Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America
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Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 45, 50, 142–43
Obama administration, 73
O’Brien, Liam, 119–20, 189–90
butterflies and, 116–18, 119–20, 123, 129, 132–33
Office of Endangered Species, 146
Operation Migration, 203–16, 220, 223–30, 233, 246–50, 259–60, 262–71, 272–82, 290–92, 294–96
opossums, 61, 70–72, 260
Osborne, Ken, 173
otters, 60, 60n, 253–54
Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation (Hornaday), 142–45, 258
Owens pupfish, 283–90
owls, 59–60
Palmer, Chris, 79n
Palos Verdes blue butterflies, 162–66, 168, 182
pandas, 60n
panthers, 48
passenger pigeons, 136–37, 231
Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, 204, 217, 218, 250, 259, 263, 295
Pauly, Daniel, 128
Payne, Roger, 235n
Peale, Charles Willson, 50, 51
pelicans, 258, 289
Pennypacker, Brooke, 209, 210, 213–15, 228, 263–65, 267, 272, 274–80, 290–92, 294–96
Pennypacker, Devin, 264–65
People, 218
peregrine falcons, 3
Pete and Josephine (whooping cranes), 197–98, 200–202, 217
Pew Research Center, 19
pheasants, 143
photography, 78–79
phylogenetic relatedness, 60–61
Piedra, Juan, 52, 66
pigeons, 60n, 136–37, 231, 258
pink bollworm moths, 164–65
Pister, Phil, 283–90
Plater, Brent, 190–91
Pleistocene era, 130, 199, 231
Pleistocene Rewilding, 131–32, 192
Pokémon, 178
Polar Bear Alert, 29–31, 80
Polar Bear Alert Program, 97–98
polar bears, 5–6, 37–38, 41, 51, 52–54, 66, 98–99, 160
adaptation theories and, 40–41
airlifting of, 97–101
Assiniboine Park Zoo and, 21
attacks on humans by, 31–32, 97
cannibalism among, 20–21, 96
in Churchill, 13–24, 25–45, 76–92, 93–101
climate change and, 6, 15, 19, 20, 22, 34–42, 53–56, 74, 85, 93–94, 96–97, 114–15, 181–82
declining population in, Churchill, 35–36
dogs and, 77, 79–81
endangered species list and, 52–53, 55–56, 59, 72–74
grizzly bears and, 181–82
holding compound for, 97–98
Hudson Bay and, 31, 34–37, 93
image of, 61
making eye contact with, 86, 89, 91
performing, 28
photographing of, 78–79
in popular culture, 53–54
seal hunting by, 25–26, 40
starvation video of, 93–96, 114–15
Polar Bears International (PBI), 14–19, 23, 35, 40n, 41–43, 82–83, 93, 95, 98–99
Project Polar Bear competition of, 85–90
Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish (Carroll), 82, 83
Powell, Jerry, 125–28, 132–34, 155, 166, 182–85, 293
power plants, 190–91
Preble’s meadow jumping mice, 181
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop, 226
Project Jonah, 241, 245
Project Polar Bear, 85–90
Proshek, Benjamin, 183–84
pumas, cougars, mountain lions, 48, 60, 60n, 63, 67–68
Pyle, Robert Michael, 161–62, 178
rabbits, 143
raccoons, 260–61
Radiation Incorporated, 240
rats, 170n, 260
Ratson, Paul, 29–30, 77
realistic wild animal stories, 65–66
Reimer, Mike, 32
reindeer, 48
Reiss, Diana, 151
reverence for animals, 234–35
Rich, Catherine, 163
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, 28
Robards, Jason, 29
robins, 39
Rockwell, Robert, 40n
rodents, 60n
rats, 170n, 260
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 258
Roosevelt, Theodore, 61–63, 65, 68, 69, 71–72, 142
Rosing, Norbert, 79–80
Russi, Terry, 288–89
Sagan, Carl, 237
St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, 273, 274, 278–79, 282, 294
salamanders, Valdina Farms, 59
salmon, 2–3, 285
Samberg, Andy, 99
Sanders, Greg, 254, 255
sandhill cranes, 143, 214, 222–25, 258, 267
San Francisco Bay Area, 120–24
San Francisco Call, 121
San Francisco Chronicle, 151
San Gabriel Wash, 167, 168
Saturday Evening Post, 137
Scott, J. Michael, 3, 4, 115
seabirds, 2
Kittlitz’s murrelets, 56, 72
seals, 142, 234
polar bears’ hunting of, 25–26, 40
sea lions, 2
sea otters, 253–54
Sea Shepherd Society, 242–43
sea turtles, 2, 135–36, 238
Semonin, Paul, 50
