From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
So said Robert Frost, and I concur: ice will suffice, thank you very much.
—
The road to Hosmer’s Grove on the Haleakala Crater from a sun-drenched beach motel an hour below was becoming more and more gloomy. At about five thousand feet mists began sweeping across the slopes and I almost missed a pair of Maui’s rare and only native geese, the Nene, combing the grasses for a morning meal of seeds and flowers. This is a small, handsome goose, descended from our ubiquitous Canada Goose, which must have settled down with relief after an endless flight 500,000 years ago. The Nene thrived and speciated with no predation until the Polynesians arrived with their little pigs, dogs, and hitchhiking rats around 500 AD, also with considerable relief after years of paddling their canoes across the South Pacific. Four hundred and fifty years later the Nene population was down to just thirty birds. A protective effort began in 1952 and today the population stands at about 2,500 birds on four islands. They were a welcome sight at dawn on this birding day.
What was not welcome was the thick fog that greeted me when I finally parked at the empty lot of the grove. I had dressed for the chill at 6,800 feet but not the impenetrable wall of gray that enveloped me as I entered the small forest called Hosmer’s Grove, a collection of native and non-native trees that Mr. Hosmer planted back in the 1800s for a timber industry that never took off. Birders are confronted with challenges all the time—this was a cloud forest, after all—so I ventured in hoping for a call, if not a song, from one of the honeycreepers. I thought of Bret Harte’s “A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.”
I actually love fog. It can be eerie, but somehow the more you enter into its realm, the more you receive from it: senses you didn’t expect to use, like the touch of it against your skin and the sound around you. It all magnifies.
So I was hoping for the audible life of the birds to come through in the grove. I had listened to tapes identifying some of their calls, but I was not confident in my knowledge. This was before CDs and apps were invented. I was on my own in a new world with birds I had never seen. The large trees cocooned the grove and moisture dripped from needles of pine, fir, and spruce. Then something moved above me in the soft light and barely four feet away were red feathers and then a squeaky song not unlike that of our Red-winged Blackbird back home. The great curved beak made the I’iwi unmistakable. I had my first honeycreeper. In the next hour I had close-up views of the greenish ‘Amakihi, and the rosy ‘Apapane sucking nectar from scarlet ‘ohi’a flowers. The fog allowed me closer than I was ever normally privileged to be while bird watching.
These three honeycreepers are more easily seen than the other fourteen still in existence, all that is left of the original fifty-five. Fully eleven species are on the endangered list and the little Po’ouli of Maui is virtually extinct. Discovered in 1973 by some University of Hawaii students, the chunky black-faced bird has not been seen since 2004.
The Hawaiian Islands are known as the extinction capital of the world. No place on earth today is losing species so fast. Those Polynesian pigs, dogs, and rats did a job on the islands, rooting in the earth, eating most creatures, and devouring eggs. But it was the whalers and stopover sailors in the early 1800s that changed the landscape forever by introducing mosquitoes, specifically a variety called Culex quinquefasciatus. There were no biting insects in the paradise that was Hawaii before man came ashore. With limited insect eaters the mosquito proliferated, infesting the lowlands. The birds had no immunity against avian malaria and so those living below five thousand feet succumbed to the disease and began the long road to extinction.
The three honeycreepers I saw in Hosmer’s Grove survive because the Culex Mosquito doesn’t breed above six thousand feet. However as the climate continues to warm the globe and the mosquito climbs the slopes, the future of honeycreepers, indeed all birds with no immunity, remains in doubt.
There are protective measures under way: the eradication of pools and pig fallows where the mosquitoes breed and the vast spraying of lowlands, which has its own negative impact, particularly on shorebirds like the Hawaiian Black-necked Stilt.
And there is hope that at least one honeycreeper, the ‘Amakihi, is developing some genetic immunity. Whether this can happen in time for the species to remain viable is speculative.
