, all kinds of species are now shrinking—their average body size is getting smaller—because generations of human hunters have removed the biggest, fittest animals from their gene pools. And climate change, by warming up the Arctic, is allowing grizzlies to range farther north, where they and polar bears have started interbreeding. Eventually, the polar bear may go extinct only after being absorbed into a new and unrecognizable hybrid species, which scientists, for the time being, can’t decide whether to call pizzlies or grolars.

  That is, we are not just identifying uniqueness but creating uniqueness—uniqueness that, one day, we might be similarly impressed with and feel obligated to protect. We imagine conservation as keeping essential shapes of nature locked in place. But those shapes are sometimes just projections, a zone of ever-shifting fuzziness that we’ve chosen to draw a solid line around.

  —

  WHICH BRINGS me back to the Lange’s metalmark butterfly.

  In fact, it was while talking about the butterfly to Jerry Powell in his office at Berkeley one afternoon that I was first tugged into this taxonomic quicksand. Powell was grousing about the Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort to save the Lange’s—all the weed pulling and captive breeding, which, after all his years of studying the Antioch Dunes, seemed to him both futile and meaningless. Finally, I asked if there was a chance that another population of Lange’s metalmarks might be discovered outside the dunes one day, just as Rudi Mattoni had rediscovered the Palos Verdes blue at the fuel depot. Powell considered my question. “Not strictly speaking,” he said. But, he added, it depends on what you mean by Lange’s metalmarks.

  The Lange’s is a subspecies of the Mormon metalmark species. Li
ke all butterfly species and subspecies, it is defined in the scientific literature as a butterfly that fits a particular description—in this case, a physical description meticulously detailed from the fifty specimens that Harry Lange first collected at Antioch Dunes in the 1930s. (“Fringes” of the wings are “checkered black and white, the black disposed at the ends of the nervules and veins. Outer third of wing [upper surface of primaries], black, with a submarginal row of seven small white spots, all of about equal size, and a second row of larger subtriangulate white spots internal to the first, which are of unequal size, the third and sixth being the largest.” And so on—the written description is two pages long.) Other kinds of Mormon metalmarks, with different wings, fly throughout the western United States.

  Powell explained that, years ago, he’d found a large population of Mormon metalmarks outside the town of Mendota, about 120 miles southeast of Antioch Dunes. Astoundingly, one-third of these butterflies looked exactly like Lange’s metalmarks. They were indistinguishable from the butterfly described in the literature.

  The existence of these butterflies raises some awkward philosophical questions. You could argue, for example, that these particular butterflies are Lange’s metalmarks—because they fit the description. But this logic leads to some very illogical places. It would mean that certain butterflies in Mendota, with certain wing patterns, would be federally protected as endangered species, while the other two-thirds of the butterflies they fly with—including, sometimes, their own brothers and sisters—wouldn’t qualify for protection. On the other hand, you could also argue that Powell’s discovery meant that the Lange’s metalmark isn’t actually endangered anymore, or even rare. We could stop worrying about the butterflies at Antioch Dunes and let them die, knowing there was a healthy sanctuary of “Lange’s metalmarks” in Mendota. This would be phenomenally good news—a relief. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like an accounting trick, the shifting of a few insects from one column of a ledger to another to mask a bad investment.