Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  The Last American Predators

  That left two other animals from the top of the terrestrial food pyramid, neither of which fared appreciably better than the wolf. The grizzly, biggest terrestrial carnivore south of the polar bear, had with the waning of the Pleistocene ice come to occupy the western half of the North American continent, Alaska to Mexico, California coast to the Great Plains. And by the time those geographic coordinates were given such names, the great bear was in full-bore retreat.

  Lewis and Clark, in their historic crossing of the country at the turn of the nineteenth century, met a discomforting thirty-seven grizzlies along the way, nearly every one of which they reflexively fired upon.

  Some of the grizzlies returned the welcome. One bear took on six of Lewis’s men and a hail of bullets. “Four … fired at the same time and put each his bullet through him, two of the balls passed through the bulk of both lobes of his lungs,” Lewis wrote in his journal, “in an instant this monster ran at them with open mouth.” Two more men fired, one breaking the bear’s shoulder. The bear charged on. The men scattered, fleeing for the river. Two were able to duck into the willows and reload. “They struck him several times again but the guns only served to direct the bear to them, in this manner he pursued two of them separately so close that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and pouches and throw themselves into the river altho’ the bank was nearly twenty feet perpendicular; so enraged was this anamal that he plunged into the river only a few feet behind the second man …, when one of those who still remained on shore shot him through the head and finally killed him.” Upon hauling the great bear ashore, Lewis’s men counted eight holes piercing its body in every direction.

  “These bear being so hard to die rather intimidates us all,” wrote Lewis. “I must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had rather fight two Indians than one bear.”

  In the freshly blazed path of Lewis and Clark came the miners and trappers, buffalo gunners and ranchers, bringing cattle, sheep, repeating rifles, and similarly bad designs on the grizzly. By the mid-1990s, the U.S. bear range was reduced to half a dozen or so dots on the map, only two of them with animals enough to predictably locate them, namely the national parks Glacier and Yellowstone.

  There had also been two big cats roaming the United States to be. The jaguar, El Tigre, the great spotted cat now largely confined to the tropical Americas, had ranged as far north as central California, and maybe as far east as the Carolinas, at the time the Spanish conquistadors marched ashore in the 1500s. The mountain lion—otherwise cougar, puma, or panther, according to regional dialects—could once be found from Atlantic to Pacific, sea level to alpine peaks, rainforests to deserts. By the midpoint of the twentieth century, its North American range had been halved. Supposed animals east of the Rockies became the periodic subjects of breathless sightings and perilously close encounters, but they somehow always escaped, leaving no pictures or other physical evidence of their existence. There did remain, however, a bona fide, if tenuous, holdout of eastern panthers, an inbred enclave numbering fewer than a hundred, precariously clinging to the ever-shrinking cypress swamps and pine forests of southern Florida.

  The air too grew increasingly thin of predators. The golden eagle, with a seven-foot wingspan and an overblown reputation for killing livestock, made a natural target wherever it soared within range of a sheepman or federal control agent. The aircraft added an unspoken element of sport to the business of shooting eagles. In the 1940s and 1950s, federal agents and sheepmen were gunning golden eagles by the thousands each year over the plains of western Texas and eastern New Mexico.

  In the East, smaller raptors took their share of the heat. Every autumn thousands of hawks and falcons and a few straggler eagles flying south for the winter would funnel into one particular aerial highway of thermal updrafts rising over the Appalachians of eastern Pennsylvania, to be blasted like flying rats. On one famous rocky outcrop now known as Hawk Mountain, squads of gunners would wait as the hawks streamed low overhead. Bodies would pile up. Gun barrels would overheat. On a good day’s outing, the shooters would carpet their lookout ankle-deep with hawk bodies—some of the wounded still flopping—and proudly take pictures.

  Beginning of the End

  The American history of predator eradication is notable mainly for its breathtaking rapidity, though not for its novelty. In terms of general pattern and process, it’s a story as old as civilization, arising some ten thousand years ago in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia and the Nile of Egypt, with the advent of livestock.

