Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (13 page)

To make the study manageable, Powell had decided at the outset to look at only a fraction of the insect species known to exist at the dunes—376 of them, which still took him twenty-five pages to list. Powell concluded that 243 of those 376 species were now gone. All manner of wasps, beeflies, beetles, robberflies, and velvet ants had disappeared. Among them were four species endemic to the dunes—species, like the Lange’s, that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth. That is, they were not just missing from Antioch; they were now globally extinct.

But there was a serious wrinkle. Powell expected to show the number of species declining during those fifty years. Instead, his data showed the opposite. Even though many species disappeared, the total number of species being collected actually rose over time. Against all odds, biodiversity appeared to be
increasing
at Antioch Dunes.

He soon realized this was an illusion. Powell thought about entomologists’ nets: how, in his lifetime,
their mesh had gotten finer and finer as scientists became interested in catching insects of smaller size. In the thirties, California was full of insects that hadn’t been named—large, alluring, and conspicuous bugs that leapt out at you from the landscape. The boys of Lange’s generation concentrated on the butterflies and dragonflies and wasps—the charismatic megafauna of the invertebrate world. As those larger insects lost their novelty, or their population declined and they became harder to find, the next generation was driven to root around for smaller, more obscure things. And so, in turn, was the generation after it.

Over the years, the gaze of entomologists gradually magnified, each generation scrutinizing what the previous one hadn’t bothered with or noticed. By the time Powell was surveying the dunes in the late seventies and early eighties, the insects he was bringing home included the minuscule and the nocturnal—because that’s what a scientist of his generation was accustomed to collecting, and what was left to be caught.

The biodiversity of the dunes hadn’t expanded. But people’s perception of it had.

—

T
HE PHENOMENON THAT
Powell stumbled onto has a name: shifting baselines syndrome. The term was coined in 1995 by a fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly. Pauly recognized that global fish populations have been slowly collapsing, and though scientists weren’t blind to that damage, their vision was too narrow and subjective to take in its full extent. Every generation of scientist accepts the oceans as it inherits them, Pauly argued. Overfishing may eat away at fish stocks, or even drive species extinct. But when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don’t see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes
their
baseline, against which they’ll measure any subsequent losses in
their
lifetimes.

Because of this, a comprehensive picture of the changes happening across generations never truly comes into focus. Scientists are concentrating on only part of a line graph that is, in fact, much longer and more steeply plunging. (We now know, for example, that between 1850 and 2005 overfishing reduced the cod population in the northwestern Atlantic by 92 percent.) As we began to fish bigger species like cod into scarcity, we transitioned to eating smaller ones, like monkfish. As Pauly puts it, humans are blindly fishing their way down the marine food web—not any differently from how entomologists blindly moved down the web of insects at Antioch Dunes, with Jerry Powell fascinated by the tiny bugs that his predecessors let pass through the mesh of their nets. When Pauly introduced the idea of shifting baselines syndrome in the nineties, he often joked to the press that kids might soon be enjoying jellyfish salad sandwiches, instead of tuna. These days, he points out that there actually is a commercial jellyfish fishing industry up and running in Asia and the American Southeast.

Shifting baselines syndrome, then, is only the scientific manifestation of a broader problem affecting all people: what the psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. has named “environmental generational amnesia.” All of us adopt the natural world we encounter in childhood as our psychological baseline—an expectation of how things should be—and gauge the changes we see against that norm. This explains why the children Kahn has interviewed in terribly polluted neighborhoods in Houston don’t believe their neighborhoods are polluted, and why Kahn’s daughter thinks the woods around their family cabin in Northern California are beautiful and pristine, while Kahn can’t get over no longer hearing the calls of owls. It’s also why Hans Hermann Behr and James Cottle—and even Liam O’Brien today—could all spend their lives equally entranced by a San Francisco butterfly-scape that only got progressively poorer. As Kahn puts it, “We don’t know what we are missing.”

