Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (12 page)

But that cycle at Antioch Dunes has now ground to a stop. With the sand largely gone, dunes have stopped rising and collapsing. And without that disturbance, invasive plants could settle into the stable ground and overpower the native ones. The stands of buckwheat have become fewer—and farther between. An individual Lange’s metalmark may never venture more than a thousand feet from the buckwheat plant it hatches on—the range within which it can lay its eggs is extremely limited. So the distance between certain butterfly colonies can easily become insurmountable, cutting off the rescue effect. One big meta-population fractures into smaller, isolated islands, each clinging to its buckwheat and surrounded by an uncrossable sea of weeds.

In recent years, the most recklessly spreading weed has been a scraggly, purple-flowered legume with a sinister-sounding name to boot. It’s called hairy vetch. The insidiousness of hairy vetch, and the many levels of damage it does, can’t easily be summed up. (In some cases, the vetch physically wraps itself around buckwheat plants and steals their sun.) The plant is Louis Terrazas’s nemesis. As the primary person assigned by the Fish and Wildlife Service to manage the habitat at the dunes, he spends his year in one long counterattack against the vetch. (Theoretically, he can mow, whack, or blast pesticides at it from a backpack sprayer, but he has to be careful not to harm any stands of buckwheat in the process, since they may have Lange’s larvae on them, or any of the federally endangered plants at the refuge, which he painstakingly marks in advance with fluorescent orange flags. Truthfully, a lot of Louis’s job comes down to yanking vetch out of the ground by hand.) When I first visited, a few months before the butterfly count, Louis was throwing everything he had at the vetch, trying, alongside the occasional community service worker, to whip the landscape into shape before the butterflies started breaking free from their cocoons later that summer. But the vetch was still everywhere. “This place eats our lunch,” Louis confessed. He pointed out areas that he’d cleared that spring but which the vetch was already recolonizing. Elsewhere, other nonnative plants, like ripgut brome and yellow star thistle, had crept in to fill the niche that Louis had torn the vetch from. “Right now,” he said, “we’re kind of like in the middle of a haircut. Like, when you look in the mirror and say, ‘Man, this isn’t looking so good.’”

But in a sense that haircut will never end. It’s easy to call the vetch a weed and rip it out of the ground to give the buckwheat some space, but the place has changed so completely that, on some level, the weeds now belong at Antioch Dunes more than the native plants do. They are heartier, thriving—better adapted to the new ecosystem that human beings didn’t realize they were creating by taking away all that sand. Keeping the Lange’s metalmark at Antioch Dunes means keeping the naked stem buckwheat there. But that now means keeping someone like Louis Terrazas there, too, slogging around with a weed whacker. If the butterfly is going to survive, we have to simulate the disturbance in the ecosystem now—we have to be the wind. As another Fish and Wildlife employee told me at the dunes one afternoon, “This place will never run on its own.”

There’d been wariness of conservation reliance like this looming in the back-and-forth over whether Dan Cox should have fed those starving polar bear cubs in his video. Lost in the ignorance and outrage were a few sensible people who claimed to understand the problem of climate change perfectly, and to understand that feeding individual polar bears wasn’t going to remedy the larger, more horrible situation. But they still wondered if we should be feeding the Hudson Bay bears anyway—because, like it or not, that’s what might be necessary now to keep those animals in the world. Conservationists cast any long-term effort to feed polar bears as logistically problematic, prohibitively expensive, and dangerous. But it’s also philosophically ugly. Making polar bears dependent on us for their very survival in such a hands-on way can feel like just as much of a defeat as letting them die out. It would mean conceding that their ecosystem is irreparably broken, and that we have to be responsible for them in perpetuity, not just step in temporarily to save them. It feels too much like playing God—even if, arguably, that’s exactly what we’ve become. After all, we’re the ones who upset so many ecosystems in the first place—we override the natural course of evolution when we endanger species, too, not just when we try to save them.

Still, once you purposefully cross that line, it’s not clear where you would draw a new one. Some people write to polar bear biologists suggesting that we feed polar bears; others imagine melting down plastic soda bottles to build motorized rafts, so that the bears can float around the Arctic as the ice disappears. Once you go hands-on, in other words, you have to decide when you’re going to take your hands off. As J. Michael Scott, the conservation biologist who helped coin the term “conservation reliance,” put it to me, “I could keep polar bears alive in San Diego if I really wanted to.”

