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

by Jon Mooallem

  The study of British children I mention is described in “Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokémon,” by Andrew Balmford et al., in Science 295 (2002).

  My writing about taxonomy owes a lot, again, to Holly Doremus and her work, particularly “The Endangered Species Act: Static Law Meets Dynamic World.” In describing the ways infants perceive four-legged animals, I’m cribbing from Paul Shepard’s The Others, 45–47. The evolutionary biologist Ernest Mayr proposed the “biological species concept” in Systematics and The Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Worry about “an undesirable trend toward taxonomic chaos” was expressed in J. Gordon Edwards, “A New Approach to Intraspecific Categories,” Systematic Zoology 3 (1954): 2. The 1953 paper I quote from is E. O. Wilson and W. L. Brown Jr., “The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application,” Systematic Zoology 2 (1953).

  The official description of Lange’s metalmark comes from John A. Comstock, “A New Apodemia from California,” Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences 37 (1938).

  Thanks to Benjamin Proshek for sharing, explaining, and re-explaining his research on Mormon metalmarks, and to his academic advisor at the University of Alberta, Felix Sperling. Rudi Mattoni’s Gulf fritillary experiment is written up in Thomas E. Dimock and Rudolf H. T. Mattoni, “Hidden Genetic Variation in Agraulis vanillae incarnata (Nymphalidae),” The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera 25 (1986).

  Thanks to Brent Plater, of the Wild Equity Institute, for several good conversations about his lawsuit. Also with us that day in Antioch was Peter Galvin, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity; Galvin was assisting Plater with the Lange’s metalmark suit and added to my understanding of what was at stake. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife letter I quote from was written by Cay C. Goude, an assistant field supervisor at the agency, to the California Energy Commission, August 17, 2010.

  For an example of the right-wing response to Wild Equity’s lawsuit see Jane Jamison’s editorial, “Eco-Nuts Torture California Businesses with ‘New’ Pollutants,” published on the Web site Right Wing News on January 22, 2011. Jamison warns that Californians will soon be paying more for electricity because of “nutty control-freak environmentalists who survive as parasites of government bureaucracies . . . in behalf [sic] of bugs which end up on windshields and car grills anyway.”

  PART THREE: BIRDS

  11. CONSTRUCTION WORKERS

  As I point out, the months I spent hanging around the men and women of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership happened to be an unusually fraught and uncertain period for the partnership—and especially for Operation Migration. I’m grateful to them for letting me in anyway. I’ve tried to portray some of the difficulties and disagreements I glimpsed because I believe that they reveal, rather than diminish, how admirable these people actually are.

  Sincere thanks to John French, Brian Clauss, Barb Clauss, and Charlie Shafer at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center; George Archibald, Joan Garland, Marianne Wellington, Eva Szyszkoski, and Barry Hartup at the International Crane Foundation; John Christian, Tom Stehn, Doug Staller, and Joel Trick, past and current U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees; and Marty Folk of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

  Special thanks are due, of course, to the staff of Operation Migration: Liz Condie, Walter Sturgeon, Richard van Heuvelen, Jack Wrighter, John Cooper, Gerald Murphy, Geoff Tarbox, Trish Gallagher, Heather Ray, and Caleb Fairfax; and to Joe Duff and Brooke Pennypacker, both of whom inadvertently taught me quite a bit about life while teaching me about flying with birds.

  Historic population sizes of whooping cranes are based on data from the Whooping Crane Recovery Team and Dr. Ken Jones, compiled by Betsy Didrickson of the International Crane Foundation.

  The story of Josephine and Pete (and of Robert Porter Allen and George Douglass) is detailed in Faith McNulty, The Whooping Crane: The Bird That Defies Extinction (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1966). To learn about this period, I also read Robin W. Doughty, Return of the Whooping Crane (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989) and Cindi Barrett and Tom Stehn, “A Retrospective of Whooping Cranes in Captivity,” Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop 11 (2010). In Nature’s Ghosts, Barrow also writes beautifully about Allen’s work.