Acknowledging the problem of shifting baselines syndrome, like truly acknowledging the enormity of climate change, can be profoundly disruptive and discouraging. It begs the question of what baseline biologists should be measuring wildlife populations against in the first place. It also can leave us, the public, unsure how to feel about conservation’s supposedly feel-good success stories. In 1973, when the bald eagle was placed on the endangered species list, there were believed to be only 417 nesting pairs of birds left in the lower forty-eight states. In 2007, Fish and Wildlife triumphantly delisted the eagle, having by then built that population up to ten thousand nesting pairs. But the agency also estimates that there may have been as many as fifty thousand pairs in 1782, when the bird became America’s national symbol. And there were doubtless more still when Columbus arrived in 1492, the year often used as a de facto baseline. So do ten thousand eagle pairs represent a miraculous resurrection, or only a meager uptick after a much longer, more devastating decline? Is America flush with eagles? Are we still hopelessly deficient? How many eagles should there be?

In 2005, a paper was published in the journal
Nature
that sought, in part, to settle this ambiguity. Its lead author was a then graduate student named Josh Donlan. If the problem of shifting baselines was starting to feel unresolvable—like nothing could be objectively measured; like we were staring down into a vertiginous, infinitely receding series of subjective baselines, each invalidated by the one just behind it—then Donlan was ready to bring everyone back onto solid ground.

Once, the paper explained, North America was teeming with spectacular prehistoric megafauna: not just Thomas Jefferson’s mammoths, but shaggy eighteen-foot-long ground sloths, dire wolves, and beavers the size of bears. There were humongous elk, saber-toothed cats, wild horses, and cheetahs. There were American lions bigger than present-day African lions, and a fleet of meat-eating birds circling overhead, waiting for all these hulking carcasses to drop. Virtually all of these species vanished at the end of the Pleistocene era, about twelve thousand years ago. Why? In part, one hypothesis holds, it was because that was when humans, having arrived in North America over a land bridge from Asia, developed a new kind of stone spear tip called the Clovis point and hunted them to extinction.

Donlan and his colleagues argued that this Pleistocene extinction, and not Columbus’s arrival in 1492, was North America’s zero event—the moment when, ecologically speaking, everything started going wrong. If there was one scientifically defensible baseline for conservationists to agree on, this should be it. That megafauna had tremendous impacts on its ecosystems. Simply trundling around and displacing dirt would have changed the landscape in profound ways, providing habitat for other, smaller critters and insects. The absence of that megafauna has had repercussions, too. For example, it allowed the animals those larger animals ate, like deer and other ungulates, to explode in number, setting in motion a suite of other disorderly consequences.

In short, the loss of that megafauna has meant that, for the last twelve thousand years, every human generation has inherited a North America that is profoundly out of whack. So many of the ecosystems we see, study, and appreciate like architecture are, in fact, mostly ruins—a disheveled set of ripple effects, reverberating from the loss of these big and influential beasts. All of this is well understood and not especially controversial. But Donlan and his coauthors were proposing bringing that megafauna back—or at least proxies for it. Their plan called for the importation of camels, tortoises, and horses, and then eventually cheetahs, elephants, and lions from Africa. The animals would be reintroduced on private property or at new, large, fenced preserves on the Great Plains. They called the plan Pleistocene Rewilding.

People object that Pleistocene Rewilding would be playing God, Donlan told me. “But my response is, we’re already playing God.” We’re just not doing a very good job of it. The goal of too much conservation appears to be keeping the last threads of a lost world from fraying—“managing extinction,” as Donlan puts it. We are afraid to interfere with nature or steer its course too dramatically on purpose. But we are meanwhile creating a nature full of highly adaptable weeds and pests by accident. We’re not just eliminating the continent’s wildlife; we are oafishly changing the composition of it, replacing its condors and panthers with more dandelions and rats. At the heart of Pleistocene Rewilding was a contention that America could be so much more.

