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

by Jon Mooallem

  I’d expected to find Brooke wallowing in exile. After all, the fate of Operation Migration was hardly less uncertain than when I’d last seen them. And the migration the crew was about to start that fall would turn out to be their most exasperating yet. They would lose one bird mid-flight before even leaving Wisconsin—not have it die, but physically lose it—and later be grounded briefly by the Federal Aviation Administration because of some oblique quibble the agency had with OM’s nonprofit status. By Christmas, the crew would only reach Alabama, and be stranded there so long because of weather that, when they tried to fly again, the birds—likely assuming they’d reached their winter home, and losing their physiological urge to migrate—would refuse to follow. The cranes would be boxed, driven to a nearby wildlife refuge, and left to spend the winter there instead. For the first time, in other words, OM would fail to make it to Florida.

  Still, right now at least, Brooke was upbeat. When I asked if it was tough to be shunted onto this isolated pig farm, he told me that he appreciates the solitude, actually, and that the public library in the nearby town is much better than the one in Necedah. “Last year at the refuge was not a comfortable situation,” he said. “It was a slow tightening of the rack.” He was, in fact, much happier and looser than when I’d last seen him, as if he’d somehow wound back the mileage accumulated the previous fall and restored the good humor that had gotten sapped out of him. He was back in his element—which is to say, he was pushing as hard as he could, in all directions, against many small and immediate frustrations: the birds that were slow to follow his trike during training; the pig stench. “The little picture,” Brooke said, “is a whole lot easier to deal with than the big picture. That’s for sure.”

  You could argue that this is the crux of a terrible problem. In the end, I can’t say I’m optimistic about the future of wildlife. The stories of the polar bear, the butterfly, and the whooping crane had, at times, even lowered my confidence in our ability to see the problem clearly. There’s a fluidity to nature that’s not easy to recognize or accept, and climate change will only accelerate and distort such changes. There’s also a fluidity to how we feel about nature—the way our baselines subjectively reset and will keep resetting far into the future, while, in the background, the empirical damage piles up.

  These are destabilizing thoughts. I still don’t know what to do with them. But neither does anyone else, it seems, and so their weight has a way of compressing conservation down into a nearsighted exercise—one that can be pursued only by focusing on the little picture of the present and by blocking out the yawning uncertainty that moment is adrift in.

  Then again, it was people’s capacity to focus on that little picture that I found so invigorating everywhere I went—and to keep refocusing on it; having reached a place of devastating pessimism, to return somehow to a place of, not optimism exactly, but at least relative equanimity. Maybe what conservation tries is sometimes misguided or futile. But there’s something deep and blameless in the trying itself—a spark we can feel defined by as humans and should point out to our kids.

  Invariably, the many battle-scarred old conservationists I met told me they failed. But, really, having been thwarted, they usually just refocused that same moral energy in different ways. For all his saltiness, Jerry Powell, the lepidopterist, still Xeroxed and mailed a copy of his Antioch Dunes study to every Fish and Wildlife employee who asked for one. Joana Varawa told me she was now striving to act compassionately toward those immediately around her on Lanai rather than gather up the compassion of all humanity to save the whales. Even Rudi Mattoni, who told me he’d given up—who used those exact words—had definitely not given up, but was instead settling into his corner of the jungle with a net and a notebook, to preserve the memory of every last insect he could.

  If they’d all given up, why did they spend so much time talking to me so I could write their stories down? And how was it that, during those conversations, they could access such ardent feelings of frustration all over again, if they weren’t still trying to unscramble the same question that I’d apparently gotten stuck on, too: how, on earth, should we human animals live?

  I’d been picking apart the stories we tell about wildlife, hoping to find a firm conclusion, or even some new and useful vision for our shared future together. But I never came close. America rewrites those stories so erratically over time, and so impulsively, that few of them feel convincing in the end. Instead, I’m convinced by the stories that we use wild animals to tell about ourselves. The best of us are cursed with caring, with a bungling and undying determination to protect whatever looks like beauty, even if our vision is blurry. People kept warning me that Isla’s generation will blame us for losing so much of that beauty. But whatever: it’s inevitable, and I’m trying to make my peace with it. It’s comforting that they’ll still imagine better, and it will occur to them to be angry.

  —

  AS THE FOG CLEARED at White River Marsh the next morning, I stood in a blind with a small group of Craniacs and watched Brooke train the new class of birds. It seemed to go very badly. (“I think they’ve still got a lot of learning to do,” an old lady next to me whispered.) Afterward, Brooke rushed out to a cement-slab hangar that OM was renting, to meet two inspectors from the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA had called out of the blue, wanting to inspect their trikes.

  Given the crew’s trouble with the agency later that fall, the inspection feels foreboding in retrospect. Brooke may have half understood that at the time, but while the two men meandered around each aircraft, ticking boxes on their clipboards, he merely did what he always did: he talked. He explained the project to the inspectors—the costumes, the imprinting, the long push to Florida—and, before long, seemed to be winding his way back to a conversation that he and I had had at dinner the night before.

