WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE
Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators
William Stolzenburg
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: The Grizzly in the Room
One: Arms of the Starfish
Two: Planet Predator
Three: Forest of the Sea Otter
Four: The Whale Killer
Five: Ecological Meltdown
Six: Bambi’s Revenge
Seven: Little Monsters’ Ball
Eight: Valley of Fear
Nine: The Lions of Zion
Ten: Dead Creatures Walking
Eleven: The Loneliest Predator
Epilogue: Alone on the Hill
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
A Note on the Author
Imprint
To Mom and Dad
PROLOGUE:
The Grizzly in the Room
ANYONE WHO WRITES a book of science about great, flesh-eating beasts should be required up front to disclose their bias. Here is mine.
The second week of June 2000, on the campus of the University of Montana in Missoula, nearly a thousand professional biologists and advanced students had gathered for the fourteenth annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology. As a science writer covering that conference, I was to navigate the chaos of some four hundred presentations—going off eight at a time, thirty-two to the hour, three days straight, in various locations about campus. My reporting strategy, honed to questionable success with years of practice, was to scramble hither and yon in manic pursuit of the most captivating titles, the next great thing in conservation, as one might try fielding an exploding batch of popcorn.
Within fifteen minutes of the first day’s opening sessions, that strategy had been scrapped for an infinitely more alluring one. I had found a seat in a symposium called “The Role of Top Predators in Ecological Communities and Biological Conservation,” and for the next three hours I made no pretenses of needing to be anywhere else.
Because here were stories of lions, hyenas, and leopards, battling cheetahs and wild dogs over bloody carcasses on the African plains. Here were tales of wolves raising the neck hairs on moose in Alaska, rogue killer whales gobbling sea otters in the Aleutians, even coyotes chasing house cats in California suburbs. Here, one after the next, were legitimately visceral alternatives to filing yet another pale report on habitat fragmentation, population viability analyses, or microsatellite loci.
The faces materializing at the podium, the names appearing on the papers, included some of the icons and iconoclasts of conservation biology. There was James A. Estes, pioneering marine biologist whose observations in the Aleutians thirty years earlier had revealed the sea otter as resurrected guardian angel of the vibrant Pacific kelp forest. Estes was back from yet another season in the cold northern waters, with a bizarre new twist in the otter’s comeback story—a twist involving otter-eating killer whales, whose punch line still has the marine science community feuding.
Estes also brought a message from his coauthor John Terborgh, a legendary tropical ecologist with nightmarish news from a surreal, predator-free archipelago in Venezuela, whose forests in the absence of harpy eagles and jaguars were being eaten to the ground. There was Joel Berger, noted authority on large hoofed animals, diagnosing a strange case of amnesia in the Grand Teton range of Wyoming, where the moose had forgotten certain essential fears—an unfortunately lethal lapse now that wolves had recently reclaimed lost ground in the Tetons.
Later that afternoon, Berger’s colleague Peter Stacey was revealing more wounds of missing predators. Streamside birds of the Grand Teton had disappeared, in a chain reaction eventually traced back to the mountains’ missing wolves and grizzlies.
The next day brought more on the science of predators and predation as increasingly vital matters in conserving life’s diversity. A progress report from Yellowstone National Park, then five years into a bold experiment of turning gray wolves loose after a seventy-year hiatus, suggested the sanctuary had been decidedly shortchanged in the wolves’ absence. The reinstated top predator, reported lead researcher Douglas Smith, was turning the park into a banquet of elk carrion, with a slew of scavenging species reaping the leftovers. It would turn out these were the rumblings of bigger tremors to come; Smith and his colleagues were sitting cautiously on preliminary findings of a wholesale revival of Yellowstone’s compromised ecosystem, courtesy of the wolf.
Talk after talk, northern seas to tropical jungles, the conclusions rang in accord, as with a gavel: Big predators were not just missing; they were sorely missed. It brought to mind a medical phenomenon haunting many amputees; the phantom pains of a missing limb. These top predators—these missing limbs—were still deeply felt.