Pleistocene Rewilding became big news in the week after Donlan’s proposal was published in 2005. He found himself discussing America’s long-lost megafauna on morning television shows. “It was probably the biggest ecological history lesson America has ever had,” Donlan told me—a revelation for ordinary people to realize that their suburban neighborhoods were once run through with camels and lions.
But then Hurricane Katrina hit, and the media turned their attention elsewhere.

Donlan also got letters—hundreds of letters and e-mails—calling the idea “moronic,” scolding him for wanting to “release killers in our homeland” or for proposing to pillage Africa’s wildlife in order to “beautify” the Great Plains. People worried their children would be “gobbled up while taking a hike” and detailed exactly what kind of firearm they’d use to gun down trespassing elephants.

On the one hand, Pleistocene Rewilding is completely logical. If you followed history far back enough—if you peeled back all those nostalgic baselines we are burdened with, one by one—you’d arrive exactly where Donlan had. You would see the rationality of what he was proposing. But if I was learning anything, it was that rationality hardly matters when it comes to the dark comedy of people and wild animals in America. “Just a note to let you know,” one man wrote to Donlan, “that those of us who actually work for a living think you are a colossal asshat.”

—

O
NE AFTERNOON,
I was working at Antioch Dunes with a group of high-ranking Fish and Wildlife Service employees when an old man suddenly appeared over a small ridge, walking briskly. He wore a striped dress shirt and a fishing hat, with a pair of binoculars clipped to his belt. Blood was running down his forearm—it looked as though he’d opened up a network of scabs—but he didn’t seem troubled by this. Everyone in our party turned and stared: people don’t just walk around the Antioch Dunes; the refuge is usually closed to the public. Then the refuge biologist, Susan Euing, said, “That’s Dr. Powell.”

Jerry Powell is still a professor emeritus at Berkeley. He is a standoffish man of seventy-seven with a full head of white hair. It turns out that Powell has become one of Liam O’Brien’s primary butterfly mentors. They frequently travel around California together in the summer, camping out and doing volunteer butterfly counts. When Liam gives talks about butterflies in San Francisco, Powell comes with his wife and afterward stoically points out inaccuracies. “He’s got antifreeze in his blood in a curmudgeonly, really fun way,” Liam told me. “I seriously think he’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.”

I spent a couple of afternoons in Powell’s office, asking him about the Antioch Dunes. He told me that any work to recover the Lange’s is decades beyond the point of diminishing returns, and even if it were possible, the agency’s strategies were, in his opinion, completely misguided. For Powell, the Lange’s wasn’t even the point. The butterfly had been singled out arbitrarily for federal protection, but it was only a remnant of a community of insects he’d watched waste away around it. I asked him to imagine he was in charge of managing the dunes. What would he do? He couldn’t answer. “So little of the habitat that made the place special is left,” he said.

That afternoon in Antioch, Powell was surveying the dunes as part of an annual nationwide butterfly count—a tally of all species, not just the Lange’s. Euing had loaned him a key to the refuge gate, and he’d let himself in. He walked within ten yards of our group without exactly approaching us, curious but seeming not to want to be the one who struck up the conversation.

Finally, one of the government biologists called Powell over and asked him to take a look at some buckwheat plants. The leaves were snaked with rust-colored scars, and the Fish and Wildlife biologists suspected this was because the metalmark caterpillars were crawling up the stems and feeding on the leaves. To them, it was an encouraging sign. Powell disagreed. To him, it looked like a symptom of plant disease. “I don’t know what it is. It can’t be doing this plant any good,” he said.

The man from Fish and Wildlife stared at the plant a while longer. “Thanks for looking at that,” he said.

“So . . .” Susan Euing said to Powell, trying to make conversation. That spring, Fish and Wildlife had experimented with trucking in cattle to eat the hairy vetch. Euing now told him, “The cattle are off the grazing area now. It’s looking pretty good. It’s working.”

Powell laughed. That was his only response. He’d stuck with the Antioch Dunes for so long but seemed to have reached the same point of disillusionment with the place as his predecessors.