In the beginning when the volcanoes were rising from the ocean floor, creating the islands that became Hawaii, green and gorgeous, the paragon of all earthly delights, native species arrived on average once every thirty thousand years. Today a new species arrives with the thronging crowds about every twenty days. Mostly they are small and of an insect variety, requiring more deadly insecticides to control their expansion.
Today there are hardly any native species of animals, plants, or birds below one thousand feet, due to human incursion. Paradise lost. “Maui” means “God of a thousand tricks” in the sacred lore of Hawaiians. Perhaps he has one up his sleeve for the resurrection of exquisite and doomed creatures.
13
Galápagos
Dragon bodies were everywhere. The volcanic headland was covered with fearsome-looking Marine Iguanas that blended perfectly with the sheen of black rock they rested on. Sally Lightfoot Crabs housed in shells of neon orange wove their way through them to ocean crannies. My granddaughters, in short shorts and tees, stepped gingerly over the spiky lizard tails, snapping pictures of the layabouts, while the huge male bobbed his head up and down and opened his wide mouth, exposing a cavern of pink inside. He looked very scary and seemed about to charge, but he didn’t—it was all for show.
The wonder of the Galápagos is the benign nature of the birds and beasts. If there is an Eden on earth, this is it. Despite a few hundred years of sailors stopping by for birds and tortoises, loading up their ships for the next whale hunt, the animals remain sanguine around human beings. Tortoises, of course, do not move quickly; perhaps if they did, they would run like hell.
In 1820, after a Sperm Whale bonanza was reported by the Nantucket whaleship Globe, hundreds of whalers put in at the islands to pick up tortoises for food and oil. They flipped them on their backs in the hold, stacking them side by side and on top of each other, and they lasted for months. Had the whaling business persisted, the tortoises would probably be extinct, as the population plummeted from 250,000 to about 20,000 today. The very fact that they are big and can last without food and water for months is what brought them to the islands in the first place. A few million years ago a pregnant South American tortoise rode the Humboldt Current six hundred miles west to one of the eighteen islands. Her size allowed her to keep her long neck extended so she could breathe as she floated along for weeks or months. Her progeny dispersed to other islands, creating subspecies, ten of which still exist today. When my granddaughters and I were there, there was an eleventh species represented by just one individual from the island of Pinta who was called “Lonesome George,” then in his dotage at almost one hundred. We watched him inch around his enclosure on Santa Cruz Island, his head stretching out from under his steep saddleback shell as he reached for leaves. He looked like ET with his wizened skin and big wise eyes. Six months later, on June 12, 2012, Lonesome George stopped breathing, ending millions of years of his lineage.
Vita and Isabelle are cousins, both born in 1999, at the close of one century and the promise of a new one. When my grandchildren turn twelve I take them wherever they wish to go in the world. It is a rite of passage for me as much as it is for them because I get to spend time watching their young minds absorb the wonders of a new world. The girls deliberated for more than a year, debating the merits of Paris as opposed to Hawaii or Thailand, and finally chose the Galápagos, which made me happy.
Lonesome George near the end, in his enclosure at the Charles Darwin Research Center, Galápagos, 2011
In the same year they were born I made my first visit to the islands. As a trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society, I celebrated the centennial of the Bronx Zoo with my colleagues on the islands. We called it “In the Wake of William Beebe,” who was the zoo’s first curator of birds and who wrote eloquently about his time in the Galápagos. We visited the islands he researched in the 1920s and where WCS still plays a role.
