Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  And once again my apologies for that depressing dirge so relentlessly creeping back into the conversation.

  There is, however, at least one more likely scenario to report, and as to whether it qualifies as good or grim, let the reader judge. It is an alternative scenario in which the carnivores do have a future, albeit in the form of a mechanically managed affair. To illustrate again with the workhorse model of Yellowstone, wolves and bears leaving the borders are getting killed with withering frequency in the human-dominated landscape. The animals’ corridors of safe travel between refuge are being pinched, their options against inbreeding growing slim. And so to keep their blood lines strong, and their numbers viable for long-term survival, may one day soon become a matter of… trucking. This is a foreseeable future of big predators in pockets here and there, managed and bred more like livestock, trucked and airlifted between fenced reserves. It is what some are already considering as the only hope left.

  “Conservation of large expanses of pristine habitat may be the utopia of carnivore conservationists, but sadly this is a possibility already lost to history,” notes the carnivore biologist David MacDonald. “Nature as a theme park is an unattractive prospect, but there are parts of the world where the option of laissez-faire conservation is long past.”

  As any number of pragmatic biologists agree, what has not already been decided for the future of big carnivores will very soon be decided by us. Do we want them back? If not, we can say for sure what their future will be. As for the trickle-down consequences to come, that is something only time will tell. Life will probably not come crashing to a halt for the lack of big meat-eating beasts, at least not in ways that we’re yet able to clearly define. “Is it an ecological impact we can survive?” ponders the conservation biologist David Wilcove. “Well, that’s kind of a high bar, isn’t it? If we only worry about the things that threaten our very survival we end up in a pretty bleak world. Of course, that’s true not only for biological diversity, it’s also true for culture, literature, and the arts.”

  For all the lip service and heartfelt longings to see the fierce beasts return, there often remains unspoken the reflexive shudder of relief that they are securely caged, buried, or banished to the hinterlands. Alfred Russel Wallace, the indefatigable nineteenth-century naturalist who nearly beat Darwin to the explanation of evolution, is often quoted for one of his prophetic exclamations on the great Pleistocene extinction. “We live in a zoologically impoverished world,” wrote Wallace, “from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared.” The quoter usually ends there (as did this one, much earlier in the story), leaving one to imagine Wallace wistfully longing for that wild world of yesterday. Yet the remainder of Wallace’s thought, so often buried by historians, suggests another sentiment: “… and it is, no doubt, a much better world for us now they have gone.”

  “I suspect most people in the world could not care less if all large predators vanish,” said George Schaller. “There are a few of us who think they are beautiful, interesting, essential to natural ecological processes, and part of our natural heritage worth preserving, but we are a distinct minority anywhere.”

  Among the many rewards for surviving the long, thrilling trial of the Pleistocene came the imparted wisdom to never take lightly those big, carnivorous creatures that with one swipe of the paw can kill and with the other instill a sense of grace and majesty to the art of survival. It is the durability of that lesson that will decide whether the dangerous beasts accompany the great human experiment into the twenty-second century. Writes Stephen Kellert, “The survival of tigers, bears, mighty rivers, and wilderness will depend as much on our avoiding and fearing these species and landscapes as on our willingness to shower them with affection.” Some have muddled the lessons over time and distance. And so there are those who jump into lion cages or purposely pitch their tent in the middle of grizzly bear trails, just as there are others who shoot tame tigers for sport or saw the jaws off living coyotes. Somewhere in between lies hope, for whomever might be looking for it.

  This story began with an admission of bias, and finishes there for good measure, in one rare and particular place that still harbors grizzly bears. The morning of June 21, 2000—summer solstice, longest day of the year—found me first thing on the trail heading back to the aspen grove on the hill, where the night before the grizzly family had burned itself into one person’s psyche. That morning I discovered, exaggerations aside, that the world had changed.