  Louisianan Claude Eagleson’s description of cranes circling like square dancers is quoted in Gay M. Gomez, “Whooping Cranes in Southwest Louisiana: History and Human Attitudes,” Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop 6 (1992): 21. “Two Nebraska Duck Hunters Kill the Last of the Pompous Bird,” was published in the Washington Post, February 7, 1904.

  The range and population size of whooping cranes before European settlement are described in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s March 2007 revision of the International Recovery Plan (Grus americana), pages 9–10. The New York Times blamed the crane’s extinction on its “lack of cooperation” in “Scarcest of Crane Vex Wildlife Service; Whoopers Dodge Efforts to Save Them,” February 4, 1946.

  Several documents helped me better understand WCEP and the transition it was undertaking in the fall of 2010: “The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership Five Year Strategic Plan,” December 2010; “The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership Guidance and Partnership Transition Documents,” August 27, 2010; and “The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership External Review Program Review, Final Report,” March 31, 2010, by Jane Austin, Leigh Frederickson, Dr. Devra Kleiman, Dr. Phil Miller, and Dr. Tanya Shenk.

  Operation Migration’s Web site was an invaluable resource in a number of different ways. I relied on it extensively for details about past migrations, for descriptions of flights I did not witness firsthand, or to check my descriptions of ones that I did. Also useful were issues of INformation, the magazine OM publishes for its supporters, and a DVD the group produced called Hope Takes Wing.

  12. CRANIACS

  Thanks to George Archibald for a great afternoon of talking and watching sandhill cranes in Baraboo. To learn more about his work with Tex, I relied on Doughty’s The Whooping Crane, 105–6, and many newspaper and magazine stories, including “Dr. Archibald Dances with Cranes So Their Tribes May Increase,” by Linda Witt, People magazine, April 24, 1978; “Man and a Bird Dance Together to Preserve Species,” by Bayard Webster, New York Times, March 25, 1980; “Odd Couple’s Mating Dance Finally Lays an Egg,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1982; “What Gee Whiz Means,” a Washington Post editorial from June 7, 1982; and “Peeping in the Shell,” by Faith McNulty in the January 17, 1983, issue of the New Yorker. I also watched an excellent video about George and Tex produced by the International Crane Foundation.

  Aldo Leopold wrote about cranes in his essay “A Marshland Elegy” in A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). When I visited George Archibald in Baraboo, he took me down the road to Leopold’s old cabin and quoted a very long passage, from memory.

  I interviewed William Lishman on Skype and drew additional details about his house and art from his Web site and from a February 20, 1992, article in the (Montreal) Gazette, “Underground Digs.” Lishman chronicles his first flights with geese and the origins of Operation Migration in his memoir Father Goose (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1995).

  Robert Horwich answered many questions about his work by phone and e-mail and pointed me to several helpful scientific papers, including Robert H. Horwich, John Wood, and Ray Anderson, “Release of Sandhill Crane Chicks Hand-Reared with Artificial Stimuli,” Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop (1998) and Robert H. Horwich, “Use of Surrogate Parental Models and Age Periods in a Successful Release of Hand-Reared Sandhill Cranes,” Zoo Biology 8 (1989). A collection of studies detailing early attempts to teach cranes to migrate was published in Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop 8 (2001). The remote-controlled whooping crane is mentioned in “Pilots Train Cranes to Fly Away Home,” by Less Line in the December 9, 1997, edition of the New York Times.

  Thanks to Mary Vethe and her third-graders at P
ineview Elementary in Reedsburg, Wisconsin.

  In the fall of 2008, I tagged along for a short stretch of Operation Migration’s ultralight migration while working on a story about the project for the New York Times Magazine (“Rescue Flight,” February 19, 2009). It was during that trip, and not during the 2010 migration described in the book, that I met Squire Babcock outside the church in Kentucky. However, that brief scene and a couple of stray quotes from WCEP members are the only material I’ve pulled into the book from my earlier reporting.

  13. THEIR INCREDIBLE ESSENCE

  Information on Humphrey the Humpback’s return comes largely from the stories by the Associated Press, Washington Post, and USA Today, which headlined one of its articles: “Humphrey: Advanced, Dumb or Lost.” The government spokesman hoped Humphrey wouldn’t come back in “Humphrey Finally High-Tails It Back to the Sea,” by Herb Michelson, Sacramento Bee, November 5, 1985. The woman wished she could talk to Humphrey in “Return of the Wrong Way Whale,” by Cynthia Gorney, Washington Post, October 23, 1990. And the San Jose commuter voiced his strong suspicions that a supreme intellect was at work in “Humphrey Hysteria,” USA Today, October 24, 1990.