“Okay,” Powell finally said. “Well, good luck with it.” Then he handed Euing her key and left.

OUR VANISHING WILDLIFE

W
hen I got home from Antioch Dunes one afternoon that summer, there was a newspaper clipping with my name written on it, waiting for me on our kitchen table. My mother-in-law had tucked it into a package for Isla, thinking that I’d be interested.

The article described how, recently, about a hundred small diamondback terrapins had made their annual migration, crossing the runways at New York’s Kennedy Airport. As happens during the summer, the turtles had delayed many flights. And the newspaper hinted at how funny it was that a few tiny turtles could halt a fleet of giant airplanes.

It
was
funny. But, then again, I’d also recently read about how Christopher Columbus’s men, moored in the Caribbean after their trans-Atlantic trip, were kept awake at night by the clunking of so many sea turtle shells against the hulls of their ships. There may have been as many as 660 million green sea turtles in the Caribbean at that time—collectively, they would have weighed as much as, and maybe more than, all the buffalo on the North American plains. It was the opposite of the scene at JFK, in other words: a giant fleet of turtles was bombarding a few tiny ships.

I’d started reading historical accounts of wildlife in America—a little obsessively. Part of what I was hoping to do for Isla by showing her endangered animals in the wild was offset the environmental generational amnesia that would inevitably take hold between her and me—to help her know a world, a baseline, that preceded her. But I was also learning about the world that preceded me. And what always leapt out of those accounts was the simple fact of abundance: people’s descriptions of being dwarfed and engulfed by wild animals, or even just massively inconvenienced by them. Americans are still inconvenienced by wildlife all the time, of course: the raccoon in the attic, the deer eating the backyard flowers, a recent incident of black bears rubbing against wiring in Idaho and shorting out Internet connections. But, as with the turtles at the airport, these confrontations usually highlight how inflexible our own species has become, and how much space we take up. You’d never know that the animals used to be the teeming and inflexible ones.

I read that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, passenger pigeons roosted in flocks of more than a hundred million birds. Flying in, they were said to block out the sun. One man on the Ohio River mistook the “loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness,” for a tornado. Trees snapped under their weight, and when the birds finally moved on, the locals were left to trudge through the many inches of dung that had accumulated under them like a fetid snowfall.

But by the turn of the twentieth century, the passenger pigeon had been all but hunted to extinction. The birds’ sudden absence was just as astonishing as their abundance had been. It was too much to believe. Even decades after the death of the very last passenger pigeon in 1914, a letter to
The Saturday Evening Post
speculated desperately that the pigeons were still alive and must have merely flapped off for another planet.
*

I read that a man named James McNaney, while camping outside Glendive, Montana, in 1882, was suddenly confronted with “a living stream” of some hundred thousand buffalo barreling down on him from the top of a hill. The animals came running ten abreast, and still it took four hours for the herd to pass. In the early days of the railroad, trains had to stop for hours to wait for crowds of buffalo to slog past. Sometimes a stampeding column battered into the side of the train, derailing it. Describing one incident in Kansas in 1871, a man wrote: “Each individual buffalo went at it with the desperation of despair, plunging against or between locomotive and cars, just as its blind madness chanced to direct it. . . . After having trains thrown off the track twice in one week, conductors learned to have a very decided respect for the idiosyncrasies of the buffalo.”

That abundance wouldn’t last, either. By the early 1870s, the slaughter was well under way. The animals were killed for food, for skins, for their tongues. They were killed as an act of war against the Native Americans who relied on them. And they were killed for the sheer pleasure of shooting them, sometimes from a moving train. In 1872, after crossing much of the continent on the railroad and seeing no buffalo, President Garfield assumed that all this shooting from railcars had made the animal skittish, that the buffalo had learned to stay away from the tracks. In fact, they had just been wiped out from those areas. By the 1880s, the moping masses that once blackened the plains had been reduced to the point where the death of an individual animal was significant enough to be reported by the Associated Press. The breadth of the destruction supplied the same awe as the animals themselves had. As one newspaper put it, it was a “rate of extermination that is almost incalculable and one of which the mind can have no just conception.”