  He’d told me about one morning that spring, when he was still at the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. Two of the cranes I’d watched Operation Migration deliver to the refuge at Christmas had already left on their northbound migration back to Necedah. Brooke was waiting for the last three to decide to depart. At sunup one day, after checking the birds and doing his usual battery of chores, Brooke—playing a hunch—settled into the blind next to the pen to watch. (Half of the pen has no top. The birds come and go as they please all winter, typically exploring the refuge by day and flying back in to roost at night.) Sure enough, the three birds soon issued a long, blaring call and launched. They coiled higher into the blue. Brooke watched them vanish. On his receiver, he heard the beeps of their tracking bands get softer and softer as the cranes soared out of range. Then, finally, he couldn’t hear anything anymore. They were on their way.

  Immediately, Brooke told me, he started packing up. He hurried around the blind, taking the maps off the walls, and walked into the pen to unhook the feeders. “Then I say to myself, ‘Slow down a minute.’” This was it, after all—the moment everyone worked for. For the first time since the cranes had hatched at Patuxent, they were on their own. They were wild. Soon Brooke would drive to Patuxent and start the process all over again, with new chicks. But the brief sliver of every year between the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next had started the second those three birds disappeared in the sky.

  Brooke walked into the shed next to the pen and sat down among the leftover bags of crane chow. It used to be that, after dropping the whooping cranes at the refuge in Florida, he and the other pilots would bounce out of their cockpits and start high-fiving each other and hugging. But in the past few years, it hadn’t even occurred to them to celebrate; they touched down and, without a word, began briskly dismantling the wings of their airplanes and bagging their gear. “There are many triumphs through this whole experience,” Brooke told me, “but there isn’t a lot of rejoicing anymore.”

  So, sitting in the feed shed, Brooke decided to share that moment. He called his girlfriend, who used to work for Operation Migration. He called Joe. Then he s
tarted calling Craniacs, stopover hosts—many different kinds of people, all of whom had a hand in the project and who, Brooke realized, deserved to feel the same momentary sense of accomplishment—the illusion of closure, at least—that he was now forcing himself to feel. He must have called a dozen different people, he told me. “And if the battery in my phone would have lasted, I could have stayed in there calling people for four or five days, when you think of all the people that have helped this project go forward.”

  It was this collaborative aspect to the reintroduction that he was explaining now in the hangar, though the FAA inspectors seemed almost not to hear him as they knelt and prodded one of the trike’s propeller guards. Soon even I was only half listening, packing my backpack on the seat of my car, waiting for a free moment to say a last goodbye and head home.

  It was almost as if Brooke was standing in the hangar telling stories to himself, marveling about how, a few months out of every year, people welcome these strangers onto their land, open their homes, and keep them well fed, all for the sake of a wild animal they’ll probably never see—and how unusual that is, if you take a moment and think about it.

  “These birds,” I heard him say, “they’ve got a key that just unlocks the goodness of people.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book exists only because so many many knowledgeable, compelling, and decent people—those I’ve mentioned and others I have not—were willing to talk with me about the work they do and the causes they care about, or even invite me into their worlds to see for myself. For that, I thank them.

  In 2009, I wrote a story about Operation Migration for the New York Times Magazine that, in retrospect, birthed this book. I’m grateful to the many gifted editors I’ve worked with at the magazine—Jamie Ryerson, Paul Tough, Sheila Glaser, and Hugo Lindgren—for making me a better reporter and writer; to ace fact-checker Lia Miller; and especially to Alex Star and Gerry Marzorati for first letting me through the door.

  Thanks to Doug McGray, Evan Ratliff, and the rest of the Pop-Up Magazine family in San Francisco for giving me a chance to try out my Billy Possum material on stage, and to Roman Mars of 99% Invisible for putting it on the radio.

  I first visited Churchill in 2005, five years before the trip I chronicle here, while a student at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, for a project on climate change called “Early Signs.” Thanks to Sandy Tolan and Orville Schell for making that trip possible and to Salon and Public Radio International’s Living on Earth for giving our reporting a home. Thanks also to Nick Miroff, my friend and collaborator on that project, with whom I first learned to see the stories unfolding there.

  Thanks to Michael Pollan, for offering advice and a critical confidence boost at the beginning of this project; to Laurel Braitman, Jennifer Kahn, and Nick Miroff for reading parts of the manuscript at different times; to Chris Colin for reading parts of the manuscript all the time; and to Jack Hitt, for all of the above and more: “If you know him, you know why.”

  I’m grateful to my agent, David McCormick; my dogged fact-checkers, Timothy Leslie and Hamed Aleaziz; and to Lindsay Whalen, Terry Zaroff-Evans, and others behind the curtain at The Penguin Press, all of whom improved the manuscript, and my mental health, in many subtle but important ways. And I’m especially grateful to my editor Ann Godoff, whose trust and guidance was a gift.