  It was a hike beginning on high alert, half expecting a grizzly behind every sagebrush, a bear rearing from every draw. But soon the legs loosened and the jitters gave way to a deepening state of fascination. There was a strange procession of tiny worms on the trail, one every foot or two, each wriggling in the dust, as if being attacked by an invisible enemy. In a green meadow on the flank of a distant butte walked a moose, disappearing slowly like an apparition into the trees. From a trailside sagebrush, a Brewer’s blackbird scolded, impressively so without dropping the insect in its beak. Snipe winnowed from the sedges of the trickling creek, ground squirrels peeped and trilled as they raced across the path.

  After a blissful hour on the trail came the final, watchful approach to the meadow where the family of bears had appeared the night before. There beside the aspen grove lay the broken ground, freshly gouged and pocked by the mother’s foragings. Between deep green patches of geraniums and lupines lay chocolate scoops of dark earth. Impressions in the turned soil—heel, palm, toe, and claw—brought images of great paws deftly excavating earth by the bucketful, the muzzle of bear sniffing the bowl for roots and grubs exposed. From the lodgepole forest not thirty yards away came the crack of a branch, and for the longest of moments there was breathless silence, and staring frozen into the dark woods …

  It has become dreadfully cliché among writers to exclaim how once having met the grizzly on its home turf, one never again looks at the country in the same way. But there are only so many ways to dress up the same naked truth of that statement, and no honest way to omit it, so I’ll simply repeat the mantra. Because in truth your eyes will be focused, your ears will be tuned, your nose will be testing the air. Your back will be straighter, your feet will be lighter. One never sleepwalks through grizzlyland, dreaming of other places to be.

  Wherever I went that day, exploring miles of what was now grizzly country, all was lit in sharp, crystalline relief. It was an eternal day bathed in the most sparkling sunlight, spent contemplating every track and scat and hank of hair, but also every floral configuration of geranium, valerian, gentian, and lupine. It was a day spent peeking inside the flower head of a dandelion, to find a yellow crab spider gripping an ambushed fly by the head. A gopher tunnel excavated by … a bear? Breezes rumbling like gentle thunder in the ears. A tensing whiff of carrion. American kestrels hovering on sharp falcon wings over prairie gardens of scuttling voles and hiding grasshoppers. Here and there were dancing pairs of little black-and-white butterflies spiraling skyward.

  Late in the day, I circled back for my last glimpse of grizzly grove and saw above it a golden eagle floating on enormous wings, lazily circling and ascending through a pine green backdrop to the purest blue sky. Nowhere to go, no place to be. White puffclouds building, schooner shadows drifting across the rolling sagebrush sea. “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,” as Kipling well put it, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” That night at camp, with a hermit thrush singing flute notes over the soothing roar of the river, the longest day of an entire life faded to a close.

  I cannot and do not pretend to speak for those few whose lives still carry the daily prospect of disaster at the jaws of professional killers. I cannot speak with the entitlement earned by the Tanzanian farmer who dutifully sleeps among lions, or muster the authority of the Sundarban woodsman who goes to work wearing only faith and a facemask to shield him from tigers. I have only to convey what those of science
have found, of the fool’s experiment unfolding, and the impending impoverishment of life in the void of great predators. All I can personally but crudely attest is that there is something fundamentally different about a land roamed by big meat-eating beasts, a sense that becomes forcefully apparent in a solitary walk through their realm. And I can only believe, from somewhere deeper than any logic center of the brain, that a life of incomprehensible loneliness awaits a world where the wild things were, but are never to be again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many, many thanks to my agent, Russ Galen, who immediately said yes to a wild idea, then worked his magic to find it a warm home. And so also my gratitude to the deciding voices at Bloomsbury USA, who took a chance and let a stranger in the door. And particularly to my editor, Kathy Belden, for her deft and gentle hand.

  There are hundreds whose interviews and life histories have given me insights and new appreciations for the wild things, whose proper tributes I can’t begin to express in anything short of another book. It has been a privilege and an honor to speak with some of the most brilliant minds and admirable souls in nature.

  Among those who took especial pains, Jim Estes graciously sat through many hours of endlessly repeated questions about his life with sea otters. Josh Donlan and Harry Greene, who, like Estes, have suffered no small amount of grief for their ideas, shared a fascinating glimpse into the back rooms and seamy underworld of their profession. Your secrets are safe with me—for this book, anyway.

