Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (11 page)

Now it was quiet enough to hear the person next to you talk again. Robert Buchanan waved some of his staff, Martha Stewart and her crew, and a few lucky preselected executives from the World Wildlife Fund tour onto two other helicopters, waiting nearby. They would follow the bear and be on the ground when it was released. Some would take photos with the tranquilized animal’s head in their laps and post the pictures on Facebook.

Those of us left on land could only look up, still reeling from the implausibility of what we’d just seen: the wild animal’s ascension into a dirty white sky. It was all so obviously charged with meaning, but impossible to work out. I looked up and watched the image get tinier and fuzzier, until it was hard to know what it was anymore. Then, finally, the polar bear was gone.

BUTTERFLIES

THE MIDDLE OF A HAIRCUT

T
he Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge sits at the very edge of Antioch, California, an economically haggard suburb an hour east of San Francisco. It’s a narrow band of land at the anonymous, industrialized fringes of town, the kind of place not easily reached by any bus line, but around the corner from where a transit company parks its buses at night. The refuge is bordered by the San Joaquin River to the north and, across the road to the south, a sewage treatment plant. Its parking lot abuts a waste transfer station and a diner called the Red Caboose, a converted old Santa Fe Railroad train car that is popular with bikers.

At only sixty-seven acres, Antioch Dunes is among the very smallest of America’s national wildlife refuges. You could walk straight from one end of it to the other in under an hour, if it weren’t for the tremendous Georgia-Pacific Antioch Wallboard Plant, which, built before the refuge was established, still stands on a block of privately held land, splitting the refuge in two. The wallboard factory, which everyone calls the gypsum plant, is a daunting facility with its own water tower and container ship dock on the river. It makes drywall and emits a low-pitched thrum that you can hear when you’re walking around the refuge. Sometimes gypsum dust—a chalky white powder—drifts over the dunes and settles on the leaves of plants.

I spent a lot of time at Antioch Dunes and grew to really like the place, but the fact is, it’s hard to describe the refuge without sounding like you are insulting it. Even calling it “Antioch Dunes” can sound snide, since there have been virtually no recognizable sand dunes here for at least twenty or thirty years. Long before the federal government bought and protected the land in the 1980s, the sand that had piled up spectacularly was gradually trucked away to make bricks and roads and at least one horse-racing track, until it was virtually all gone—dug down to near the water table in places—and a rowdy garden of shrubby, nonnative weeds and trees soon sunk in its roots. In an essay titled “In Memoriam: The Antioch Dunes,” a botanist accused the landowners who sold that sand of converting the area’s “permanently uncommon value into transient cash” and forever leaving “the people of California that much more bankrupt in soul and spirit.” He was writing in 1969, arguably before the place went most dramatically downhill.

Recently, one afternoon in late August, a Fish and Wildlife Service employee named Louis Terrazas was showing a group of volunteers a large aerial photo of Antioch Dunes—giving us the lay of the land. We had assembled on the smaller of the two halves of the refuge, east of the gypsum plant, to count butterflies. Louis brought cookies and sunscreen for everyone. As we helped ourselves, he leaned the photo against the torso of a squat, slightly thuggish guy in camouflage shorts named Steve, using him like an easel. When I’d asked Steve what brought him out to count butterflies, he told me, “I’m here because I was a bad, bad boy.” It was a long story, which I couldn’t really follow, having to do with Steve’s tendency to run stop signs while doing a paper route at three in the morning, but the upshot was that a judge finally got tired of slapping Steve on the wrist and sentenced him to some whopping number of community service hours. He was handed a list of possible jobs. Louis was the only guy on the list who called him back.

We were here to count a specific kind of butterfly: the Lange’s metalmark, a little-known but very critically endangered species. Antioch Dunes is the only place on Earth where the Lange’s metalmark lives. (There are also two endangered flowering plants here, the Contra Costa wallflower and the Antioch Dunes evening primrose—the refuge is the only one in the nation set aside for endangered plants and insects.) As a baseline for the butterfly’s conservation, the government needs to establish each year’s “peak count,” or the highest number of Lange’s spotted on a single afternoon. In the nineties, peak counts reached into the thousands. But the species was flirting with extinction, Louis now told us. In the summer of 2006, the Fish and Wildlife Service had been shocked to find that the population had suddenly crashed. Peak count was only forty-five that year, which is to say that all the Lange’s metalmark butterflies known to exist on Earth one afternoon could have fit inside a French press. “So . . . I wouldn’t see them in my backyard?” said an older woman in a Puerta Vallarta baseball cap. She’d adjusted her voice mid-sentence so that, by the end, she was clearly answering, more than asking, a question.