  The Internet videos I refer to are titled “How to Snuggle with an Elephant Seal” and “Touched by a Wild Mountain Gorilla.”

  I’m grateful to Joana Varawa, aka Joan McIntyre, for her time, forthrightness, and perspective on so many things, and for sharing sections of a memoir she’s writing. I feel lucky to have gotten to know her. The book she edited, Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins (New York: Scribners, 1974), is gorgeous and strange, and her first memoir, The Delicate Art of Whale Watching (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), taught me much about her post–Project Jonah life. Thanks also to Eugenia McNaughton, a former Project Jonah employee, for meeting with me.

  It was largely by reading D. Graham Burnett’s leviathan-sized history, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) that I got up to speed on John Lilly’s work, Margaret Howe’s experiment with Peter, and the origin and significance of Songs of the Humpback Whales. Another good book, Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothernberg (New York: Basic Books, 2010), covers some of the same ground. I also read Lilly’s two books from this era: Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1967) and Man and Dolphin (New York: Pyramid Books, 1969). Donal Henahan encouraged New York Times readers to connect with their “mammalian past” in “Is the Art Song Really Out of Date?” December 13, 1970.

  For details about the parade in Stockholm, see “What Happened at Stockholm” by R. Stephen Berry in the September 1972 edition of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Joan McIntyre’s most notable press clips include “Whale Love,” by Nicholas von Hoffman, Washington Post, February 16, 1973; “Children Protest Whaling,” by Donald P. Baker, Washington Post, June 3, 1973; “Watch Out, Hawaiian Whales, The Crusader Is on the Way,” by Jean M. White, Washington Post, October 29, 1974; and “Stumping World to Save the Whale,” by Harriet Stix, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1974.

  The story of Monique the Space Elk is covered by Etienne Benson in Wired Wilderness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Thanks to Etienne for sharing some of his leftover research as well.

  To understand Greenpeace’s standoff with the Russian whaling vessel, I relied, again, on Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale; on the 2012 documentary film A Fierce Green Fire by Mark Kitchell; and on coverage in the New York Times. I also interviewed the historian Frank Zelko, author of a forthcoming history of Greenpeace. (It was during that interview that Zelko compared Mind in the Waters to Silent Spring.) The herbicide problem at Antioch Dunes is described in an April 2, 2012, article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Peter Fimrite, “Weed Killers Threaten Lange’s Metalmark Butterfly.”

  I learned about WCEP’s tracking operation from Eva Szyszkoski and Joan Garland at the International Crane Foundation. John Christian explained why tracking the cranes was initially, legally, necessary. To think through the philosophical and legal complexities of wildlife tracking in general, I read yet another exceptional paper by Holly Doremus: “Restoring Endangered Species: The Importance of Being Wild,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 23 (1999).

  The situation surrounding bighorn sheep in Texas was first described to me by a pro-donkey activist there named Marjorie Farabee and later confirmed by Tom Harvey at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Coyote-control tactics of the USDA’s Wildlife Services division are described in “Wildlife Services’ Deadly Force Opens Pandora’s Box of Environmental Problems,” part of a stunning, three-part exposé about the agency by Tom Knudson in the Sacramento Bee that ran in 2012. Information about Cornell’s Right Whale Listening Network comes from the project’s Web site.

  I first read about the Otter-Free Zone in Doremus’s “Restoring Endangered Species: The Importance of Being Wild.” I learned more by speaking with Steve Shimek, chief executive of the Otter Project, and even more from talking with Greg Sanders, whose final word on the subject is drawn from “Agency Seeks to Lift Otter Ban,” by Sara Lin in the Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2005.

  My description of early attempts to promote wildness in whooping cranes quotes David H. Ellis et al., “Lessons from the Motorized Migrations,” Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop 8 (2001): 143.