Seton, Ernest Thompson, 64–65, 69, 83
sharks, great white, 30
sheep, 60n, 143, 252, 253
shifting baselines syndrome, 128–30, 132, 138, 141, 145, 179, 258–59, 292
Siegel, Kassie, 55, 56, 74
Silent Spring (Carson), 239, 240
skinks, 41
sloths, ground, 130
Smith, Len, 27–28, 33, 42
snail darters, 57
snakes, 60n, 111, 170n
Sonoran blue butterflies, 167
spiders, 170n
Glacier Bay wolf, 56, 61
Smithsonian, 28
Smithsonian Institution, 57, 58, 137n, 140, 240
Songs of the Humpback Whale, 235
“Species in a Bucket” story, 283–90
Spence, Mike, 77
Sportfish I, 152n
spotted owls, 59–60
squirrels, 143
Staller, Doug, 211–13
Stark, Fred, 218
Steiff, 63, 69
Steiff, Margarete, 63
Stewart, Martha, 15, 16, 18–19, 22–24, 35, 38, 84, 98–99, 101
Stirling, Ian, 28, 35
Stroumboulopoulos, George, 84
Sturgeon, Walt, 264, 273–74
Suckling, Kierán, 170
synanthropes, 260
Taft, William Howard, 69–72
Tajiri, Satoshi, 177–78
Taoists, 245
taxidermy, 137n, 139
taxonomy, 178–81, 191
butterflies and, 179–85
evolution and, 179
teddy bears, 62–64, 69–71, 142, 176
television, 60n
nature programming on, 79n
Terrazas, Louis, 106–11, 113–14, 116, 190, 193
Tex (whooping crane), 217–20, 222, 223, 233, 237
Theory of American Degeneracy, 45–50, 143
Thirty Years War for Wild Life: Gains and Losses in the Thankless Task (Hornaday), 287–88
tigers, 60n
Time, 54
Tonight Show, The, 219–20
Tooke Lake, 265–68
tortoises, 131, 289
tourists, 14, 21, 25, 29–30, 32–34, 38, 41–42, 76, 84–92, 100
trout, 285
Tundra Buggies, 14, 28–29, 33, 42–43
Tundra Connections, 43
turkeys, 60n
turtles, 2, 60n, 135–36, 238
diamondback terrapins, 135
TWA Flight 847, 152
ultralight planes (trikes), 203–8, 211–12, 214–15, 220–21, 223, 225, 230–31
United Nations, 53–54, 238
Urban W
ildlands Group, 166
USA Today, 234
Valdina Farms salamanders, 59
van Heuvelen, Richard, 215
Vanity Fair, 54
Varawa, Joana (Joan McIntyre), 8, 234–46, 257, 277, 293
vetch, 113–14, 134
Vietnam War, 152n, 241
Washington, George, 49
Washington Post, 57, 69, 199, 220, 239
Watson, Paul, 242
Westervelt, Miriam O., 172
whales, 57, 146, 234, 252, 253, 293
Humphrey the Humpback, 150–56, 174, 175, 232–33, 234, 243
McIntyre (Varawa) and, 8, 234–46, 257, 293
Songs of the Humpback Whale, 235
Whale Wars, 243
whaling industry, 236, 239, 241–43, 246
Greenpeace and, 241–44
White Fang (London), 65
White River Marsh, 290–91, 294
White Wilderness, 79n
Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP), 209–12, 227, 246–51, 255–56, 259, 264–67, 269, 275–77, 290
whooping cranes, 5–6, 143, 197–216, 217–31, 246–51, 255–57, 259
breeding problems in, 249
at Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge, 265, 267–68, 272–73
climate change and, 281
crane number 2 (injured bird), 214–16, 247–48
Craniacs and, 228–30, 233, 250, 273, 282, 291, 294, 295
Duff and, 202–3, 205, 207–9, 211, 224–26, 230n, 231, 250, 262, 264, 273, 275, 278–82, 295
First Family, 265–68, 270, 289–90
Gee Whiz, 219, 200
Gibbs and, 265–71
Horwich and, 222–24
humans and, 199–200, 204–5, 255–57, 265–71
imprinting and, 205, 218, 222
International Crane Foundation and, 218, 222, 223, 250, 251, 267
International Whooping Crane Recovery Team and, 249
mystique of, 199–200, 230, 257
at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, see Necedah National Wildlife Refuge
Operation Migration for, 203–16, 220, 223–30, 233, 246–50, 259–60, 262–71, 272–82, 290–92, 294–96
at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, 204, 217, 218, 250, 259, 263, 295
Pennypacker and, 209, 210, 213–15, 228, 263–65, 267, 272, 274–80, 290–92, 294–96
Pete and Josephine, 197–98, 200–202, 217
population turnaround in, 201–3
at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, 273, 274, 278–79, 282, 294
shooting of, 289–90
Swamp Monster maneuver and, 215
Tex, 217–20, 222, 223, 233, 237