There were sixteen of us volunteers—a few older couples, a garrulous oil industry grunt at Chevron, a college student with a Day-Glo tiger tattoo on her back who’d heard about the butterfly count on Craigslist. Except for Steve, the traffic violator, we were all here because we wanted to be—for the benefit of the butterfly, or our own benefit, or some inscrutable intertwinement of the two. Butterflies occupy a special place in our imaginative wildernesses, transcending their status as bugs. They don’t sting, bite, buzz in your ear, or scamper across your kitchen floor. If you woke up to find one had alighted on your nose, you’d lie perfectly still, puzzling out whatever beneficent message the cosmos must be communicating to you—whereas you wouldn’t do this if you woke up with a banana slug on your nose, or a cockroach. We see butterflies as delicate, uncorrupted—which is probably why we’re so keen to paint them on our daughters’ cheeks at birthday parties or stitch them in glittery thread on their pajamas. We had to invent unicorns and fairies to keep little girls company. But we let the butterflies in, too, just as nature made them.

In that sense, the story of the Lange’s first sounded to me like a melancholy children’s book. A fragile, beautiful butterfly had been hemmed in on all sides by filth and modernity until its home—fenced off, closed to the public—faded into a kind of forgotten badland. Stolen cars have turned up at Antioch Dunes. Once, Louis told me, a biologist found the body and head of a dead pig in two separate black garbage bags, dumped at the front gate. And a short drive away is the house that belonged to Phillip Garrido, who kidnapped eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard in 1991, held her in a warren of outbuildings in his backyard for eighteen years, and fathered two daughters by her. In our imaginations, butterfly habitat is always a pretty place on a beautiful day. But somehow the Lange’s metalmark had persisted here long enough to attract some human attention—not much, but enough, in our age of conservation reliance, to change everything.

The Antioch Dunes came apart slowly; it took the entirety of the twentieth century for them to devolve into what they are now. The butterfly was tossed around on the surface of that confusion. There were, I’d find, people tossed around, too—people who loved the place, and other neglected landscapes like it, and tried to counteract the entropy taking hold. I found their stories rising and falling in the history of the Antioch Dunes, almost cyclically: Each generation of idealists was running after butterflies, trying to save them but never quite catching up, until, having watched so much nature deteriorate in their lifetimes, they finally buckled over, jaded. And just as they did, without fail, the next generation of idealists would appear, obliviously hitting their stride.

I wanted to trace the changes at this one specific track of land across all that time. But looking so closely at an insignificant-seeming bug, at an insignificant-seeming place, eventually drew me into deep uncertainty about so much else. It turns out that the Lange’s metalmark flies in a confounding and counterintuitive wilderness, where some of our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. I kept chasing the butterfly, wherever it led me. And before I knew it, I was all the way back at conservation’s first principles, faced with petrifying questions like, what exactly are we preserving, and why—questions worth asking, even if they can’t be answered.

—

L
OUIS PASSED AROUND
some laminated photos of the Lange’s metalmark so we would recognize it in the field. It was orange and black and looked to me like a smaller Monarch butterfly, but probably only in the way that all unfamiliar meat tastes like chicken to the uninitiated.

This was the middle of the Lange’s flight period, he explained—the few weeks every summer when the butterflies emerge from their cocoons and zip from place to place, mating and laying eggs. It lasts about a month, until they’ve all been picked off by dragonflies or succumbed to old age. (Butterflies live hard and fast.)

It was up to us volunteers to form a long line and pace every transect of the dunes with handheld clicker counters, trying to spot the butterflies, one by one, as they quivered through the air. The trick, Louis said, was to stay in line; anyone who got too far ahead might spook a Lange’s and flush it out of the plants before it could be positively ID’d. Also, we had to keep looking behind us for butterflies scattering in our wake. It sounded hard. “You ready?” Louis shouted.

He gave the signal, and we began creeping through the brush. We moved in almost perfect lockstep for a few paces. Then someone saw something and shouted. Someone else yelled, “No, I think it’s a buckeye,” noting that the buckeye butterfly, also pictured in Louis’s mug shots, was bigger than the Lange’s.