  There, in the Fertile Crescent, the first systematic attacks on the great predators was launched. They followed in logical step with the first hunters and gatherers who took up the experiment of farming in the cradle of civilization. They cultivated the local barley and wild wheats. They corralled and tamed their wild game. From the spirited mountain populations of wild mouflon sheep and bezoar goats came their docile, domestic barnyard counterparts; from the ornery aurochs—inspiration of the man-eating Minotaur—came the placid, cud-chewing cow.

  For the prototype herdsmen, these were intended as handy packages of fresh meat. The wild carnivores with which they shared the land quite naturally tended to see them that way too. With domestication were born two new and related concepts: one viewing animals as property, the other assuming predators as thieves and threats to livelihood. The inevitable conflict was compounded as the proliferating humans and their herds expanded across the countryside, chopping forests, cultivating fields, grazing the fields, supplanting the wild herds as they went—in essence making livestock the only game in town for a big hungry predator.

  And so it was that by the end of the Stone Age there was a price on the predator’s head. Solon, a noted statesman of Athens twenty-five hundred years ago, announced a five-drachma bounty for anyone killing a wolf. The Celts, for their part, had by the third century B.C. bred the massive wolfhound, sending it bounding in pursuit of wolves over the Irish countryside.

  At least one other force of reason sufficed for eliminating the large predators. Killing them was such high entertainment. With the advent of crowded cities and stultifying labor, there arose a class of citizen inevitably bored with the sedentary life, whose legions could apparently be appeased by making live theater of animal slaughter. With the raising of their great amphitheaters, the Romans began hauling elephants, hippos, and lions by the thousands, from as far away as Mesopotamia and Africa, to be killed in grand spectacle. A single day’s slaughter in the Coliseum of Rome might include a hundred bears, more than four hundred leopards, and five hundred lions—quantities better understood when considering that a take of five hundred lions would more than wipe out the entire population now living in Asia.

  By medieval times, predator persecution had gone large-scale, most conspicuously in the pursuit of the wolf. There were snares and pitfall traps and stomach piercers, as well as the classic steel foot traps. Firearms debuted, armies amassed. Whole villages would turn out to drive wolves into nets or shoot them as they broke back through the lines.

  With the persecution rationale and weaponry in place, the big predators toppled across the civilized reaches of Eurasia. From Scandinavia to the southern Alps, wolves and bears and lynx were driven to the craggiest mountain enclaves, or eastward to the most isolated reaches of Siberia.

  In Africa came more numbing repetition. The African wild dog—Africa’s pack-hunting version of the north’s gray wolf—was once a cosmopolitan predator of sub-Saharan Africa; by the end of the twentieth century it had been chased to a scattershot of guarded reserves.

  The cheetah, by the mid-twentieth century, was all but driven from the Asian continent, all other populations collapsing toward the last big parks of Africa. The lion, archetypal African predator, descended down a similar track: Its widespread presence in western Asia was whittled to some 350 individuals confined to a single forest in India; its supposed stronghold in Africa was a façade, with population
s heading for impending collapse beyond the confines of guarded parks and reserves. The tiger, with its pan-Asiatic range, was evaporating to a handful of disparate populations, the whole of them numbering maybe seven thousand.

  As in America, the international pogrom visited upon the terrestrial carnivores extended logically to their aerial counterparts. By the 1960s, the patterns were in place that by the end of the century would relegate more than forty species of the world’s raptors to the International Council for Bird Preservation’s list of threatened species.

  The slide of top carnivores’ continued into the sea, where the big marine predators were something more than competitors for food; they were the food.