  Joe Duff first explained to me that, once upon a time, Canada geese were cherished and rare. “They’re beautiful creatures,” he said. “They used to be harbingers of the changing seasons and legends of the fall. But show me one person who likes Canada geese now. And it’s our fault!” I subsequently read about the history of the species in many archival newspaper stories, including “Road to Oblivion Runs Both Ways,” an April 10, 1966, Washington Post column by then chairman of the Audubon Naturalist Society, Irston R. Barnes. For an overview, I consulted “Large Canada Geese in the Central Flyway: Management of Depredation, Nuisance and Human Health and Safety Issues,” prepared for the Central Flyway Council by P. Joseph Gabig in 2000.

  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that there are now 3.5 million resident Canada geese in the country. The Department of Agriculture is the federal agency responsible for controlling them. The total number of geese the government kills every year is hard to come by, but I got at least a rough idea from documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by Barbara Stagno of the animal rights organization In Defense of Animals. Discussing pigeons, I quote from “The Chattering Sparrow,” New York Times, September 2, 1878, and “To Get President to Join in Pastime Is Big Hope of Many,” Washington Post, July 26, 1933.

  The growth of urban raccoon populations is documented in the PBS Nature film Raccoon Nation. “Our Most American Animal” was written by Polly Redford and published in the December 1963 issue of Harper’s. It includes a photo of her young son, shirtless, cuddling with a raccoon.

  14. SPOILER

  My attempt to reconstruct what happened at Tooke Lake is based on conversations with Brooke Pennypacker, George Archibald, and two former trackers with the International Crane Foundation, Anna Fasoli and Sara Zimorski. I also e-mailed with Bev Hansen of the Hernando Audubon Society. Most of all, I’m grateful to Clarice Gibbs for her invitation to visit and for sharing her story.

  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2011 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation: National Overview, published in August 2012, states that fifty-three million Americans feed birds outside their homes.

  15. BACKPACKS FULL OF ROCKS

  Information about Jefferson County comes from the county’s Web site.

  In relaying Brooke’s speech on the beach at St. Marks, I’ve also interwoven several statements he made to me months later when—still unable to shake what he’d said that afternoon at St. Marks, but also still incapable of understanding why exactly I was so moved—I told B
rooke so and asked him to elaborate. This is the only place in the book where I’ve knowingly combined two conversations this way, or altered a person’s quotes except for making minor adjustments for the sake of clarity or accuracy.

  EPILOGUE: THE MAN WHO CARRIED FISH

  I’m grateful to Phil Pister for meeting with me at his home in Bishop. To get the story right, I also relied on Pister’s essay, “Species in a Bucket,” in the January 1993 issue of Natural History and “Edwin Philip Pister, Preserving Native Fishes and Their Ecosystems: A Pilgrim’s Progress, 1950–Present,” an oral history done in 2009 by the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. (The interviewer was Ann Lage.) Thanks also to Terry Russi for showing me around Fish Slough. John Muir wrote about the redemptive effects of trout fishing in the essay “The Animals of the Yosemite,” in Our National Parks (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 231.

  For more gruesome details about the farmer who snapped in anger at the pelican colony, see “Farmer Snapped in Anger at Pelican Colony,” in the Kansas City Star, October 6, 2011.

  Finally, a note about Rudi Mattoni. Not long ago, one of the journalists I hired to fact-check this manuscript e-mailed Mattoni and asked him, among other things, to confirm a few details about his insect-cataloging project on the Rio de la Plata. Mattoni responded: “I have left the area. I am abandoning the idea.” He explained that he’d been discouraged to find the local community and the academic community to be unsupportive and completely uninterested in his objectives. “Another of life’s small tragedies,” Mattoni wrote. In other words, he had given up.

  Except, he hadn’t given up. Instead, he recently moved to New York City, he wrote, “where I plan to spend the rest of my days working on the art/science interface.” He’s now working with an artist to develop mass-rearing methods for butterflies, just as he’d once done for the government’s moths, with the aim of building “living sculptures.” That is, Mattoni has thrown himself into communicating the importance of biodiversity via the same, more imaginative channels that he’d tried to open with his art exhibit in Buenos Aires. We should all wish him luck.