“We got one over here!” I heard Louis yell from the far end of the line. He wanted everyone to keep walking in formation, but our heads were turned now, and there was an immediate and unmistakable drifting to the right, toward Louis and the butterfly. Then someone on the opposite end of the line yelled, “There’s another one right here!” and some of us started drifting that way, too.

“Is that a second one?” one older women asked.

“There’s one right here, too!” a man hollered.

“Rock on!” someone said.

“Oh, here’s a third one!” a woman shouted, though it was unclear whether one of the first butterflies had merely jittered through her line of sight.

There was a fifth and sixth sighting, maybe more. Fingers were firing on the clicker counters. “We’ve got another one here!” Louis yelled.

It was a monstrously eventful and confusing ten seconds. And in that pandemonium, it was immediately clear just how unscientific this process was going to be. The very baseline understanding of the species’ health was being provided by us, a bunch of civilians, who had only just been shown a photo of the bug a moment ago. And yet this is a common situation. As the budget for protecting endangered species and managing wildlife has stayed relatively stagnant, but the workload has exploded, more of that work has fallen to a standing army of curious and often retired volunteers—citizen scientists whom Princeton ecologist David Wilcove has compared to volunteer firefighters. In Maine, they count moose and frogs. In Ohio, they snatch Lake Erie water snakes out of the water and measure them.

When the excitement was over, Louis went around to the witnesses individually to reconstruct what had happened. He felt confident that the tally ought to be capped at five. Then he called us back to take a good look at the first Lange’s metalmark, which was sitting obligingly still on the stalk of a buckwheat plant. We huddled around it. The girl with the tiger tattoo took a picture with her iPhone.

I squatted and looked at the butterfly for a long time. It was the size of a quarter. The wings were rimmed in black with white speckles, then gave way to sunbursts of deep orange. I’d seen lots of photos of the species before that afternoon, but the butterfly was always blown up and perfectly centered in the shot. Looking at it now for the first time in the wild—seeing it as a tiny blotch on a big leaf, with so much air and space and civilization around it—brought a deflating new sense of scale. The bug seemed vulnerable to the point of helplessness. You wanted somehow to zoom in, to make it feel important and central again—a worthy protagonist of the bizarre, generations-long saga that’s played out at Antioch Dunes on its behalf.

You wanted to make the butterfly look big again. And this could be why one of the older women in our group had taken to her knees only a couple of inches from the leaf and was now examining the butterfly through binoculars.

—

O
NCE, THE
A
NTIOCH
D
UNES WERE
what ecologists call a disturbance ecosystem. The landscape was in motion—slow motion. Wind-driven sand gradually piled into new dunes, and older dunes periodically collapsed. Certain plants thrived in that unruly environment, while the seeds of newcomers were never able to get a foothold in the shifting sand.

One native that’s well adapted to this cycle is a tall, spindly plant with muted white flowers called “naked stem buckwheat.” The buckwheat is the Lange’s metalmark’s host plant. Every butterfly lays its eggs on a particular host plant, and whereas some species of butterflies are promiscuous, laying on a variety of plants, others, like the Lange’s, are committed to a single one. Strictly speaking, the host plant is the butterfly’s habitat—the platform it needs to survive, like sea ice for polar bears. Butterflies will thrive in even the most totally run-down-looking or artificial landscape if they find enough host plant there. In Miami, conservationists have expanded the range of a species called the Atala by planting its host plant in highway medians and attracting the butterfly there, into the middle of traffic.

If you watched a time-lapse film of Antioch Dunes, you’d see, as dunes formed and fell asynchronously around the property over the decades, different plant species mushrooming and then dying back on top of the dunes in a predictable succession. The buckwheat is part of that succession. Every summer, some metalmark eggs laid on stands of buckwheat the previous year will turn into butterflies and take flight. Others will have had their plants senesce or the dunes blown out from under them. As certain encampments of butterflies dwindle, butterflies from other, nearby stands of buckwheat skitter in to lay eggs there and supplement them—what’s known as the “rescue effect.” Or they pioneer new colonies elsewhere, as new patches of buckwheat mature into good habitat. Around the dunes, individual colonies of Lange’s metalmarks will grow and die out chaotically. It’s not uncommon for the total number of butterflies in this kind of “meta-population” to spike and dip dramatically from year to year. But in the aggregate, the meta-population survives; there’s enough of a cushion so it can recover from any losses.