Beebe was an exceptional man. The natural world fascinated him in all its intricacies. He had no patience with people who were bored and once said, “Boredom is immoral. All a man has to do is see. All about us nature puts on the most thrilling adventure stories ever created, but we have to use our eyes.” Beebe was one of the first scientists to talk about the relationship of organisms to one another—he was an ecologist studying ecosystems before the terms came into existence. He traveled extensively and wrote books on pheasants in Asia, coral reefs off Haiti, fish in Bermuda, jungle wildlife, and the Galápagos. He feared the loss of species, and one of his most eloquent statements is a prayer for the ages: “The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”
Will Beebe was a celebrity in the 1920s and ’30s. He and a friend made thirty dives in their “Bathysphere.” The metal globe weighed five thousand pounds, was four feet nine inches in diameter, and had three small portholes of fused quartz. In 1934 they went deeper than anyone had ever been, 3,028 feet below the surface of the ocean. Beebe compared the luminous fish he saw on those dives to stars in the night, and said that exploring the ocean depths was like exploring space. Seventy years later we still know as little about the oceans as we do about outer space. The oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who was influenced by Beebe, says 95 percent of our oceans are unknown to us.
So, in the wake of William Beebe those of us from WCS set off to follow his Galápagos Islands journey: from San Cristobal to Genovesa to Fernandina and Isabela. Then on to Santiago, Bartolomé, Santa Cruz, and South Plaza. Bottlenosed Dolphins rolled in the waters, shearwaters skimmed the air above the waves, and silver fish skipped the surface.
A few children and grandchildren of fellow trustees were on that first trip. My husband and I noted how special the islands were for them. The tidal pools allowed close observation of crabs, small fish, and baby octopus while the rocks were covered with herons, oystercatchers, Yellow Warblers, and lazing sea lions and iguanas. Everything was right out in the open, with no bars as in a zoo. We walked paths that brought us next to nesting Blue-footed and Red-footed Boobies, and scrub forests of Frigatebirds with puffy chicks. We watched Flightless Cormorants, found only in the Galápagos, preening on the rocks. And we swam with sea lions. There is a primal contentment in being close to animals, a sense that this is the way it is supposed to be, the way described in Genesis.
No need to fly from predators, so the Flightless Cormorant evolved in the Galápagos.
A Land Iguana wanders where he wishes to in the Galápagos.
Twelve years later, Isabelle, Vita, and I boarded National Geographic’s ship Endeavor in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a few days after Christmas 2011. This was a voyage for families, and a third of the passengers were children between the ages of four and fifteen. At least a dozen pubescent boys and girls from different parts of the United States, Ireland, and Australia raced each other around the decks, cannonballed into the pool, and hung out in the lounge playing games after dinner. We had come to see the animals, and for my girls the young human males were the most interesting of them all—well, that’s another story in Genesis.
Galápagos was never truly settled until well into the twentieth century, unlike Hawaii, which the Polynesians may have visited as early as 800 BC. Both archipelagoes are volcanic, but Hawaii’s earliest islands are twenty-eight million years old while Galápagos’s are three million. There is ongoing volcanic activity on both. Hawaii sits in warm waters, while Galápagos, near the equator, is in the path of the cold Humboldt Current traveling north from the tip of Chile. The upwelling created by the Antarctic water colliding with warmer surface water makes the Humboldt the richest ecosystem for marine life in the world. Small fish like anchovy, mackerel, and herring feed on nutrients brought to the surface, and large fish like tuna feed on them. These nutrients are particularly abundant from May through November, resulting in a profusion and diversity of marine life and birds. It is the northernmost outpost of the penguin.
Millions of years of evolution, of adaptation to life without significant predation, and of abundant food sources, have made the animals unafraid. Some of them are even bold. On Floreana it was hard to bring my water bottle to my mouth without an endemic Floreana Mockingbird jumping on top for a sip.