  The Atlantic cod, New England’s founding fish, the currency of northern Atlantic nations, once swam in great schools of six-foot monsters, in numbers so thick that John Cabot in 1497 bragged about landing them with a bucket lowered into the sea. After the buckets and hooks were replaced in the 1920s with trawling nets, the cod began to disappear. By the 1960s, cod stocks and cod economies were collapsing, from the seas of northern Europe to the Grand Banks of Canada to the Gulf of Maine. A big cod now, in the few places they are still numerous enough to be fished, averages a little more than a foot long.

  The Atlantic bluefin tuna, a half-ton, hot-blooded torpedo hitting speeds of fifty miles per hour, is a creature that crosses oceans as a habit, chasing down smaller fish in a violent rush of muscled propulsion. It is also a fish that often ends up as frozen slabs of prospective sushi in the massive fish market of Tokyo. A single prime bluefin will sometimes fetch sixty thousand dollars at the market. Thirty years ago, there was a breeding stock of about a quarter million bluefin tuna in the western Atlantic. Today they number about twenty-two thousand animals.

  And so it goes, on down the line of the ocean’s biggest fish. Whereby the fall of the great terrestrial predators can be summed up as a casualty of the agricultural age, the subsequent collapse of their marine counterparts owes itself to the coming of the technological age. Following World War II, the machinery of war was redirected at the ocean’s fishes. By the 1960s, the fishing business entailed tracking schools by radar and satellites, shooting harpoons with howitzers, and spreading nets wide enough to swallow jumbo jets. To be a big fish in the 1960s was to wear a bull’s-eye.

  In 2003, two Canadian scientists confirmed the gut-level suspicions of observers around the world. In a paper published in the journal Nature, Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm exhaustively tallied the catch of the world’s tuna and sharks, marlins, swordfish and codfish—the oceans’ alpha fish—starting with the industrial fishing revolution of the 1960s. They conservatively estimated that the numbers of the ocean’s top predators were down by 90 percent. “From giant blue marlin to mighty bluefin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean,” said Myers. “There is no blue frontier left.”

  Upshot

  So how are those big predators doing, anyway? By the time that question had gained scientific legitimacy—by the time that mischievous trio Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin had tossed their firecracker into the marble halls of ecology, declaring the world green on account of predators; by the time their protégé Bob Paine had returned from the tidal rocks of Mukkaw Bay bearing important news of a certain sea star named Pisaster—all but the wildest outposts were in the terminal stages of apex predator annihilation.

  In place of Paine’s pitching arm were poisons and guns and automobiles, evaporating wildlands and shrinking prey populations, removing the last of the top predators wherever they lived, gray wolves to white-tipped sharks, mountains to plains, coasts to ocean depths.

  It was a planetary experiment of predator removal, perversely reminiscent of Paine’s own trials upon the coastal rocks, but with two critical departures. To gauge the impact of Pisaster’s absence, Paine had dutifully set aside a length of shore untouched and still crawling with starfish—a benchmark of relative normalcy—a control. On that account, the global experiment fell decidedly short. For the world’s alpha predators, there was no inviolate refuge of rock. There was just one ubiquitous spread of civilization, chucking as they went every last starfish into the sea.

  The question of how much the big predators mattered had become a problem almost impossible to measure scientifically. If one were to truly begin testing for the consequences of their disappearance, it would take a study area of formidable size. It would require funding on a scale better suited to the space program than the threadbare coffers of the National Science Foundation. It would require either moving or killing a lot of big and beautiful and rare animals—if such might still be found.

  With the environmental awakening and endangered species legislation of the 1970s, it was the sort of experiment that would have been rapidly shuttered out of ethical principle, if not by threat of imprisonment. And so it was a fortuitous miracle that by the 1970s, the predator-prey experiment an ecologist could only dream of was already three hundred years underway, waiting to be discovered.

  THREE

  Forest of the Sea Otter

  Discovery

  In 1741, the Siberian sailing ship St. Peter, commanded by Vitus Bering and his crew of seventy-seven, got lost while exploring the uncharted western shores of North America. Battered in the cold, tempestuous sea, its sailors wracked with scurvy and desperate with hunger and thirst, the St. Peter made way back to the Kamchatka Peninsula until running aground on a bleak volcanic island at the western end of the Aleutian archipelago. As castaways go, the crew of the St. Peter could have done worse. The shores of their shipwreck were swimming with easy meat.

