Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  Those who’d spent their lives pondering the impacts of the topmost predators could only speculate on where the human species was heading without them. “We don’t have to constantly look over our shoulder, we don’t have to live behind lion-proof fences, our kids can play in the garden without mothers being worried,” ventured Hans Kruuk, the esteemed animal behaviorist and confessed carnivore addict. “Our observation and detection abilities do not need to be as keen and alert anymore, nor do we need to be able to sprint—and with all such faculties, it is known that if you don’t use it, you lose it. One can afford to be an obese couch-potato.”

  Others were not quite so comforting with their prognoses.

  “If the big carnivorous creatures did not exist, the world would be an emotionally and esthetically impoverished world,” said Stephen Kellert, a social ecologist from Yale. “Stripped of their menace, powerful creatures and landscapes become little more than objects of amusement and condescension.”

  George Schaller, in summing up his Serengeti experiences, wrote, “Now, in our unheeding rush to conquer our environment, we are in danger of destroying the roots of our nature, the wilderness that saw the whole of our evolutionary history. Perhaps as we transcend our past, adapting to new patterns of culture and becoming less human by today’s standards, the wilderness will become superfluous. But for the present the salvation of our humanity lies in the spirit of such areas as the Serengeti, where man can renew his ancient ties and ponder his uncertain destiny.”

  “In view of the enormous scope of human time and experience, perhaps mankind has unwittingly embraced a diseased era as the model of human life,” wrote Paul Shepard. Before his death in 1996, the eco-philosopher Shepard had come to view modern man as a lost and lonely refugee from the Pleistocene. Estranged from his predatorial heritage, indifferent to the creatures that had made him human, the adolescent heir of the natural world was plundering and blundering his way to the gravest mistake of history. “The most damaging blows of all are the extinctions of the ‘useless’ forms of life, those wild things that seem outside our economy and inimical to agriculture … We have loosed a population epidemic since men ceased to hunt and gather that is the most terrifying phenomenon of the million years of human experience.”

  Prairie Ghosts and Phantom Pains

  Though he died ten years before Pleistocene rewilding made international headlines, Paul Shepard loomed large in its philosophies. “Perhaps nothing makes us more human, and feel more vulnerable, than a large predator that could kill and eat us,” concluded Donlan and Greene in summing up the mob scene they’d so innocently incited.

  Several of the rewilding authors later mentioned in private that they might have erred. Not with any scientific detail or train of logic, but with their hesitation to more proudly trumpet the gut-level grandeur of their vision. Buried beneath the more mechanical discussions of evolutionary potentials and economic costs and gains, lay hints of heart-stirring drama and visceral inspiration. “Free-roaming, managed cheetahs in the southwestern United States,” began one formal passage appearing in their incendiary Nature paper, “could save the fastest carnivore from extinction, restore what must have been strong interactions with pronghorn, and facilitate ecotourism as an economic alternative for ranchers.” Following is the story left untold.

  It turned out that one of the most astounding creations of the Pleistocene was still around to ponder. The American pronghorn, a strange and singular mammal of the American plains and badlands, is more closely related to the goat than to the antelope for which it is most commonly misnamed. The pronghorn is a barrel-bodied creature on pencil-thin legs, with a thick neck and long face and stout, namesake horns sprouting from the crowns of mature bucks. Viewed broadside, it is colored by a swath of carmeled prairie, followed by a flaring white rump. Back from its near extermination during the shooting-gallery era of the American West, the pronghorn again epitomizes the open expanses of the American prairie. Modern biologists like to pry into its food habits and population dynamics and harem mating society, but almost everything written or said about the pronghorn invariably circles back to one singular overriding theme: speed.

  Capable of traveling at bursts exceeding sixty miles per hour, the pronghorn is the second-fastest land animal on the planet—or the fastest, depending how far the race is run. Its sprint is slightly slower than that of the African cheetah’s, but its pace over the mile is unmatched by any wild creature on legs. Its feats of footspeed are both legendary and true. Many who have spent any appreciable time driving through pronghorn country come back with a nuanced version of the same ensuing spectacle.

  It begins in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck on a dusty road, far upon some open stretch of the American steppe, when out of the corner of the eye appears a band of pronghorn on the run—stick-legs a blur, white rumps shining, muscled necks craning forward. Over the sagebrush badlands they fly, a squadron of hovercraft fluidly absorbing the terrain, hurtling forward at a frightening clip. The speedometer confirms what the eye struggles to fathom: forty-five miles per hour. The pronghorn are keeping pace, unveering, unflagging. One minute, two minutes—they are still going. They are racing the machine.

