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

by Jon Mooallem

  And so, earlier that year, a high-ranking panel of government scientists and conservationists known as the International Whooping Crane Recovery Team decided not to allow any more whooping crane chicks to be trained for migration at Necedah until the breeding problem was studied exhaustively and solved. (One theory was that an infestation of black flies was biting and hounding the cranes until they were forced off their nests. But there was also vague concern in the partnership that the problem could be less straightforward: that, maybe, being reared by a big white costume, instead of a bird, had written some inscrutable glitch into the programming of these cranes, making them inadequate parents.) Pledging more animals to that stalled population seemed unwise at this point—like potentially throwing them away. Operation Migration could shift its base of operations to another site next spring, and still lead a new group of cranes on migration. But that meant zeroing in on a piece of suitable habitat, evaluating that land with a battery of scientific tests, then getting the requisite pile of permits completed before next spring—a ruthlessly tight schedule. And many in WCEP were adamant that they’d rather miss the deadline, and leave Operation Migration behind, than rush into anything haphazardly.

  There were now also alternative ideas for teaching cranes to migrate surfacing in the partnership. (For the last several years, for example, the International Crane Foundation has been releasing a small number of juvenile, captive-reared cranes near the adult whoopers already at Necedah and coaxing them to follow those older birds south instead of an ultralight. In short, they’re starting to succeed in doing what they’d once done with sandhill cranes, but had seemed impossible to pull off with whooping cranes at the outset of the reintroduction.) For some in WCEP, the breeding deadlock at Necedah cleared a perfect space in which to pause and dedicate more resources to investigating these new techniques. And in certain corners of the partnership, there was only low-grade sympathy, at best, for OM’s predicament. John French, Patuxent’s research director, told me: “Decisions should be based now on data. They need to be made for the good of the project and the good of the birds. If that means that OM isn’t part of the project anymore, then that’s the way it goes. So be it.”

  By late November, with the crew’s pace slowing through central Alabama, finding and vetting a new piece of land in time to launch an ultralight migration the following year started to seem impossible. One night, scooping leftover barbecue onto a paper plate in a host family’s kitchen, Joe Duff pulled me aside and admitted that he was all but convinced this would be Operation Migration’s last migration. If they were forced to stand down next year, they could never rebound: their funding would dry up, and the crew would take other jobs. He felt bad that he couldn’t go public with that news yet, he told me. He would have liked to give the many Craniacs along the route a proper goodbye.

  —

  AS IMPROBABLE AS IT SOUNDS, there was actually a second, smaller band of costumed whooping crane conservationists barreling south behind us in campers and vans that fall—a kind of shadow operation, a couple of states back but gaining ground. This was WCEP’s tracking team.

  The tracking team, primarily staffed with young biologists from the International Crane Foundation, has been charged with monitoring all the other birds in the population—the one hundred whooping cranes now migrating south independently, and especially those making the trip on their own for the first time. Every crane has a transmitter around its leg that spits out a blip on a personalized radio frequency. The trackers drive ahead of the birds, plotting their positions and progress as they go. Early in the morning, they stake out the cranes’ last known locations to try to get eyes on the birds, and they collect reports from a network of bird-watching cooperators in various states. They do this all fall, until the birds get to Florida. Then, in the spring, they do the whole thing again, in reverse, chasing the birds on their migration back to Wisconsin.

  Sometimes there is a hands-on element to the trackers’ work. If a bird winds up somewhere it shouldn’t be—a playground, a hunting ground, hundreds of miles off course on the opposite side of Lake Michigan—the trackers are ready to flush the bird, or even suit up in a white crane costume, grab the crane, and drive it somewhere better. You can imagine the trackers as white-robed guardian angels, watching over the cranes and rescuing ones that get into trouble. Or you can see them as a roving goon squad, abducting and reeducating any birds who don’t follow the rules.