And yet here at Antioch, on behalf of a tiny butterfly that no one’s ever heard of, on a refuge where no one goes, America seems to have quietly blown past that threshold a long time ago without ever really considering these questions. With the Lange’s, as with other endangered species, we’ve gone all in, dramatically manipulating its ecosystem to promote its survival—sending Louis out there to groom the dunes to accommodate the butterfly’s predilections and plant new arrangements of its favorite plant, as though he were the landscaper of some aristocrat’s country estate.

Which is not to say that it’s working. That afternoon in August, we were embarking on the sixth volunteer butterfly count of the summer at Antioch Dunes. The surveys had begun three weeks ago, but no one had spotted any butterflies until a couple of days earlier, when a single Lange’s was seen on the opposite side of the gypsum plant. That is, when we started that morning, peak count was one.

—

W
E DIDN’T SEE ANY
more Lange’s after that initial burst of five. One day the following week, the count hit twenty-eight. But that would prove to be peak count for the year. It was a new all-time low, and sent those working on the recovery scrambling.

One of the last transects we surveyed that afternoon was on some of the refuge’s highest ground, a weedy dune with an old utility tower on it, once used to anchor power lines before running them across the river. The lines now ran through a second, newer tower, across a bowl-shaped valley, on an equally high hill.

Louis positioned us in a line abutting the bottom of the tower. Some of our waists were actually touching the rusted crossbar at its base. We had to survey the land under the tower, which meant that, on Louis’s signal, some of us would be climbing over that steel bar into the tower’s skeletal interior, then clambering between the metal cables and support structures and out the other side. If anyone had managed to keep up the fantasy that we were spending the day in a pristine wilderness, this conclusively killed it. Just as Louis was about to say go, one of the volunteers noticed a gap in our line. His name was Liam O’Brien, and he’d been fighting back a measure of cynicism all day. “I’ll go over here in the gap,” he shouted. “God forbid any metalmarks are
there
.”

Liam is an energetic and knowledgeable butterfly lover who, when we’d first gone around a circle introducing ourselves that afternoon, elicited speechlessness and some actual gasps by relaying that he’d been out to count Lange’s in 1997, and that they’d counted more than twenty-two hundred of them that day. He is forty-eight and lanky, with styled, whitening hair. He tends to move and speak in choppy, purposeful bursts. A moment earlier, he’d whirled around, tracking a fast-moving flickering in the air for as long as he could with his finger, and shouted, “That looks like a dogface! That’s a California dogface!” hoping to give everyone the opportunity to see California’s state butterfly. At one point, as we shuffled between transects, Liam whispered to me, “I’m not the annoying butterfly guy, am I?” I started to tell him that I didn’t think he was; he was offering his little factoids in a helpful, totally egoless way. But something caught his eye, and he shot off in another direction. “Heliotrope!” I heard him say. “Great, great plant.”

Liam and I had driven to the dunes together that day. I’d met him earlier in the summer in San Francisco and would occasionally seek him out at the café where he has coffee every morning, to bounce butterfly questions off him. He made his living with butterflies. He led butterfly walking tours in San Francisco every spring and summer. He painted butterflies to illustrate trail signs for local parks. He’d started a small, neighborhood-wide recovery of a butterfly called the green hairstreak and, despite being mostly self-taught, had also spearheaded the government’s reintroduction of the endangered Mission blue to a hilltop in San Francisco called Twin Peaks.

That afternoon’s metalmark count had left Liam in an introspective mood. Driving home, he told me that, as much as he loved butterflies, he wondered if the whole enterprise to save the Lange’s was becoming a little foolish. “The tsunami of change that’s going on at that place, with the nonnative weeds—you want to know, is this just an exercise in futility? What is it going to take to put these pieces of a puzzle back together when the puzzle itself has already changed?” He wondered about his own butterfly conservation projects in the city, too: whether he was wasting his time; whether, via some indiscernible chain of causes and effects, he might even be doing more harm to the environment than good. Totally possible, Liam said. There was no way of knowing. But in the end, he told me, “I just want to be part of a generation that tries.”