ultralight planes and, 203–8, 211–12, 214–15, 220–21, 223, 225, 230–31
at White River Marsh, 290–91, 294
wildness of, 255–57, 226–71
Wilcove, David, 111
Wild America, 175
Wild Animals I Have Known (Seton), 66
wild animal stories, 65–66
WildEarth Guardians, 53
Wild Equity Institute, 190
Wildlife Services, 252
wildness, 257–58, 271
policing of, 251–52
of whooping cranes, 255–57, 266–71
Wilson, E. O., 170
Wolch, Jennifer, 67–68
World Wildlife Fund, 98, 101
wolves, 63–66, 68, 130, 160, 252
federal protection of, 68
World War I, 144
World Wildlife Fund, 54
Wrighter, Jack, 273–74, 279, 280, 278
Xerces blue butterflies, 122–24
Xerces Society, 123
Yellowstone Park, 251–52
YouTube, 5, 88, 233–34
zoos, 139–40
* For example, a snow goose biologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Robert Rockwell, who has worked in Churchill for more than forty years, made a case in one paper that the town’s polar bears could actually survive on land by subsisting on goose eggs. Polar bear biologists rebutted his work, and thus began an esoteric back-and-forth involving population dynamic modeling and hypothetical calorie crunching. It was boring, but each new paper made headlines in the press, which has taken to covering polar bear science as though it were a boxing match between environmentalists and climate skeptics. Rockwell’s study was seized on as a damning counterfactual by skeptics, while environmentalists branded him a climate denier. (He’s not.)
This was only one of several dust-ups in the press around the time I visited Churchill. A polar bear scientist was investigated (and cleared) by the government for exaggerating reports of drowned polar bears in Alaska. A photo of a polar bear clinging to a small fragment of ice was exposed as an artful crop job. People seemed to believe that disproving any particular claim about polar bears and their vulnerability to climate change invalidates the reality of climate change altogether—even if, as in Rockwell’s scenario, the ice is still melting and the bears are merely skirting by on a goose-egg technicality. Rockwell, for his part, wound up feeling that most of the people who accused him of being a climate skeptic were “idiots” and that the scientists who lashed out to challenge his research, including a couple of big name polar bear biologists affiliated with Polar Bears International, have become so desperate to convince an unresponsive public about climate change that they’re behaving irresponsibly. They exaggerate the facts and are intolerant of any science that complicates their tidy storyline, Rockwell told me. They mean well but, they’re talking like “marketing guys” now, not scientists.
* Over the last twenty years, a new field of academic study has coalesced around similar questions, examining our attitudes toward animals and the sociological, psychological, and imaginative forces that influence them. The field is so new that its own researchers don’t always agree on a name for it—often it’s called Human-Animal Studies—and its findings are wide-ranging. My favorites include: The more television a person in upstate New York watches, the more fearful he or she is of being attacked by a black bear. Americans are more likely to assume that a given tiger is female than male. If the mammals depicted on beer bottle labels reflected the actual mammalian biodiversity of Earth, there would be far more rodents and bats on beer bottles, and far fewer mountain goats, bighorn sheep, and wooly mammoths. Only 13.7 percent of white women in Southern California won’t enter the ocean out of fear of jellyfish. American television commercials tend to depict solitary wild animals, whereas Chinese ads show herds, flocks, and gaggles. The average time a person spends in front of an animal enclosure at an American zoo is 99.31 seconds.
