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

by Jon Mooallem

  A root of the problem appears to be that, even though empirical targets are typically laid out in the government’s recovery plans—x number of whooping cranes, and so on—the people steering those recoveries have been working so hard, for so long, to prevent the chastening failure of the species’ extinction that they can’t quite envision what success should actually look like, in the real world. (As John French told me at Patuxent, “At this point, work on any endangered species is certainly a very severe rearguard effort. In our meetings in WCEP, we don’t talk about underlying philosophies of humans and the natural world. We talk about what we’re going to do next week, and who’s got enough money to buy food.”) But there’s also a fickleness to our attitudes about wildlife over time that I hadn’t acknowledged. And, like the problems of shifting baselines and climate change that I’d come across before, it creates one more cavernous and disorienting ambiguity at the heart of conservation. America is scrambling to save so much. But, as Holly Doremus writes, we’ve never asked “how much wild nature society needs, and how much society can accept.”

  —

  I DECIDED NOT TO TAKE Isla on any of the migrations that fall. Partly, it was because I didn’t want to subject her to the miserable logistics of crane chasing—to shlep her across the country to some deep Southern backwater motel and wake her before dawn four or five mornings in a row, in case the wind happened to blow in precisely the correct direction, at a cooperative clip.

  I remembered, as I’d stood by at Necedah, waiting to see whether Operation Migration would finally lift off, watching the defeat expand in the eyes of the Japanese television crew’s cameraman—how tired he looked, and how, over the course of that week, his face gradually surrendered to a beard. I had mixed feelings about inflicting that hassle on my little girl. And I wasn’t sure it was worth it. By now, the momentary sight of a few white birds flapping behind a plane at a flyover event almost felt secondary. Whatever story I was following at this point wasn’t about the breathtaking inscrutability of animals, but of people.

  I do remember, though, how, early one morning when Isla was three and a half, she and I caught sight of three raccoons outside our kitchen window. A fat one right in front of us, the size of a small schnauzer, scampered back and forth along the wall of our little cement backyard. Two others—one big, one small—clambered up the posts of our neighbor’s deck. Then down again. Then up.

  “Baby raccoon!” Isla said in an explosive stage whisper. We watched, rapt, as they hurried to do whatever raccoons try to get done before sunrise. They were Isla’s first raccoons.

  I like raccoons. I can’t understand why they’re so underappreciated—not detested like rats or opossums maybe, but not known for delivering thrills, either. They’re surely one of the most cuddly looking and admirable synanthropes—what biologists call species that succeed in the human environment. (In the last seventy years, the number of raccoons living in North American cities has grown twentyfold.) I’d read that President Coolidge’s family kept a pet raccoon named Rebecca at the White House. A 1963 essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “Our Most American Animal” even proposed that the raccoon be elevated alongside the bald eagle as a second national symbol. The raccoon’s character, the essay argued, is our character. The animal embodies everything that separates the New World from the Old: toughness, adaptability, self-reliance, a devotion to being busy: “Nothing about him is rare, delicate or specialized. He is as common as dirt and as hardy as weeds.”

  When the raccoons moved on, Isla asked me to pour her a bowl of Cheerios. Our day started up as usual. She rarely mentions watching polar bears in Churchill. But from time to time, she asks me if I remember that “very special time we got to see raccoons.”

  14.

  SPOILER

  Late one morning in early December, Operation Migration touched down on a hay farm in Chilton County, Alabama, smack in the center of the state, at the migration’s 813th mile. As Joe came in for a landing, a retired veterinarian living on an adjacent property, hearing what sounded like some kind of wailing industrial leaf blower, rushed to his window and was stunned by the sight of a hooded figure in the open-air cockpit of an ultralight, descending with a line of white birds snapped behind his wing, like an elaborate kite in a stiff wind. The veterinarian’s name was Bubba, and he wasted no time ordering up dinner for everyone. By nightfall, trays of chicken, ribs, sweet potatoes, and turnip greens were spread like a church buffet across a table in Bubba’s front yard. Slabs of homemade peanut brittle were passed around the fire pit.

