Natural Acts

by David Quammen

* Or they did at the time this essay first appeared; since then, the regulations have been changed in the grayling’s favor.

  * This was true when Fay said it; no longer. During 2002 and 2003, Ebola struck also in Odzala and roundabout, killing dozens of people in villages and hundreds—probably thousands—of gorillas in the forest. But that’s part of another story for another time.

  * Still more recently, it has become Minkébé National Park, one of thirteen new national parks decreed by President El Hadj Omar Bongo in 2002, partly as a result of Fay’s Megatransect.

  * It bears noting, though, that other ART methods have yielded some returns to the wild, such as the hundred Mississippi sandhill cranes, additions to an endangered subspecies, that were bred at ACRES using artificial insemination and released on a refuge near Pascagoula.