Here, in a country whose society had blown away all but a token remnant of its topmost competitors, was a force of top-flight ecologists exposing the campaign as a colossal case of shooting one’s own foot. Here was evidence that the biggest and scariest of carnivores were more dangerous by their absence. It was time, as Jim Estes addressed his audience, to rethink the way we look at the world, to consider the view from the top down—from the predators’ perspective.
From that day I began tracking this insurgent cadre of concerned scientists taking stock of Earth’s increasingly fangless kingdom. Theirs is the story of this book. In field sites spanning the biosphere, these ecologists are questioning the soundness of ecosystems recently devoid of their topmost predators, and discovering suspicious cracks in the foundation. They are flagging, in a sense, what the bard of ecology Aldo Leopold once described as “the marks of death in a community that believes itself well.” And I hope, if nothing else, that through the following chronicle of their discoveries, these unseen wounds and phantom pains, whose source scientists are now bringing to light, may at least be made visible for all of us to deal with as we choose.
But again to that sticky business of bias. There is a reason these discoveries have been so late in coming and—as we’ll see—so warily received. The ecology of big predators remains the most intractable discipline in the most complex of all sciences. Its subjects are hard to find, and harder yet to hold still for study. The big predators are not only inherently rare—as ordained by their tiny perch atop the food pyramid—but fashionably rare, at the hands of a modern human society that slaughters them blatantly out of contempt and obliquely through wholesale destruction of their homes and livelihoods. These are animals that tend to roam too far for conventional observation, considering that a week’s jaunt by a lovelorn wolf may span entire western states. The great carnivores, like lions melting into the tall grass, are also by nature enigmatic and stealthy, and dangerous when cornered. Their intimate study poses logistical and psychological issues unknown to the biologist studying deer or beetles.
And therein lies one confounding variable that inescapably pervades this supposed book of fact and systematic inquiry. Over the thousands of millennia that our own lineage has spent in the company of killing beasts—competing with them for food and running from them as food—the great meat-eaters have quite naturally etched themselves into the human persona. Long before people had perfected the art of exterminating their fellow predators, they were worshipping them. Thirty thousand years ago, Paleolithic artists were decorating cave walls with reverently painted murals of lions. To this day no human, scientist or otherwise, impassively witnesses the disembowelment of a living creature by the tearing jaws and claws of wild carnivores. No one impartially records the soul-jarring charge of a grizzly bear or the mountain-hushing howl of the wolf
.
The question hanging over that Missoula gathering was palpable, and it has stalked this story to the end. All this talk of killing and fleeing and ecological chain reactions made for stirring copy, but was it legitimate? Were these the reports of sound science or the veiled advocacy of a few who had fallen prey to the predators’ mystique? More to the heart, what would it mean to the human animal to one day wake up and find itself in a world where the biggest, most threatening predator in the whole blessed menagerie was a coyote the size of a border collie? These concerns were pertinent not only to the predator ecologist advocating conservation but also to the journalist who would question their conclusions. Something more than science pervaded the discussions—something akin to the five-hundred-pound grizzly in the room.
Nine days after my awakening in Missoula, I was standing alone at dusk just outside the northwest corner of Yellowstone National Park, atop an open knoll ringed on all horizons by ranges of the northern Rockies. Earlier in the day and far behind I had passed a sign at the trailhead reading WARNING: GRIZZLY BEARS ARE ACTIVE IN THIS AREA. And after reconnoitering the countryside, I had determined that this natural amphitheater would indeed be a good place to seek an answer or two about the objective nature of carnivore journalism.
As the skylight faded I stood on the lonely knoll, slowly turning in circles. There was less faith than duty in my exercise, scanning the surrounding hillsides for bears I held no serious hopes of conjuring. Around I turned, drifting between distant mountain peaks and the purpling skies in the purest of silence. Duskdreaming. The trail heading back would soon be too dark to follow. Time to go. I turned one last quarter to the north, and there stood grizzlies.
