Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America
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* For example, children have been shown to acquire fear of spiders and snakes more quickly than fear of guns and other human-manufactured dangers. In this case, there’s a logical, evolutionary basis for biophilia: if you are an immobile baby spending a lot of time on the ground, it pays to learn quickly to fear snakes, spiders, and rats. Fear of big predators, and the quick and erratic movements and sudden sounds they make, doesn’t kick in until after four years old, about when the first human kids would have begun roaming unaccompanied outside of their camps.
* Necedah’s wetlands were drained for agriculture a century ago. But, as a Fish and Wildlife Service history of the refuge puts it, “after a series of intense peat bog fires in the 1930s, many settlers abandoned their homesteads.” So, in 1939, the land was flooded again as a public works project and turned into a wildlife refuge. Its wetlands still need to be meticulously flooded and drawn down to maintain just the right habitat for birds. You’d never know by looking at it, but the refuge is an artificial landscape—a man-made terrarium with no walls or roof.
* Whooping cranes are not particularly nice. The politics inside the pen are like those inside prison, with dominant birds making their reputations by bullying ones that show weakness. One year, Operation Migration hired a short Eastern-European woman with an unassuming posture as an intern, and whenever she suited up and got in the pen, Joe told me, “the birds used to whale on her.” Once, after a whooping crane died in the pen, the other cranes pecked out its eyes.
* In 1999, Disney produced Fly Away Home, a family film loosely based on William Lishman’s memoir Father Goose. In it, a young girl, played by Anna Paquin, and her eccentric inventor father, played by Jeff Daniels, rescue a group of goslings and save a wetland from development by leading the geese on a migration behind an ultralight. (The plot is complicated.) The psychologist Gail Melson describes the film as part of a modern genre, like Free Willy, that shows children “as the true stewards of embattled nature,” and “as allies and often saviors of vulnerable animals against an unfeeling, cruel adult world.” In the film’s most transcendent scenes, where the little girl flies with the geese, it is actually Joe Duff in the cockpit, wearing a helmet with fake pigtails sticking out of it.
* The recordings, made in Bermuda and Hawaii by Roger Payne and Scott McVay, represented a step forward for science—few people, aside from top-secret navy engineers, knew that humpbacks vocalized. The American counterculture was also drawn to whale song as though it were nature’s lava lamp—a swirling psychedelic bath of sound to lose oneself in. Even the music critic for the New York Times suggested listening to Songs of the Humpback Whale in a dark room and getting “in touch with your mammalian past.”
* Taking a whooping crane to the vet on migration is not like taking a house cat to the vet. Someone first had to go ahead, Secret Service–like, to secure the clinic. Barking dogs were cleared out. Phones were silenced. The doctor was outfitted with a hood and white costume. Actual local headline: “Nashville Vet Dresses Like a Marshmallow to Save Whooping Crane.”
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
INTRODUCTION: THE WOMAN WHO COUNTED FISH
PART ONE: BEARS
1. MARTHA STEWART ON THE TUNDRA
2. AMERICAN INCOGNITUM
3. BILLY POSSUMS
4. THE CONNECTION
5. THE LIFT
PART TWO: BUTTERFLIES
6. THE MIDDLE OF A HAIRCUT
7. SHIFTING BASELINES
8. OUR VANISHING WILDLIFE
9. WITHOUT CHANGE, THERE WOULD BE NO BUTTERFLIES
10. THE SOUP STAGE
PART THREE: BIRDS
11. CONSTRUCTION WORKERS
12. CRANIACS
13. THEIR INCREDIBLE ESSENCE
14. SPOILER
15. BACKPACKS FULL OF ROCKS
EPILOGUE: THE MAN WHO CARRIED FISH
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index