In a study in which a fake snake, a fake turtle, and a Styrofoam cup were placed on the side of a road, motorists hit the snake and turtle more often than the cup, and the snake more often than the turtle; nearly 3 percent of motorists who hit the fake animals appeared to hit them on purpose. Another study, looking at people’s reactions to being attacked by pumas, found that the “lowest likelihood of escaping injury occurred when individuals remained stationary.” Women are more likely than men to get “a magical feeling” when seeing dolphins in the surf. Sixty-eight percent of “mothers with high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem” identified with a dancing cat in a commercial for Purina.
Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons, but also more stupid. Turkeys are seen as slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and people believe dolphins to be smarter and more lovable than human beings. Pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs.
* It takes extreme amounts of time, money, patience, and luck to catch that sort of iconic material in the wild, and, understandably, some professionals cut corners. Chris Palmer, a veteran wildlife filmmaker who recently authored an exposé of the industry, explains how animals from game farms are routinely used as stand-ins for wild ones, or jelly beans are hidden inside deer carcasses so that trained bears will tear them apart. This kind of trickery has been going on forever. (In 1958, Disney wanted to show lemmings scram
bling, en masse, off a cliff in the Arctic for its film White Wilderness. So the Disney crew paid Inuit kids to round up lemmings, forced the lemmings to run on a treadmill covered with snow, then picked up the lemmings with their hands and chucked them into the water. In reality, scientists later determined, lemmings don’t even run off cliffs. Americans still think they do in large part because White Wilderness popularized the idea.) But, Palmer argues, the explosion of nature programming on television, with dedicated twenty-four-hour networks like Animal Planet and Nat Geo Wild, has only made things worse. It’s created a demand for more, and more sensational, footage but shriveled filmmakers’ budgets and deadlines. Wildlife filmmakers, Palmer told me, are good people and often staunch conservationists, but the pressure on them is agonizing, and the ethical lines are blurry. “It’s not that you’re evil or malignant or malicious,” he said. “You’re just trying to get the damn shot so you can go home and have dinner with your family. So you put the monkey and the boa constrictor in the same enclosure.”
* The last passenger pigeon was named Martha. She lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. After she died, she was sent in a block of ice to the Smithsonian and stuffed. She enjoyed decades of celebrity. In 1966, Martha was sent to San Diego, on loan for a symposium about wildlife conservation; the organizers just wanted her there, as a mascot, as they plotted ways to save the earth. Fifty-two years after her death, Martha was flying again—on American Airlines. A dedicated stewardess held Martha on her lap the entire transcontinental flight. When she returned to the Smithsonian, Martha spent years as part of an exhibit of taxidermy of extinct birds, alongside a great auk, an ivory-billed woodpecker, and the world’s last heath hen, named Booming Ben. But then the museum built a new Hall of Mammals, and the birds had to come down to make room. When I visited, the collections manager, James Dean, told me that he’d like Martha to be put back on exhibit somewhere, but that his PR people tell him that no one wants to see a case of extinct birds. So Martha is now kept on a Styrofoam block in a metal cabinet labeled Z-11-C, in a vast climate-controlled warehouse full of metal cabinets, reminiscent of that last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Poor Martha,” Dean said as he pulled her out to show me.
* In retrospect, it’s amazing how the idiosyncratic motivations of so many people aligned behind a single whale. For example, the lead boat for most of the rescue effort was a small fishing vessel called the Sportfish I, captained by a local fishing guide named Jack Findleton. As a teenager, Findleton had seen twelve months of combat in Vietnam. He was one of only 27 of the 144 men in his unit who came home alive, and he came home scarred. “This is my way of making up for what I did then,” he told one newspaper, an atonement for some apparently very terrible acts, which he would not go into. Trying to save Humphrey, Findleton said, “has shown me sensitive feelings that were buried for years.” Another man involved in the rescue mission, Bernie Krause, told me that, years later, a woman in Ohio explained to him that she and her family and everyone in their church had been praying for Humphrey. They believed the animal was Jesus Christ, returned in the form of a whale, swimming up the river to take a look around and judge us.