  All about the island appeared fur seals, which, when not arcing through the surf, were napping on the beaches. There was a peculiar cormorant, a fearless and flightless swimming bird the approximate size and flavor of a roasted goose. Grazing its way through the seaweed shallows was an unimaginable grublike mammal growing thirty feet long, propelled by a tail fluke. Steller’s sea cow, named after the ship’s naturalist, was slow to flee, easily gaffed, and insulated with a nine-inch layer of buttery fat that Steller himself likened to “the oil of sweet almonds.”

  Amid these beds of floating kelp also swam sea otters, four-foot-long slips of shimmering fleece with button eyes peeking from furry, quizzical faces. When not diving for shellfish, the otters tended to recline upon the water like logs of driftwood. Sometimes they would haul out and sleep atop the rocks, allowing Bering’s crew to tiptoe down and club them.

  Bering’s wreck would likely have earned but a footnote in history had it not been for the sea otter. Their meat was reported to be “tough as sole leather,” but their fur was softer than the finest silk. Sea otter fur, constructed of hairs clustered 645,000 to the square inch, served the otter in trapping an insulating layer of air against the body, one of the thermal innovations allowing this blubber-free animal to make a living in the blood-chilling waters of the Bering Sea. (The other being the metabolism of a blowtorch, fueled by an appetite consuming a quarter of the otter’s body weight each day.)

  Of course none of these physiological trivia mattered to an eighteenth-century explorer. What mattered was that this was the thickest, plushest, most decadent design of any mammalian coat. As it happened, a certain strata of Chinese aristocracy had by that time developed a number of other designs for sea otter fur, favoring it in the form of capes and sashes, mittens and caps, as well as the trim of fine silk gowns. It was a market to make a poor enterprising Russian rich. When the St. Peter finally limped home to Siberia, jury-rigged and lightened by the death of Bering and more than half his crew, word of the otters went with it. Little more than a year later, a stampede of maritime gold diggers was sailing a beeline from Siberia for the mother lode of Bering Island.

  To be a naïve fur-bearing mammal or a fresh piece of meat lounging in the path of the promyshlennik—as the Russian fur hunters were called—was most unfortunate. Within twenty-six years, Steller’s sea cow was gone, ne
ver to be seen again. The cormorant, now known in history books as the spectacled cormorant, held out until about a century later.

  The fur seals, by strength of their mobility and sheer multitudes, maintained a slim and sporadic presence through the slaughter. But the shore-hugging sea otters—so conveniently gathered, so rabidly assailed—evaporated wholesale through the Aleutian chain, one island after the next. With club and gun, net and spear, and an army of Aleut slaves drafted to the task, the promyshlennik swept across the Pacific, killing otters in the water, asleep on the rocks, pups and nursing mothers all. America and Europe inevitably came scrambling for their piece of the action. And together the nations raced through the Gulf of Alaska and down the coast of North America, through British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, California to Baja, chasing otters to the last.

  A treaty in 1911 brought a figurative cease-fire, given by that time nobody could find otters enough to hunt. In the century and a half since the killing had started, anywhere from half a million to nine hundred thousand sea otters had been mined from the Pacific.

  Yet somewhere, somehow, slipping cautiously through a few overlooked coves and sheltered reaches of rocky coast, a dozen or so tiny pockets of sea otters survived. From their secret sanctuaries they began to rebuild. As the sanctuaries filled to capacity, hungry pioneers began crossing ocean gaps, recolonizing emptied shores. By the late 1960s, there were again big pods of sea otters to be found bobbing in the cold Pacific swells. They had gone part way toward refilling the ocean-wide void left by the fur rush. And in doing so they had set the stage for another revolution of sorts, this one destined for the history books of ecology.