  Several anomalies of anatomy and physiology account for the pronghorn’s supernatural speed. The lower legs are long but only slightly thicker than a human index finger, surprisingly slender even for an animal barely exceeding one hundred pounds. Those legs gobble twenty-nine feet of ground with every springing stride of a pronghorn at speed. Probing inside the pronghorn body, the physiologist gasps: Heart, lungs, and windpipe are freakishly oversized. A tame pair of young pronghorns are placed on a treadmill, oxygen masks strapped to their faces, and tested for the volumes processed by those tremendous organs. They triple the capacity of a comparably sized goat.

  Behind such outrageous displays of velocity are fearsome invisible forces. To see them, one must think back at least thirteen thousand years ago, before their disappearance. Before then the plains of North America were stampeded by an unprecedented cast of quick and deadly predators: a lion larger than its contemporary African subspecies; wolves of several varieties; a bear designed like a racehorse; a hyena with the legs of a coursing hound; and a cheetah with the legs of, well, a cheetah. Miracinonyx trumani was lithe yet larger than the modern African cheetah, and likely at least as fast. It was this sprinting cat, and the formidable packs of hyenas and the like, that made the American steppe a very lively place to grow up. They were the crucible in which the ultimate demon of speed, the American pronghorn, was forged.

  That at least is the theory of pronghorn expert John Byers, along with many others who can think of little reason to refute it. There is nothing in the modern American bestiary that comes close to challenging a running pronghorn that’s beyond a few weeks old. It is, in Byers view, overbuilt.

  The pronghorn has apparently not lost more than a step or two in the dozen millennia since the last of its most capable chasers departed. Ironically enough, one of the many names given to the pronghorn is prairie ghost. Earned for the speedster’s habit of vanishing into the open spaces, it might just as well be referring to the invisible cheetah on its heels. Through a fortuitous oversight of evolution, those with imagination can still peer back into the Pleistocene, through the blazing speed of the pronghorn, to where magnificent carnivores still wielded their power, crafting some of the most awesome inventions in all of nature.

  The pronghorn’s was one of many such stories finding few sympathies among the rewilders’ audience. Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a Jurassic Park disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of
hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. They come in the form of denuded seascapes and barren forests, ruled by jellyfish and urchins, killer deer and sociopathic monkeys. They come as haunting demons of the human mind. In conquering the fearsome beasts, the conquerors had unwittingly orphaned themselves.

  There comes a gradual bend in the road, sending the veering truck and beelining pronghorn toward a collision. The pronghorn decide they will be first to the intersection. The whirring legs accelerate. With a boost from some internal rocket, they surge ahead. They unzip the road in a puff of dust and silent clap of thunder, heading for far horizons, white rumps narrowing to white dots in the distance.

  In the hurtling pronghorn, the vanished predators have left behind a heartrending spectacle. Through the smoking displays of wild abandon runs a desperate spirit, resigned to racing pickup trucks in its eternal longing for cheetahs.

  EPILOGUE

  Alone on the Hill

  NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AGO, when the trio of Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin first raised the hackles—suggesting that the world was green by the predators’ good graces—there was much to be argued. There still is. Great keystone predators do not lurk benevolently behind every rock, nor does their presence cure every ecological ill—at least not that science yet knows.

  However near or far HSS came to generating a universal theory for how the web of life is woven, they nonetheless stimulated a world of inquiry. Nearly fifty years later, the community of ecologists knows that there are indeed certain keystone predators, some as unlikely as an orange starfish, with powers to rock entire ecosystems to their foundations. It knows that the fertile kelp forests of the North Pacific coast are far more lush and lively when sea otters are around to eat urchins—though it is fiercely divided as to whether maybe, just maybe, a gluttonous legacy of industrial whaling ultimately triggered a bizarre cascade of killing that once again has the otters and their forests crashing. The field of ecology, if it is not yet entirely sure, is growing more convinced with every new skyward aspen or willow in Yellowstone that the greening of the nation’s most hallowed park has much to do with the return of its missing wolves. The field has also begun to take seriously the prospect—though not as seriously or urgently as John Terborgh would like—that the ecological meltdown visited upon the predator-free islands of Lago Guri may well soon describe broader hells on Earth.

  “Posterity has rightly treated HSS kindly,” declared the benevolent godfather of keystone ecology, Robert T. Paine, in a retrospective essay on the fortieth anniversary of the paper that sent the field afield. It seemed almost anywhere one chose to look, arctic tundra to tropical forest, one could find ecosystems ascending to higher orders of biological stability and complexity, or teetering toward chaos and impoverishment, in varying accord with their apex predators.

  By the fall of 2007, Terborgh was organizing an international guest list, a who’s who in this flourishing field of ecological cascades, to gather for a February conference on what he had declared as “the next hot topic in conservation.” The exploration that had begun with the question Do the great predators matter? had come to the more complicated task of dealing with the answer.