This is the same Mockingbird that Charles Darwin collected on his Beagle voyage in 1835, one from each island he visited. It was the small differences in the Mockingbirds that he wrote down, not the Finches, which he thought were unrelated to each other. He didn’t think the finches were adaptive variations of the same finch ancestor, so he collected them without bothering to note which island they came from. The idea of species evolution didn’t begin on that voyage of the Beagle. He had clues when he was in the Galápagos; he even wrote in his journal, “The different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings…my attention was first called to this fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought.” This didn’t fully register at the time with the young Darwin. It percolated but didn’t become a real insight until he was back home in England, where the lab dissected his specimens and he learned that the thirteen finches were descendants of one ancestral species, pure examples of adaptive radiation because they filled different ecological niches on the islands. He mentions the finches in his Voyage of the Beagle in 1839 but, curiously, not in On the Origin of Species, which he finally published in 1859, twenty-three years after his Beagle trip ended. He and Alfred Russel Wallace, in a synchronicity common to great ideas, and a desire to be first in print, published parallel theories at the same time.
One of Darwin’s Finches, the Cactus Finch
—
The first jump into the water was a jolt despite our half wet suits. Vita’s long slim body shivered as she snorkeled next to me. A huge Green Turtle glided by and then a Spotted Ray, like a great bird in slow motion. There were clownfish, groupers, and Tiger Eels. Then a Galápagos Penguin shot by like a bullet. A six-foot Marine Iguana chomped on algae, tearing it from a clump on a submerged rock face. Life underwater was bucolic until a mammoth sea lion butted my side as he streaked by. This was a warning from the “beach master” protecting his harem that I was in his territory. The Galápagos does have its darker side, not only human incursion but predation by owls and the Galápagos Hawk of small lizards, bird’s eggs, and insects. The owls and hawks have little fear of humans. A Barn Owl slept blissfully three feet above us as we changed into our bathing suits, and Darwin, collecting species, said of the Galápagos Hawk: “A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk out of the branch of a tree.” Underwater, it is catch as catch can, as it is anywhere in the great ocean, big fish after little fish.
Vita and Isabelle were scared of sharks. I was too. How could one not be after seeing Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws? Life for me is marked “BJ” and “AJ”—before Jaws and after Jaws. As a girl I swam unafraid in the waters of Surfside, Nantucket, in front of our summer cottage. A fin in the water was not an uncommon sight—we knew it was probably a harmless Nurse Shark feeding at the bottom on calm days, or if the sea was rough and a dark fin appeared, we would just
sit it out until the Blue Shark or Mako or whatever it was passed by after the school of Bluefish it was chasing. Swimming in the moonlight, following the path of sparkles it made on its watery beam, was one of my greatest joys. On dark nights the phosphorescence glowed and lit our legs beneath the waves. I knew kids who died from polio during those years in the 1950s, but I never knew one to die from a shark attack.
In the 1970s Ed and I watched our own children swimming in the surf as carefree as I had been at their young age. Then in 1975 we saw Jaws. The scene where the girl is swimming at night and is pulled under by the Great White Shark made a searing impression on me, one I have never been able to erase despite telling myself it’s just a movie. How can people say images do not make a difference to lives? Hasn’t the advertising business known this forever? My courage failed me. I never dove into that watery path of moonlight again.
So it was with some trepidation that I joined others in a Zodiac boat to swim with sharks. Isabelle and Vita chose to stay on the ship; I didn’t blame them. We motored to a deep channel between a one-hundred-foot pinnacle and Kicker Rock. Our guide was a beautiful young Ecuadorian woman who had no fear, but she also had no wet suit or snorkel, having left them both on the ship. She wouldn’t go in, but she kept urging us into the water. No one moved, everyone busy fiddling with his gear. I was the oldest and figured I had the least to lose and so found myself slipping off the tubing into the cold unknown. When I put my face mask into the water I was stunned. I would have gasped but for the breathing tube in my mouth. Below me, down to my right, to my left, and all around were more sharks than I could count. They were larger than I was, and streaming by continually. I was mesmerized, quite unable to move for a few minutes. They were so close, but they weren’t paying any attention to me; perhaps they had eaten well and were just out for a cruise. I boldly took a deep breath and closed my snorkel intake, swimming ten feet down. Galápagos and Whitetip Sharks passed by with no acknowledgment; the Blacktip Sharks were still a few feet lower, and even lower were some Hammerheads.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 14