  By then, Operation Migration was zipping toward Florida at a phenomenal clip, weeks ahead of where they were the previous year. But a heaviness had set in. Layers of crankiness had accumulated as we rolled south, the way a ball of ice grows, careening downhill. Or at least that crankiness was being shared with me more candidly. I noticed that now, when the pilots met at dawn to assess the weather for flying, there was a subtext to the conversation, in which each of the three men passive-aggressively angled to be the one who made the correct call. Even Gerald, a breezy older fellow on the ground crew who cooked up big egg breakfasts on down days and curates a section of OM’s Web site called “Gerald Murphy’s Recipes,” started dumping on me all of a sudden when we found ourselves waiting for a few minutes alone in a parked car. He felt he was being “taken for granted,” he said, and was contemplating volunteering instead for a red-cockaded woodpecker conservation project near his home in Florida. “I miss sleeping in my bed with my wife,” Gerald told me glumly.

  But it was Brooke Pennypacker, one of the pilots, who seemed to be having the toughest migration. Brooke was sixty-one that autumn—the same age as Joe—a wry New Jersey native with downy, chalk-white hair and large stores of conversational energy that rarely found an outlet, since he worked with birds he was not allowed to speak near. Some coworkers had taken to calling Brooke “the Vortex,” because he was known to suck up their time unexpectedly with long and extemporaneous stories. But I’d been drawn to the guy since my first day at Necedah, finding those stories to be invaluable peeks into the wackiness and dreariness of daily life on migration—of what it actually means to have devoted oneself to a bird.

  Brooke’s lifestyle was more nomadic than even his fellow crew members’: He essentially migrates with whooping cranes year-round, helping to raise each new class of birds from the time they hatch at Patuxent in the spring, relocating with them to Necedah for flight training in the summer, maneuvering the cranes south with Operation Migration all fall, and staying behind in Florida to monitor them through their first winter. And by then, it’s nearly time for him to start the entire cycle over again. “Brooke’s spent every waking hour on these damn birds now for seven years,” OM’s ground crew chief, Walt Sturgeon, told me. “That dedication is unbelievable. But he’s getting very cynical, and that’s too bad. Then again, I don’t think there’s anything I can do to stop it or change it.” By the time OM reached Chilton County, I’d noticed that the stories tumbling out of Brooke were mostly circling back to the same place: some bemused or defeated complaint about WCEP, or about the other two trike pilots. Usually, his ranting was good-humored and self-deprecating. But lately, when he started, I noticed other crew members slowly inch away.

  Grounded at the hay farm, Brooke and I managed to kill most of a morning talking in the run-down barn. He explained how he’d wound up in this morass of crane politics—it was by accident, and for reasons similar to mine. He did it for his child. Brooke has a teenaged son, Devin, whom he’d raised mostly on his own for the first five years of the boy’s life. Devin was about three and a half, in the mid-nineties, when Brooke met Joe Duff at a barbecue for ultralight pilots. Joe invited Brooke and his boy to visit him at the Airlie Center, a bird sanctuary and conference center, not far from where Brooke was living, in Virginia. (Joe and William Lishman had led geese to Airlie on Operation Migration’s early, experimental migrations.) Brooke and Devin showed up first, and Brooke sat his son on the slope
of an earthen dam so he could take a closer look at a few geese he heard honking in the nearby woods. When he turned around though, he saw a much larger squadron of geese treading over the top of the dam, moving with clunky determination, straight at Devin. Brooke froze; not knowing anything about geese, he worried they’d peck his son open like a bun. Instead, the birds only settled all around the little boy, put their heads down, and fell asleep. Brooke told me his son was vibrating and grinning, suppressing a squeal. “And I said, ‘Shit, we’ve got to do more of this.’”

  It wasn’t that Brooke was a conservationist, or even interested in birds. But he felt compelled to engineer a certain kind of childhood for his son, just as I did for Isla—one that involved being outdoors, knowing about animals, heels dug into nature. “That’s our responsibility,” Brooke told me. “You’ve got to expose them to as much of the good as you can.”