  Josh and Jim, along with Bob Beschta, Donna Hart, Bob Paine, Bill Ripple, Michael Soulé, John Terborgh, and Don Waller each reviewed parts of this manuscript, and each spared me embarrassing gaffes. For those that surely remain, the fault rests here.

  A special thanks to Bob Paine, who accompanied me to Holy Ground; to Rodney Bartgis and Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, who led me to the Hollow; and to John and Lea Vucetich, who showed me their own Magic Kingdom at Isle Royale.

  Thanks also to Kent Redford, for his skeptic’s perspective and early warnings of decorator crabs. And to cattleman Jack Turnell, for his stunning candor on wolves and loathing, who with his wife, Lili, graciously invited the enemy to their dinner table.

  Martha Rosen, David Steere, and the staff at the Natural History Library in the National Museum of Natural History were forever welcoming and helpful in guiding me through the musty reference stacks and bewildering maze of secret hallways that are a special charm of the Smithsonian.

  Scott Weidensaul was throughout a soothing voice of experience, who more than once talked a despondent scribe off the ledge. Trish Tolbert and Will Murray served as mentors and role models, though they probably have no idea. And Pam Davis long ago sacrificed so much to make my leap to the writer’s life possible. Thank you.

  To the Nature Conservancy and the many admirable colleagues with whom I shared so many life-altering adventures, thanks for the journey. The Conservancy was the mother ship harboring the greatest job in journalism, transporting me to some of the most outrageously wild outposts on the planet. May the good ship keep true to course.

  Kathy Kohm at the helm of the magazine Conservation (formerly Conservation in Practice) provided a welcome forum for exploring certain predator-worthy ideas during the writing of this book. Kathy and her crew also independently came up with the WTWTW title before my editors and I did, and generously shared.

  From those humbling baptismal days at Science News, I owe a long overdue thanks to my editors Laurie Jackson and Pat Young, who caressed and slashed with amazing balance. And to Rich Monastersky, way back “When Life Got Hard,” for handing me that predation paper by Vermeij.

  To the memory of Laura van Dam, whom I only wish I could thank in person for her utmost kindness and early encouragements.

  To Sunshine Annie, DVM, who gave her all to rescue this book from ruin. To the Hairy Legs Ski Team, for that indulgent week of recharge in the Wasatch powder. And to Jean Rousek, whose glass is not only half full, but somehow forever overflowing—thank you for sharing.

  Thanks must go to Meerkat, my faithful desktop editor who supervised many hours of composition, her twitching tail repeatedly clearing the screen of cobwebs.

  And to Dee and Kev, Paul and Care, whose selfless heroics on behalf of homeless animals remind me how high my bar has been set.

  And most of all to my love Kathy. It is her bottomless compassion for all fellow creatures that gives a wearied chronicler of their destruction his reason for getting up in the morning.

  NOTES

  Full citations for all references noted herein are found in the bibliography.

  Chapter 1: Arms of the Starfish

  Pieces of this chapter were published in my 2003 article “Playing God in a Tide Pool.” Robert T. Paine’s outdoor lab on the rocky coasts of the Pacific Northwest is beautifully portrayed in The Intertidal Wilderness: A Photographic Journey Through Pacific Coast Tidepools, by Anne Wertheim Rosenfeld, with contributions from Paine.

  The impact of Charles Elton’s Animal Ecology as a landmark text of ecology (as well as its author as ecological icon) has been nicely interpreted by Mathew A. Leibold and J.Timothy Wootton in their introduction to a 2001 reissue of Elton’s 1927 classic by the University of Chicago Press. Elton’s role in deciphering population cycles is handily summarized, among other places, in the first chapter of Peter Turchin’s book Complex Population Dynamics (2003).

  Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy (1994) provides a thorough accounting of the historical context in which Elton’s ecology evolved. Several other landmark studies in community ecology and population cycles are to be found in Joseph H. Connell’s work on barnacles, Charles J. Krebs and colleagues’ long-term studies on the population cycles of lynx and hare, and Raymond L. Lindeman’s 1942 paper on the energy flows of ecosystems. For seminal work on predator-prey systems in lakes, see papers by John Langdon Brooks and Stanley I. Dodson, and Stephen B. Carpenter and James F. Kitchell.

  Critiques of HSS’s green world hypothesis can be found in P. R. Ehrlich and L. C. Birch (1967) and William W. Murdoch (1966), with a more recent overview of the debate by Gary A. Polis (1999).

  Timothy Wootton and others among Bob Paine’s long and distinguished list of students generously provided insight on the man’s character and contributions. The Importance of Species (2003), edited by Peter Kareiva and Simon A. Levin, serves as both a tribute to Paine and a synthesis on the science of keystone species.

  For striking visuals on the intimate act of starfish predation, as well as an extensive overview of the early evolution of life via predation, see the amazing sequences captured by cinematographers in the video documentary The Shape of Life, by Ron Bowman and Sea Studios Foundation.

  Chapter 2: Planet Predator

  Much of the discussion on the genesis of predation and its impact is informed by Stephan Bengston’s “Origins and Early Evolution of Predation” (2002). Bits and pieces in the reckoning of the Cambrian explosion were lifted from my 1990 features for Science News (“When Life Got Hard”) and the Washington Post (“Back When Life Got Hard”). Stephen J. Gould’s 1989 book, Wonderful Life, is a spirited tale of those who’ve worked to decipher that explosion from the incomparable quarries of the Burgess Shale.

  The history of life in North America is admirably synthesized by Tim Flannery in The Eternal Frontier (2001). The most recent and ongoing era of its eradication has been well-documented, most gracefully by Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America (1987). Europe’s war with its predators is covered in technical papers by J. C. Reynolds and S. C. Tapper (1996), and Urs Breitenmoser (1998). The plight of America’s wolves is particularly well covered by Jon T. Coleman (2004), Vicious: Wolves and Men in America; Thomas Dunlap (1988), Saving America’s Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850–1990; and Michael J. Robinson (2005), Predatory Bureaucracy:The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West.

  Geerat Vermeij‘s remarkable life with shells and fascination with predation is engagingly told in his autob
iography, Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life (1997), as well as in Ron Bowman’s PBS documentary The Shape of Life (2002).

  Chapter 3: Forest of the Sea Otter

  Papers by and interviews with James A. Estes inform much of this narrative. Karl W. Kenyon’s 1969 monograph on the Aleutian sea otters was, until Estes’s body of work, the classic; it is still well worth a read. Richard Ellis provides a more thorough and heartrending account of the Bering Sea slaughters in The Empty Ocean (2003).

  Chapter 4: The Whale Killer

  James Estes and his students are the source for much of this chapter too. Key papers laying out their argument for killer whales as sea otter predators are by Estes et al. (1998), and Terrie M.Williams et al. (2004).

  For an astounding accounting of the items known to wind up in the stomachs of killer whales, see Thomas A. Jefferson et al. (1991). For a stunning beachfront seat to killer whales snatching seal pups, see the segment “Coasts,” in the incomparable BBC-Discovery Channel film series, The Blue Planet (2001), narrated by David Attenborough. In the segment, “Ocean World,” the series includes graphic footage of a pack of killer whales attacking a gray whale mother and calf in Monterey Bay. Viewer discretion is advised, on both accounts.

  The furor over Alan Springer and James Estes’s whaling hypothesis (A. M. Springer et al., 2003) can be appreciated through the raft of critique papers that followed, including those from D. P. DeMaster et al. (2006), S. A. Mizroch and Dale Rice (2006), and Andrew W. Trites et al. (2007), and climaxing with the 2007 blockbuster by PaulWade et al. Yet another fascinating take on the mystery, called the scavenging hypothesis, is suggested by Hal Whitehead and Randall Reeves (2005) and leans favorably toward the Springer and Estes camp. At press time, a reply from Springer and Estes was under review.