SHIFTING BASELINES

B
utterflies swarmed the center of Liam O’Brien’s life abruptly, fifteen years before I met him. Before that, he’d spent a decade as a professional actor. He mostly appeared onstage, doing Shakespeare and musicals, but he got a short-lived break in film in 1990, when he was cast alongside David Cassidy in a hokey sci-fi comedy called
Spirit of ’76
. (Liam played an evil geek named Rodney Snodgrass.)

Six years later, he was living in San Francisco, working as an understudy in a production of
Angels in America
. And that was when it happened: a tether snapped tight between Liam O’Brien and butterflies. One day, he saw a butterfly with electric yellow and smudgy black wings landing in the garden outside his bedroom window. It was a western tiger swallowtail, a native of San Francisco. Liam had always kept a notebook of illustrations—a kind of visual journal—and, the next thing he knew, he was out in the garden with his pens and watercolors, capturing the swallowtail on paper. Soon he was touring around California in his Econoline van, painting and drawing as many of the state’s butterfly species as he could find.

In 1998, Liam tested positive for HIV. He’d been losing his motivation to compete for acting gigs, and, in a way, the virus gave him permission to focus on the thing that made him happiest: butterflies. He set out to learn more, to collect names and explanations for what he was seeing. He went to annual butterfly counts and started hanging around some of the most respected butterfly scientists, or lepidopterists, in the Bay Area—a klatch of stoic, sometimes crotchety old men (they were mainly men) accustomed, since childhood, to chasing butterflies through woods, bogs, and canyons by themselves. Liam, on the other hand, is a snarky, spirited gay man with a big booming voice and no scientific background. But somehow he managed to win that crowd over. He found it ironic: We associate butterflies with feminine, gentle things. People use the terms “butterfly chaser” and “mariposa” as slang for gay men. “But I just happen to be gay. I go to the Lepidopterists’ Society’s annual meetings, and I’ve never seen such a collection of shabby straight men in my life.”

One of Liam’s mentors gave him a piece of advice: “Learn where you live”—dig deep, and study what’s around you. So, in 2007, Liam decided to conduct his own exhaustive survey of San Francisco’s butterflies, trying to see which butterfly species historically found within the city limits survived there. He spent more than two hundred days in the field that year, walking the defunct naval yard, the oceanfront scrub, and the weedy hillsides between posh Victorian houses, noticing which butterflies flew where. He was looking around, getting to know his neighbors.

Butterfly-wise, the San Francisco Bay Area happens to be a national treasure. The profusion of butterfly species in the region is arguably unparalleled in the United States; there were as many as fifty-seven before the Gold Rush. This diversity is a function of the severe changes in climate across the region, from dank, wet, and foggy to sunny and hot; even temperatures in different neighborhoods of San Francisco can differ by twenty-five degrees on a given day. This patchwork of microclimates creates something akin to the Galápagos Islands for butterflies, with different species and subspecies attuned to each area. In 1849, a French lawyer came to the region in search of gold but wound up chasing butterflies instead. He discovered about forty-three new species, eight from San Francisco proper.

The city became a hot spot for lepidopterists in the late nineteenth century. It was a time before biology and natural history had professionalized as fields, when a lawyer with a good eye and durable walking shoes could make valuable contributions. The most accomplished lepidopterists of the era were weekend warriors. One was a professional stage actor, like Liam. Another, Hans Hermann Behr, a physician, was once described as “always in danger of falling into forgetfulness on professional subjects when he caught sight of a butterfly he ardently wanted.” Butterfly collecting wasn’t a dignified hobby. It was seen as childish and useless—dorky. Although the stigma wasn’t ever erased, a more glamorous, swashbuckling counterimage of the collector did momentarily emerge. It was best embodied by one of Dr. Behr’s pupils, a San Francisco police officer named James Cottle.