  So, when the Airlie Center started a project to reintroduce trumpeter swans using ultralights and needed a pilot, Brooke took the job and moved onto the property. (Brooke would eventually join Operation Migration in 2002, after one of its original pilots had a stroke.) As his son got older, Brooke put him to work at Airlie on weekends, dragging him out of bed in the morning and into a kayak to haze any swans that tried to land in the sanctuary’s pond during flight training. In a book about the swan project, I found a photo of Devin, then age eight, scrubbing out a swan pool with a long-handled brush. After a while, the kid started to resent it. “He had a lot of years of that,” Brooke told me, his voice nearly dropping out from under him. I assumed there’d been a falling out—a fracture of some kind. But, for once, a tangent had arisen in a conversation that Brooke Pennypacker declined to go off on.

  Eventually, we wound around to the story of another family. In the fall of 2006, three whooping cranes—two graduates of the ultralight migration and their new offspring—flew from Necedah to the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge in western Florida for the winter. But a drought had dried up much of the adults’ traditional territory there, so they shifted to nearby Tooke Lake, ringed by neighborhoods of ranch homes, a golf course, and a trailer park. As the winter wore on, the three whooping cranes started eating from bird feeders in one particular backyard. Soon they were spending nearly every day at the house, pecking away, unfazed by the bird watchers and neighbors who came to gawp at them up close. When the WCEP trackers knocked on the door of the house, the old woman who lived there refused to take her bird feeders down. One tracker told me, “She was a little bit crazy, a little confusing to deal with. I don’t know if she lives alone or what. But no matter what you told her, she was going to feed those cranes.”

  It was a complete breakdown of whooping crane wildness. And it stung especially because these three particular birds were supposed to be WCEP’s big success story. They were known as the First Family. The juvenile was the only chick in the history of the reintroduction that had not been abandoned at its nest and had survived long enough after hatching at Necedah to make a migration with its parents the following fall. It was, in short, a celebrity—the only whooping crane in the eastern United States that had lived its entire life outside a lab, reared by other whooping cranes, not a human in a white gown. It was unimpeachably wild. But now its parents had led it here and taught it to scratch seed from an old woman’s hanging plastic tube, like a common sparrow. The humans hadn’t failed. The cranes were undermining our ambitions on their own—they were like the humpback that, having been laboriously rescued and sent back to sea, swam back and beached itself.

  All of a sudden, the philosophical debate about wildness within WCEP had a focal point. Some saw the birds’ behavior as an unbearable black eye on the project. But George Archibald, for example, visited the woman’s house several times and saw no problem with the arrangement. Once, George told me, he watched the three whooping cranes pass only a few feet away from some kids fishing at the edge of Tooke Lake, without any sign of alarm. The kids ignored the cranes, and the cranes ignored the kids, George remembered, and that struck him as the best humanity could realistically hope for. “The purists want these birds to be wilder,” he said. “They don’t want them hanging around bird feeders or houses in Florida. Well, I’d prefer them to be that way, too. But we live in a fallen world. People are all over the place.” George’s International Crane Foundation, one of the WCEP partners, even capitalized on the situation by taking some of its donors to Tooke Lake to show off the First Family at close range.

  Brooke visited the house himself late that January, he told me, arriving in street clothes to watch, from an adjacent empty lot, the three cranes strut across the old woman’s yard in plain sight and snack on birdseed. It was hard for Brooke not to take insubordination like that personally, having spent so many summers roasting inside his costume during flight training, supposedly so the cranes wouldn’t feel at ease around humans.

  Suddenly, the old woman appeared in her housecoat. She was defensive and argumentative, Brooke remembered, and had already had enough of whooping crane conservationists showing up at her door and telling her what to do with her bird feeders. (I couldn’t help picturing one of those crazy pigeon ladies, dispensing seed from a collapsible grocery cart on city sidewalks.) Just as the woman insisted to Brooke that she was doing nothing wrong, he told me, a wild sandhill crane chick came sauntering around the side of her house, stopped squarely at her feet, and looked up at her like a lapdog begging for a treat. Brooke’s eyes bugged out. “What’s that?” he asked her. “My little sandhill,” she told him defiantly.