  That ambiguity exists inside many other endangered species recoveries, too. Around America, wildlife managers are laboring to negotiate the same sorts of impossible boundaries between animals and the human world, or even between animals and other animals—policing their wildness. Bison that wander out of Yellowstone Park have been pushed back across the line, for fear they’ll transmit diseases to livestock. When red wolves were reintroduced in North Carolina, the animals were outfitted with special collars that could be triggered remotely to stick the wolves in the neck with a sedative. It was a kind of kill switch, in case the humans who were monitoring the wolves saw an animal’s signal wander outside a certain designated territory but couldn’t get on the ground quickly enough to intercept it. In other parts of the country, if reintroduced gray wolves can’t be kept off ranchland and they kill a rancher’s cow, state governments or conservation groups have simply reimbursed the rancher for his losses.

  Wildlife officials have used paintball guns to push moose out of traffic on Interstate 90 in eastern Washington. In Alaska, they use Tasers. In Texas, as part of its reintroduction of rare desert bighorn sheep, the state has sent out marksmen to gun down preemptively the animals it sees as competitors to the bighorns, clearing feral donkeys and elk out of their way, as well as another, non-native species of sheep called the aoudad. Since 2001, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, called Wildlife Services, has shot an average of six hundred coyotes a week from helicopters to clear western lands for domesticated sheep or cows or to protect mule deer. And near Cape Cod, where summer feeding grounds of the world’s last 350 North Atlantic right whales coincide with a busy shipping lane, with boats charging in and out of a liquefied natural gas terminal, Cornell University has installed a network of high-tech buoys to listen for the animals. Ten-second audio clips of possible whale calls are uploaded to a lab at the university, where analysts, working round the clock during the busiest times of year, verify these calls and warn any ships in the vicinity to slow down.

  Zoom out and what you see is one species—us—struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we’ve decided they ought to stay. In some areas, we want cows but not bison, or mule deer but not coyotes, or cars but not elk. Or sheep but not elk. Or bighorn sheep but not aoudad sheep. Or else we’d like wolves and cows in the same place. Or natural gas tankers swimming harmoniously with whales. We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.

  In an environmental law review article on the subject, the scholar Holly Doremus criticizes this sort of restrictive wildlife management as “erect[ing] a virtual cage” around animals. Conservation should strive to build healthy populations of animals that are “as wild as possible in a tame world.” But controlling and manipulating animals, or making apologies and payouts for them, effectively amounts to a kind of domestication, changing species “from wild animals to human creations designed to serve human needs.” Just as a cow on a fenced-in pasture meets America’s need for beef, a buffalo scrupulously contained inside a national park meets America’s need for buffalo: perhaps just our aesthetic and moral needs to know that buffalo exist there, and to keep their destruction off our conscience.

  This work goes more gracefully at some intersections of people and animals than others. I learned about one management scheme that failed so badly that, when some environmentalists talk about it now, it can sound like an allegory or a farce. In 1987, the government decided to relocate 140 Pacific sea otters, a species once believed to be extinct, from their l
ast redoubt on the Northern California coast to the waters around an unpopulated island far to the south, near Santa Barbara. (As with the eastern migratory population of whooping cranes, the idea was to seed a second, discrete population of otters, as a catastrophic insurance policy.) Not everyone in Southern California welcomed the otters, however: commercial fishermen saw them as competitors for abalone and urchin, and the oil industry worried they’d complicate its plans to drill nearby. So those engineering the otter recovery cut a deal. They drew a line around a large swath of ocean and promised that, if any of the otters left the island and penetrated that area, the government would trap them and move them back. The area stretched three hundred miles down the coast, all the way to the Mexican border. People called it the Otter-Free Zone. Essentially, it was zoned for fishermen but not sea otters, just as a downtown neighborhood might be zoned for light-industrial use but not residential.