A sow and two cubs had magically materialized on the hillside, two roundish nubs trailing behind a dark boulder of fur, placidly pawing through a seep on the edge of an aspen grove. I slowly raised my binoculars. I lowered them and looked to the lone pine standing about a seven-second sprint to my left, estimating its lowest branch at six feet high. I pulled out my field journal and scribbled some notes, ostensibly recording some key facet of natural history I pretended to be observing.
When I look at those notes today I see the jerky scratchings of an overexcited child. When I remember the heart-pounding presence those bears had imparted over the distance—a distance that could just as likely have measured a hundred paces as a half mile—I remember why this book, for all its inherent hazards, needed writing.
ONE
Arms of the Starfish
ON THE NORTHERNMOST TIP of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, in a wild and lonely little crescent of shore called Mukkaw Bay, ocean meets land in a crash of wind and wave against craggy rock, geysers of salt spray erupting into brooding skies. Mukkaw Bay is the sort of place to imagine the Romantic philosopher, hair swept crazy by the gales, pondering the epic clash of titanic forces. And so in a sense it came to be, when in the summer of 1963 a young farsighted ecologist happened upon the place with a few pressing curiosities regarding the vital struggle between predator and prey.
It was thereafter that the austere seascape of Mukkaw Bay came to be periodically enlivened by the spectacle of a tall figure scrambling about on the fleetingly exposed terrain of low tide, bounding on long legs across the tidal pools and crevices and surge channels, stepping nimbly over slippery strands of glistening kelp. Each time, arriving at the same particular ledge, the young man would stoop to pry something from the rocks and, one by one, begin flinging starfish into the sea.
Robert T. Paine was a freshly minted ecology professor from the University of Washington in Seattle, with questions about things as fundamental as a predator’s impact on its prey, as grand as the principles underlying the diversity of life. On the rocky shores of Mukkaw Bay, he had come looking for answers in a colorful little community of marine invertebrates—barnacles, limpets, snails, mussels, chitons, and starfish—conveniently gathered, readily manipulated, and ripe for experimentation. Paine set about sampling two adjacent intertidal stretches of rock on the wave-beaten edge of the sea. Each month he would make his way out to the turbulent ledge, and from one of his plots he would meticulously chuck back into the ocean every last individual of the ecosystem’s reigning predator, a husky orange starfish formally known as Pisaster ochraceous. The other rock he left untouched.
Paine did not need to stare long to decipher the outcome. While the untampered plot had continued merrily along—with its cast of characters fully intact—its predator-free counterpart next door had fallen under siege. Where the predator Pisaster went missing, its main prey, a big dark mussel named Mytilus californianus, flourished spectacularly. Within a year, Mytilus had crowded half the other species off the rock, with the survivors hanging on by their figurative fingertips. In time, only a stark monoculture of mussels would remain. As orchestrator of Pisaster’s local extinction, Paine had triggered the collapse of his miniature ecosystem.
Robert T. Paine’s muscular little experiment, published in a 1966 issue of the scientific journal the American Naturalist, was to become a classic paper in the nascent field of community ecology. The most elementary interpretation was deceptively powerful: On this little stretch of rocky shore, one particular kind of animal wielded a disproportionately huge hand in determining how many species shared the rock. Reading more deeply, the implications of Paine’s predator-free play world grew quietly dark and monstrous.