Cottle was a huge, barrel-chested patrolman whose powerful fist, it was said, was more effective than his billy club. He’d performed heroically during the earthquake and fire of 1906 and once infiltrated a masquerade ball dressed as the duke of Wellington to catch jewel thieves. In a 1910 profile headlined “By Day He Catches Burglars; By Night He Catches Bugs,” the
San Francisco Call
presented the cop as a brawny rejoinder to the image of entomologists as “blue spectacled old men, with long hair and pasty faces peering into slimy pools.” Cottle himself had once felt that way about butterfly lovers. But he now understood that collecting butterflies was macho, athletic stuff. He claimed to have once trudged across thirty-eight miles of problematic wilderness in pursuit of a single butterfly, the way hunters tracked bears. (Elsewhere, there were stories of men dangling hundreds of feet down the side of a cliff to capture a particular species of butterfly.) Cottle called butterfly collecting “the healthiest life in the world and the greatest sport I know anything about.” A few months spent charging alongside him would cure tuberculosis, he said—guaranteed.

Boosters played up the monetary value of rare specimens. In the Bay Area especially, all the breathy fantasies of the Gold Rush were recast around butterflies. There were fortunes to be made in these “flying nuggets” of gold—all you had to do was reach up and swing a net. With new laws and conservation organizations like the Audubon Society making other popular naturalist hobbies like bird and bird-egg collecting problematic, some of that attention shifted to butterflies. And while the nature fakers were sympathetically anthropomorphizing wolves and bears, it was tough to feel bad about killing butterflies, particularly since they disappeared en masse at the end of their seasonal flight periods anyway. They were like the leaves, which painlessly dropped from the trees. As one how-to guide for collectors put it: “Their lives are so brief, what can it matter?”

There are no cases in which overcollecting was the major cause of an American butterfly’s extinction, the way overhunting and egg collecting clearly wiped out birds like the great auk. Typically, butterfly species have been imperiled by the same, sometimes interrelated forces that threaten the Lange’s metalmark today: habitat loss or habitat fragmentation, and invasive species. As early as 1875, in fact, Hans Hermann Behr, the absentminded physician, believed that the Xerces blue, a brilliantly blue-winged butterfly found only in San Francisco, had been driven extinct by the city’s expansion. The Xerces was a sand dune species, but its habitat was changing from open sand to residential neighborhoods in Behr’s lifetime. “The locality where it used to be found,” he complained, “is converted into building lots.” And the only insects that might survive in such a place were the “louse and flea.” For Behr, it was only one example of how quickly the natural beauty of the Bay Area was disintegrating.

James Cottle was barely a teenager when Behr lodged these complaints; the landscape that Cottle’s mentor now saw as spoiled was the only one that Cottle had ever known. Nevertheless, by 1928, an aging Cottle felt the same way Behr had at the end of
his
life, like he’d watched the beautiful terrain of his youth crumble into an ecological ruin. All his favorite butterfly collecting spots in San Francisco had been “erased forever by the city’s growth,” Cottle wrote—“rendered sterile and worthless . . . destroyed, defiled, eradicated.” He saw scarcely any turf left, and focused instead on one day joining his mentor Dr. Behr in heaven. Cottle pictured Behr and all the other old collectors who’d preceded him waiting for him in the afterlife, staking out a tract of prime butterfly habitat “with nets enough to go around.”

Liam O’Brien was doing his survey of San Francisco nearly eighty years later, in 2007. He counted thirty-two species and subspecies of butterflies, about two-thirds of what had been there when Cottle started collecting in the city. “In San Francisco,” Liam told me, “we’re known for what we’ve lost.” The Xerces blue in particular stands as a chastising symbol—the nation’s major invertebrate conservation nonprofit, the Xerces Society, is named for it. It ultimately became the first American butterfly known to be wiped out by humans, though it hung on in San Francisco many decades longer than expected. The butterfly had been presumed extinct for years when, in 1941, two young entomologists happened upon a small number of Xerces near a creek in San Francisco’s Presidio. Ecstatic to see the butterfly still alive, they netted and killed large numbers of specimens to trade with their friends. It was the last time the butterfly was ever seen.

“I always thought there would be more,” one of the entomologists told a reporter near the end of his life. “I was wrong.” His name was William Harry Lange. A few years before the Xerces incident, he’d discovered a new kind of metalmark at Antioch Dunes.