  Most of the otters were affixed with radio tags, but not very effective ones. The signal couldn’t be detected more than two miles away, and the batteries ran out after ninety days. (A few otters were outfitted with more sophisticated tracking devices, but those had to be implanted surgically.) And so, a telephone hotline was set up; the public would report any otters they saw on the wrong side of that invisible line. Over the next several years, a biologist named Greg Sanders drove around Southern California responding to calls. He would arrive on the scene, often days later, and stare into kelp beds with a telescope for hours. Sometimes the otter turned out to be a sea lion or only a floating log. Often Sanders found nothing. There was an otter-in-a-haystack feeling to the work.

  After six years, twenty-four trespassing otters had been captured and removed from the Otter-Free Zone. Each was driven or flown in a chartered plane to a release point hundreds of miles north, at a reported cost of $6,000 to $12,000 per otter. At least four otters died after being moved, probably from stress. Two others immediately swam back to where Sanders had trapped them. In 1993, the government finally gave up enforcing the Otter-Free Zone. Sanders told reporters, “The underlying message is, otters don’t stay where we put them.”

  —

  ORIGINALLY, THE POSSE of whooping crane trackers was assembled by WCEP to do the same job as Greg Sanders: make sure that wild animals respected certain legal agreements that had been brokered by human beings—and which, of course, the birds could have no conception of. Before WCEP could let any whooping cranes loose—to fly and land wherever they pleased, potentially carrying with them some of the protections and restrictions associated with endangered species—the partnership had to negotiate with twenty different states in and around the proposed flyway, reassuring them that it could retrieve any birds that touched down where they weren’t wanted. In ten years, relatively few birds have had to be relocated. But what’s clear in the stories of the ones that have is that the trackers aren’t just policing the law. They’re policing an aesthetic—making sure that the whooping cranes we have created behave like the aloof and magisterially wild ones in our imaginations.

  The wildness of an individual whooping crane is a fragile, slippery commodity. In the run-up to the reintroduction, scientists experimented with actively conditioning the cranes to avoid people by waving shiny balloons at them, running at the birds while screaming or rapidly opening and shutting an umbrella. (“Firing shell crackers during a charge is also helpful,” one scientific report noted. “Less than helpful has been our few attempts to use chemical mace, an electrical cattle prod, pepper spray, and lemon oil spray to promote wildness.”) In other words, there was an acknowledgment, right away, that the costume doesn’t make the birds wild; it only keeps them from getting inadvertently tamed by prolonged exposure to the person hiding underneath it. Ultimately, every crane decides for itself what distance to keep from humans when, after learning the way to Florida and striking out on its own, it’s finally allowed to encounter us unmasked. And some birds, despite WCEP’s best intentions, have exhibited a distressing nonchalance.

  Whooping cranes have turned up in suburban backyards and trailer parks. One liked to roost in a retention pond near a Walmart. One was seen strolling into a barn. Another male kept landing inside a zoo in Florida, drawn to the captive female whooping crane that lived there; once, the WCEP trackers had to fish him out of the zoo’s bear enclosure. In the summer of 2009, another male crane became a fixture at an ethanol plant near Necedah, feeding on vast piles of waste corn, oblivious to the truck traffic grunting in and out. That bird was eventually yanked from the population entirely. Its wildness had been compromised, and it was a bad influence, luring other whoopers to the ethanol plant with it. It lives in a zoo in Tampa now and goes by the name “Kernel.”

  Cases like these have forced the question within WCEP of what “wild” even means—what should a population of wild whooping cranes look like in twenty-first-century America? It would be easy to say that a wild animal is one that lives outside human influence and beyond human contact—an animal that doesn’t notice us or give a damn. But in that case true wildness would be almost impossible, with human influence now bleeding into virtually all the available space. Even WCEP’s trackers don’t have a written definition of wildness, or any empirical metrics to enforce it with—how far away from a Walmart a wild crane should stay. Ultimately, wildness is a matter of individual opinion, and not even the experts agree.