  Brooke left, convinced that something needed to be done. But a few nights later, a massive storm surge battered into the whooping crane pen at the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge nearby. The newest class of cranes, which Operation Migration had just led to the refuge from Wisconsin, were still being penned every night while they acclimated to their new habitat, and seventeen of the eighteen birds drowned that night and died. There was speculation that the cranes were stunned by a lightning strike in the water just before the biggest waves hit. One of the carcasses was found with its talons stuck in the fence, as though the bird had been trying to climb out of the flood. Within days, the eighteenth bird was found dead elsewhere on the refuge, starved to death or killed by a predator—it wasn’t clear. Just like that, an entire year of work was gone. It was the starkest, cruelest setback in the history of the project. Everyone set aside the more nuanced, philosophical setback playing out in the old lady’s backyard.

  —

  LATE IN THE FALL, during the whooping crane migration—it was almost winter by then—I visited the woman on Tooke Lake. Her name is Clarice Gibbs, and she lives in a low-slung prefab house on the lake’s north side. She has waves of short white hair and dark eyebrows, and speaks haltingly, searching for the right words—in short, not at all the defensive and muttering old bird lady I’d expected. On the phone, she’d sounded touched and relieved that someone finally wanted to hear her side of the story.

  Gibbs told me that the whooping cranes hadn’t been back to her house in years, but her backyard was still a playhouse for all kinds of birds: cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, titmice, woodpeckers, zebra finches, the occasional wood stork. She has been feeding birds ever since she and her husband moved there, she said, some twenty years ago, and I counted more than a dozen bird feeders in her backyard, of all different shapes and colors, hung from trees or hooked to stakes in the grass. A wooden block coated with peanut butter was suspended in a metal cage—a trick she’d read about in a specialty magazine called Birds & Blooms. “Birds are very entertaining,” she kept saying. “We just love the wildlife.”

  Gibbs offered me a seat at her dining room table and showed me snapshots she’d taken of the First Family. I subsequently learned that there had been whooping cranes at her house, at least occasionally, during two other winters, as well. (One of the others was crane number 710, the whooping crane that, having acquired such a fearlessness of humans in her yard, returned to W
isconsin the next spring, became a fixture at the ethanol plant in Necedah, and eventually had to be exiled to a zoo.) But Gibbs was having a terrible time that afternoon reconstructing the chronology for me. She strained to sort out how many different birds and different winters that she was remembering. She squinted to read the dates printed in the bottom corner of her photographs for help. Frequently, she removed her glasses so she could just rub her temples and think. “You know, Jon,” she said finally, “we—I lost my husband this year, so my dates aren’t great. Sometimes I don’t get everything together the way I should.”

  It seemed to her that WCEP’s trackers started knocking on her door as soon as the cranes arrived. “And I told them,” she stammered, “I said, ‘We are not feeding those birds.’” By this, she meant that she was not deliberately feeding the whooping cranes. They were eating food that she put out for other birds. She and her husband knew all about the crane reintroduction, she told me. Everyone did; the men with the airplanes make the local news every winter when they arrive at the refuge with a new group of birds. “I read enough about them in the paper to know that they’re trying to train them to migrate back and forth, and they don’t want human contact,” Gibbs said. So she and her husband tried to cooperate, only watching the cranes from their porch and never going into the yard or approaching them. For the most part, she added, the trackers “were very nice, very informative. And I could tell that their feelings for the whooping crane are very deep. They want to protect them, and I do, too.” She wasn’t trying to be nasty toward them or disrespectful. “And when the whooping cranes left, it didn’t bother me at all, because I knew they were supposed to go. They weren’t supposed to be here in the first place.” But she couldn’t afford to lose all the other birds along with them, even temporarily—and that’s what would have happened if she took down her feeders. She knew this from experience: she and her husband had taken several long trips, a month at a time, and it always took several months of feeding after they returned to repopulate their backyard with birds. Gibbs then said something that might sound obvious, but she said it very slowly, because it was important that I understand: “If you stop feeding the birds, they stop coming. And you don’t get to see them anymore.”