—

H
ARRY
L
ANGE,
as he was known, was another native San Franciscan butterfly buff. He was born in 1912 and grew up collecting butterflies before school with an obsessive glee—at the same time, mind you, that James Cottle was on his way out, growing convinced that the city had been trashed. In fact, Lange went to high school within a couple of miles of several other budding entomologists, all of whom were so enraptured by the insects they found while tromping through their city neighborhoods that they pursued the science in college and quickly made names for themselves in the field. The 1930s and early 1940s are now considered a golden era for the science in the Bay Area. When Harry Lange netted his first Lange’s metalmark at Antioch Dunes in 1933, he was merely one in an eager army of young men out there, scouring new and mesmerizing critters from the sand.

During the Depression, it was difficult for entomologists to travel to far-flung places for research. The Antioch Dunes emerged as an alternative study site for entomologists at the universities in Berkeley and Davis—and an endlessly fascinating one. At one time, there may have been as many as four or five thousand insect species living there, sewn symbiotically into the ecosystem. It couldn’t have been a more convenient place to study, either: at the edge of the dunes was a bar called the Little Corral, whose owner allowed the men to park their Model A’s there as long as they bought a beer first, and after a long day of work they could take swims or go fishing in the river. Consequently, probably no place in North America of such a small size has been scrutinized by entomologists so thoroughly, over so many years.

By Labor Day weekend 1954, the dunes were so well-known that, when a regional chapter of the Lepidopterists’ Society had its annual meeting in San Francisco, organizing a field trip to Antioch was a no-brainer. The lepidopterists were coming to see the Lange’s metalmark, and everyone managed to catch one and take it home. Still, Jerry Powell, an undergraduate at Berkeley at the time, later remembered being surprised that the generation just ahead of him—Harry Lange’s generation—had written off the dunes by then. To them, the place was destroyed.

There had already been decades of intermittent sand mining by that time. It began in earnest after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when bricks were needed to rebuild the city. But it was especially vigorous when Jerry Powell first visited. At times, two separate companies were hauling sand from five different areas of the dunes at once, shipping it out by truck, river barge, or train. Spurs ran from the nearby railway to the area between the two power line towers, and sand was being shoveled out of that area most intensively, straight onto railcars. A small depression was just starting to be noticeable there: the beginnings of the bowl-shaped valley that I’d find gaping between the power line towers on the property now.

There had also been lots of industrial development around the dunes in the years after World War II, though, according to Powell, the last straw for Harry Lange’s generation would be the construction of the gypsum plant in 1956. Not only did it sprout up in the middle of the habitat, splitting the dunes in half, but it also cast white dust over the place. It felt—in a very visceral way—like an atrocity.

It was all a matter of age and perspective, of course—all part of the same cycle of disillusionment that had been going on in San Francisco. The Lepidopterists’ Society trip was the first time Jerry Powell had ever been to the dunes, and he and the other students were just as excited by the place as Harry Lange and his contemporaries had been twenty years earlier. Just as Cottle loved the city that Behr wrote off, and Lange loved the city that Cottle wrote off, Powell now loved the dunes that Lange’s generation wrote off. Powell didn’t see a landscape sapped of life. He saw a “terrific variety” of insects. And he was sufficiently captivated to study the ecosystem on and off for decades as a professor at Berkeley.

Two decades later, though, by the mid-seventies, development had winnowed down the dunes even more dramatically. Weeds were rampant, and another recent surge of sand mining had eaten farther into the property than ever before. But Powell was still intrigued. In 1976, he began what could have been a culmination of his research at Antioch Dunes: a study to plot the decline or disappearance of insect species at the dunes since the early 1930s, to describe how that web of life broke down.

Because the dunes had been visited so regularly by entomologists, Powell assumed that the specimens they collected in any given era were a good reflection of the insect life that existed there then. So he and his students searched through museums, where specimens were labeled with information about where and when they were caught, and tallied all the samples brought home from Antioch in two seven-year periods, a decade apart, starting in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Powell made his own trips to the dunes for the next seven years, collecting everything he could. Now he had samples from three seven-year time periods—a chronological catalog of what was netted at the Antioch Dunes on some six hundred different days between 1933 and 1983. By looking at when species were last collected, he could narrow down when they vanished from the ecosystem.