  In so far as this has been a story about the science of vanishing predators, here is where the story should logically end. Conserving big predators, and its parent discipline, eradicating them, is where the science of top-predator ecology gives way to myth and sentiment, heroics and hypocrisies. Whichever side one stands on bringing back dangerous, meat-eating beasts, there is a safe bet that logic and systematic reasoning have little to do with their ultimate position. “It is usually us,” said the behaviorist Hans Kruuk, “mankind, who decide what kind of ecosystem we want to have in the first place, in an esthetic—not scientific—decision. So whether we want to have large carnivores around because they appeal to us, or because they play an important role in an ecosystem that appeals to us, in the end this is an esthetic decision. And in this, I believe that the appeal of the animals themselves will be the strongest.”

  It does on first glance appear the predators’ fates are lately brightening with fresh displays of our tolerance. In North America a spate of top carnivores are being helped, or at least allowed, to return to many places they were once forcibly helped to leave. From the few dozen wolves flown down from Canada a decade ago, there are now more than a thousand roaming the northern Rockies of Wyoming and Idaho. After forty years of absence, lynx are again breeding in the San Juan range of Colorado, after being shipped all the way from the Yukon. In the Blue Range straddling Arizona and New Mexico, there are now about sixty Mexican wolves, descendants of five captive animals once representing the last Mexican wolves on Earth. Cougars are filling old voids in the American West and wandering eastward, with tantalizing rumors reaching all the way to the north woods of New England. Jaguars from Mexico are showing up in the desert highlands of the American Southwest. In New Jersey, the most densely peopled state in the United States, its citizens are meeting black bears with unheard-of frequency. And though there is good reason to believe that a lack of wolves is partly behind the success of the coyote, the scrappy song dog of the West has nonetheless become a cosmopolitan citizen of the nation, chasing geese across Chicago golf greens, denning within howling distance of the White House, leading cops on chases through New York’s Central Park.

  The predators of the sky also seem to be finding safer airspace of late. Since the shooting was stopped and egg-thinning pesticides were banned, the all-but-obliterated bald eagle is again nesting above many a river bend and bay shore. Peregrine falcons have been returned by hand to cliffs long abandoned—and beyond, now stooping from skyscraper eyries upon fat city pigeons. And as many a backyard bird-watcher can attest, with varying parts fascination and horror, the Cooper’s hawk is back, with fierce red eyes ablaze, terrorizing suburban feeders and lawn flocks of robins, doves, starlings, and cowbirds.

  Such revivals are not solely New World phenomena. There’s a European renaissance underway in the Alps, where the rural farming populace is vacating the countryside for metropolitan employment, and the long-banished bears and wolves and lynx are tiptoeing back.

  And now, in all fairness, another side of modern predator aesthetics, from a more dominant majority: Off the coast of North Carolina, to pick just one recent reminder, the bull sharks and tiger sharks, blacktips and hammer-heads have over the past thirty years been fished to but a single percent or three of their former abundance. And in the great sharks’ absence, their prey has multiplied by orders of magnitude. The waters have grown thick with smaller sharks and their cousins, the skates and rays. One in particular, the cownose ray, prefers to eat shellfish. Behind the massive new schools of some forty million cownose rays now sweeping the eastern seaboard, there comes word of declining commercial hauls of clams and oysters. With the big sharks’ annihilation, and the rays’ release, North Carolina’s century-old bay scallop fishery has collapsed.

  And so, taking heed of these ominous warnings from science, fishermen the world over have now agreed to end their global persecution of sharks.

  Well, no, actually nothing of the sort. In the piratical domain of the open seas, up to seventy-three million large sharks each year are being hauled up and hacked alive for little more than their fins, to feed wealthy Asians’ appetite for shark-fin soup. Esthetically speaking, few seem particularly mindful, let alone concerned, of the modern ocean’s conspicuous void of big, flesh-eating fish. These are waters fast giving way to urchins and jellyfish, algae and bacteria—the bottom-most bottoms of the food chain, the microbial masses—what marine biologist Jeremy Jackson prefers to call “the rise of slime.” In Jackson’s unvarnished observations, jellyfish have become the catch of the day, and slime the future of the oceans.

  Not only does the slime rise, but over time it actually begins to look good. Slime has become the norm in many young minds (among them young conservation biologists). And the younger the observer, the more
acceptable the slime. It is the phenomenon made known by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly as the shifting-baseline syndrome. The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents. Generation to generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime. On land, the big cats and wolves become feral house cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually, nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their gated neighborhood—mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral. Shifting baselines help explain why the Pennsylvania deer hunter sees everything right and nothing wrong in a forest that’s swarming with deer yet as barren of biodiversity as a city park. Slime creeps in many guises.