Spitsbergen
Paine’s inspired path to Mukkaw Bay had begun with another young man’s odyssey nearly half a century before and a continent away, but in the vaguely familiar setting of a wild and weather-beaten land beside the sea. The man was Charles Sutherland Elton, a naturalist prodigy who in 1921, as a twenty-one-year-old zoology student at Oxford, was offered a slot on the university’s first Arctic expedition. The land was Spitsbergen, an ice-encrusted, polar-bearhaunted archipelago the size of Ireland, anchored in the Barents Sea roughly midway between Norway and the North Pole. Spitsbergen—German for “spiked mountains”—was a beautifully bleak and treeless tundra, more than half of it covered year-round in ice. Isolated from the mainland by hundreds of miles of Arctic waters, previously scoured by the grindings of Pleistocene glaciers, Spitsbergen was home to a paltry but importantly conspicuous little collection of wildlife castaways. Not including the polar bears and walruses and seals that made their living upon the sea, the mammalian fauna of terrestrial Spitsbergen numbered all of two species, the reindeer and a fox. The bird list was likewise threadbare: a handful of part-time resident seabird species—albeit in teeming, cacophonous colonies—and on land a snow bunting, a lone species of sandpiper, and a snow-white tundra grouse named the Svalbard ptarmigan. Aside from some insects and spiders to round out the collection, that was it. No lemmings or Arctic hares, not much of anything but the barest-boned collection of the north’s hardiest hangers-on—which was, after all, the main allure of Spitsbergen.
In those adolescent days of ecology, biological surveys were in vogue. The ecologists of the time had progressed from naming and cataloging individual species of plants and animals to attempting the same treatment for the communities in which the species lived. In these early stumbling steps, the simpler the better. “This poverty in species,” Elton later wrote of Spitsbergen, “made it possible to carry out a fairly good primary ecological survey in spite of the inaccessible nature of much of the country.”
Young Elton came ready. Since the age of seventeen, Elton had been staring out at the passing countryside from the windows of railway trains, walking spellbound through the English woods, quietly chasing “the dream of really knowing someday what animal populations are doing behind the curtain of cover.” He was a field naturalist of the old school, fluent in the names and habits of birds, mammals, insects, and rocks alike, who could be found lying on his belly deciphering the complexity of a pond, or hunched over an anthill in the English countryside, mesmerized by the commerce of its creatures. His days were spent noting robber ants plundering, bumblebees fertiliz
ing thyme flowers, rabbits depositing dung, and green woodpeckers digging. Elton early on had assumed the task of looking into the clandestine society of creatures whose very nature it was to hide. At least on Spitsbergen, the hiding places were few.
At the base of the great sea cliffs of Spitsbergen, the islands’ dull brown tundra suddenly took on the emerald hues reminiscent of the poster hills of Norway. (Elton didn’t offer this comparison blithely; he tested it with a color chart.) Beneath the cliffs grew luxuriant swards of grass and flower gardens of saxifrage. This apparent oasis sprouting from the tundra bleakness was no microclimatic fluke of temperature or rainfall. The source of this greenery, Elton plainly realized by looking up, sprang from guano.
The cliff faces of Spitsbergen were plastered with raucous seabird colonies of guillemots and puffins, a controlled riot of uncountable thousands. Beneath these bustling hubs of birdlife, the guano rained, and the coastal gardens grew lush. In the everlasting daylight of the Arctic summer, the seabirds were forever commuting in a continuous mad traffic, from sea cliff to sea and back again. Elton’s mind followed them out of sight into the cold gray waters. Far out to sea on egg-beater wings they would fly to their feeding grounds. Then into the water they would dive, becoming nimble submarine predators—web-footed torpedoes chasing down scores of little fish and shrimplike krill. Beaks and stomachs full, they would fly back to their cliffside nests bringing food, in one state of digestion or another, to hungry seabird chicks and tundra plants alike.
Watching this endless influx of wildflower fertilizer flown in from the sea, Elton saw a chain of life far transcending all preconceived bounds of the animal community. He saw it beginning with the base of the oceanic food chain—with the infinite masses of photosynthetic plankton called diatoms—feeding great planktonic herds of diatom grazers, they in turn feeding the little fish and krill destined for the beaks of landward-bound seabirds. Inland of the tundra wildflowers, he saw the chain stretching even further, to insects and spiders, to the beaks of buntings and the jaws of foxes. It was more than a chain of food; it was of web of interactions, ultimately transforming the face of the land. The pastures of the sea were fertilizing terrestrial gardens. And animals were doing much of the heavy lifting.
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