  Finally: thanks to Wandee, who I can never thank enough, and to Isla, who has a loose tooth and feels strongly that it should be mentioned somewhere in this book.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: THE WOMAN WHO COUNTED FISH

  The projection that half of the world’s species will go extinct by the end of this century gets thrown around a lot by conservationists and journalists. Thanks to Bradley Cardinale at the University of Michigan for helping me understand the research that prediction is based on and two key scientific papers in particular: David U. Hooper et al., “A Global Synthesis Reveals Biodiversity Loss as a Major Driver of Ecosystem Change,” Nature 486 (2012) and Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature 471 (2011).

  I first read about training condors to avoid power lines in David S. Wilcove’s The Condor’s Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America (New York: Random House, 2000), 195. And I first read about human-assisted salamander migrations in his book No Way Home: The Decline of the World’s Great Animal Migrations (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008). More important, conversations with David were a great help throughout this project; I feel lucky to have had his ear.

  Ferret plague vaccines are detailed in “Ouch! Taking a Shot at Plague,” a press release from the U.S. Geological Survey, July 16, 2008. (The agency has since developed an edible, “ouchless” vaccine.) “Spotted Owls Face New Threat,” broadcast on the KQED radio show Quest, August 29, 2011, covers the management of spotted and barred owls in California, and the monitoring of pygmy rabbits is discussed in Eveline S. Larrucea and Peter F. Brussard, “Habitat Selection and Current Distribution of the Pygmy Rabbit in Nevada and California, USA,” Journal of Mammology 89 (2008) and “Military Drones Spy on Pygmy Rabbits,” by Dave Wilkins, Capital Press, July 8, 2011. I learned about the protocol for helping Alabama sea turtle hatchlings by spending a week with the volunteer “turtle people” of Share the Beach while writing about their role in a dramatic turtle rescue after the BP oil spill for the New York Times Magazine (“Night of the Turtle People,” October 1, 2010).

  I spent a lot of time studying efforts to protect salmon on the Columbia River, but ultimately couldn’t include much of what I learned. Thanks to Scott Clemans and John Rerecich of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; to Ann E. Stephenson and Janet Dalen of the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fish counting program; to Walt Dickhoff at NOAA; and to Conrad Mahnken, a Washington State Fish and Wildlife Commissioner.

  I read about the resurgence of crocodiles at Florida Power and Light’s Turkey Point nuclear generating station in Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink by Jane Goodall, with Thayne Maynard and Gail Hudson (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009), 80–81. That’s also where I discovered the peregrine falcon “copulation hat.” I also consulted Peregrine Falcon: Stories of the Blue Meanie by Jim Enderson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 143–46.

  The idea of “conservation reliance” was proposed in J. Michael Scott et al., “Recovery of Imperiled Species Under the Endangered Species Act: The Need for a New Approach,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 3 (2005). In a more recent paper, “Conservation-Reliant Species and the Future of Conservation,” in Conservation Letters 3 (2010), Scott and his colleagues determined that 84 percent of the species listed under the Endangered Species Act are conservation-reliant. I interviewed Mike Scott about these papers when I was first getting interested in wildlife conservation, and it was largely because of the questions Mike raised that I was drawn to write more about the subject. I’m grateful to him.

  Pam Aus, who shot the video of her cat, a fox, and an eagle on her back porch, appeared on the Today show on March 30, 2012. I’m quoting from a seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Henry Beston’s The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 25.

  My understanding of early American wildlife is rooted in many sources, but two were key. In “‘The Liberty of Killing a Deer’: Histories of Wildlife Use and Political Ecology in Early America” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University), Andrea L. Smalley writes of English explorers sweeping up fish with brooms. She also quotes a 1614 letter by John Smith bragging that anyone with “strength, sense and health” could thrive on the new continent. In Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Mark V. Barrow Jr. stresses how the abundance of wildlife figured into the self-image of early Americans.

  The estimate of thirty mill
ion buffalo I cite is included in James H. Shaw, “How Many Bison Originally Populated Western Rangelands,” Rangelands 17 (1995): 149. William Temple Hornaday argued that protecting buffalo around Yellowstone was “in the interest of public decency, and for the protection of the reputation of American citizenship,” in Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York: Scribners, 1913), 91.

  PART ONE: BEARS

  1. MARTHA STEWART ON THE TUNDRA

  It would have been nearly impossible to write about polar bears in Churchill, and impossible to write about them well, without the cooperation, openness, and hospitality of three groups of people: the staff of Polar Bears International, especially Robert Buchanan and Krista Wright; John Gunter and his crew at Frontiers North Adventure; and, of course, the many residents of Churchill who I met on my trip.

  I learned about Churchill during the Cold War from the archives of the Winnipeg Free Press and by inviting myself on a tour of the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a nonprofit scientific research station on the site of the old rocket range, led by the Centre’s director Michael Goodyear.

  The 2007 government study I refer to is Steven C. Amstrup, Bruce G. Marcot, and David C. Douglas, “Forecasting the Range-wide Status of Polar Bears at Selected Times in the 21st Century,” a U.S. Geological Survey Administrative Report. I read about maple syrup shortages in the USDA Forest Service’s News Release No. 1022, “Climate Change May Impact Maple Syrup Production.”