  Inside WCEP, there are wildness fundamentalists and those who take a more libertarian tack. When I visited Patuxent one summer, John French, the research director, told me that lately he’s poked at this confusion in the partnership—the squishiness of what wildness is—by asking his colleagues to do little thought experiments. Suppose, for example, that the partnership managed to establish a large and healthy population of whooping cranes in Wisconsin, with twenty-five or even fifty breeding pairs, each fledging two chicks every year. But suppose those birds nested on golf courses and frequently had to be hazed off the back nine, like Canada geese. On a visceral level, French said, this would feel like a disaster. The romance of the whooping crane is bound up in its being not just a wild animal, but a very wild animal, he told me. That wildness drew America to the whooping crane’s cause in the first place. And after such a long fight, “who wants to see whoopers wandering around a parking lot eating French fries? I certainly don’t.” But French also said he might have to force himself to accept such a scenario as success.

  Our vision of wildness may be impossibly nostalgic, an almost religious fantasy of purity in what’s remote, in what’s beyond us—not unlike the gentle deities that Joan McIntyre saw in whales. It may be unfair to expect actual whooping cranes in the twenty-first century to behave the way we imagined whooping cranes did in the sixteenth century. In a world full of Costco regional distribution centers and Krispy Kreme drive-thrus, we are asking them to block it all out, to see the Walmart retention pond as a slum instead of a providential new form of habitat in a changing world, and to see the corn piling up outside an ethanol plant not as food but as “waste product,” and to decide, as we have, that eating it is beneath their species’ dignity. Maybe we want the cranes to be anachronisms, to live in an avian version of Colonial Williamsburg, by the code of their ancestors, and without whatever tools the modern world might provide for them.

  French conceded that the entire Truman Show–esque existence that’s been concocted for these cranes in pursuit of that wild ideal may not even be the best thing for the birds. Let’s face it, he said: “The animals that survive and thrive are those that do well in and around a human-oriented landscape.” The purest triumphs of conservation may be the species that rebound so phenomenally that they become nuisances to us on our own turf, wiggling off wildlife refuges and into niches that we didn’t expressly clear for them. Think of the white-tailed deer, an animal William Temple Hornaday presumed to be doomed in the Northeast a century ago in Our Vanishing Wildlife.

  The same story has played out to a less exaggerated degree around the country with corm
orants, pelicans, and sandhill cranes. Or consider Canada geese, one subspecies of which—the giant Canada goose—was once even presumed extinct in the United States, until a single remnant flock was discovered in 1962. Panicked scientists held scientific symposia focused on the birds’ preservation and, even as late as the 1980s, geese were being reintroduced around the country, and fed rations of corn through the winter by state governments. Now there are 3.5 million geese in America. They’re so numerous that they get sucked into jet engines and take down commercial flights, and the federal government rounds up and gasses untold thousands every year.

  Even pigeons were once cherished in American cities, before all the handouts and garbage we’ve given them to eat allowed their numbers to explode. In 1878, the New York Times described pigeons as “honest birds” whose “right to feed in the street” was being challenged by sparrows. In the early 1930s, a community of gentlemanly pigeon feeders in front of the White House hoped that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt might come out to join in their “highly developed art.”

  It’s hard to square our nostalgia for certain rare species with our resentment of species, like these, that we’ve helped to thrive, intentionally or unintentionally. It’s a thin and erratic line we draw between the wildness that awes us and the wildness that only annoys us. It’s a reminder that we remake the animal landscape on timescales longer than our imaginations are calibrated to perceive or predict, and that we can’t predict how we’ll feel about those changes, either. At Antioch Dunes, I’d been unsettled by how shifting baselines syndrome cloaks the past, warping our understanding of what’s been lost. But it hadn’t occurred to me to project the problem of shifting baselines into the future, too, to wonder where what we’re building and preserving is heading, and if it will be judged differently by those who inherit it.