It was around this time that a man named William Temple Hornaday became extremely distressed by the obliteration of the buffalo, an animal he viewed as not only a financial asset but an iconic part of America’s natural glory—“our national animal,” he called it. He regarded its extermination as a “national disgrace.” It was also an emergency. Hornaday determined that there were fewer than three hundred wild buffalo left. And so, in 1886, he did what he reasoned to be the most helpful and logical thing: he set out for Montana to kill several dozen of them.

—

H
ORNADAY’S STORY
is both an inspirational tale and a cautionary tale about the problem of shifting baselines. Somehow he withstood the tug of cynicism and despair that I’d seen drag down each generation of Bay Area lepidopterists. Rather than eulogizing the wildlife vanishing around him, Hornaday scrambled to defend it, and even replace it. For a time, at least. Maybe it was because he fought back that disillusionment for so long that when it finally did get a purchase on him, it took him down hard.

Hornaday was a taxidermist—a gifted one. He was born in 1854; beginning in his late teens, he made many perilous trips around the world to hunt exotic animals to stuff. (He claimed that during these trips he survived a jaguar attack, wrestled a crocodile, procured an orangutan named Little Man to give Andrew Carnegie as a gift, and sailed past a manta ray the size of a small volcanic island.) By the time he staged his buffalo-hunting expedition to Montana, he had ascended to a job at the Smithsonian. He was like America’s taxidermist laureate.

Hornaday needed to kill buffalo so that he could preserve them. He was horrified by the lack of buffalo specimens at the nation’s premier museum. And though he acknowledged that the idea of shooting any of the remaining wild ones was “exceedingly unpleasant,” he felt it had to be done, so that people in the future could still see and know them.

He and his party took twenty-five buffalo on a trip he billed as “The Last Buffalo Hunt.” Back in Washington, Hornaday arranged the choicest animals into a scene around an alkali watering hole. He considered these the wildest and fittest buffalo, since they had survived the great extermination and outlasted all others. “For years,” he wrote of one bull, “the never-ceasing race for life had utterly prevented the secretion of useless and cumbersome fat.” While preparing the animals, Hornaday had discovered at least one older bullet lodged in nearly every adult; the only buffalo left on the range, it seemed, were those that had survived previous assaults.

By then, Hornaday had become fixated on starting a zoo. Zoos were relatively new ideas in America—the nation’s first had opened in Philadelphia in 1874. Hornaday saw their potential as, essentially, galleries of living, moving taxidermy—safe houses where at least a few animals could be preserved and also bred, so that their kind would never technically die out. To that end, he was instrumental in establishing a Department of Living Animals at the Smithsonian, which later became the National Zoo. And in 1896, he was tapped by the New York Zoological Society to direct its new zoo, what we know as the Bronx Zoo. He stayed in that job for the next thirty years. Hornaday insisted that the zoo be open to the public for free. He envisioned it as a place where ordinary Americans could experience wildlife in perpetuity, no matter how many more extinctions occurred outside its gates.

Reconnecting the American public to its wildlife would be the major theme of Hornaday’s life. It frightened him that, as the country urbanized, younger generations were losing their firsthand knowledge of animals. He was one of the nature fakers’ brashest critics, condemning them for filling that void with fairy tales. And he similarly attacked scientific education’s growing emphasis on cellular biology at the expense of getting outdoors and learning the natural histories of wild animals through observation. For Hornaday, there was a deep tie between American wildlife and American greatness. His biographer Gregory Dehler writes that the country’s new fascination with microscopes struck Hornaday as “downright unpatriotic and un-American.” It missed the aesthetic dimension of wildlife. Animals were big and awesome; cells were slow and boring. Animals were accessible to anyone; cells were for eggheads. In theory, Hornaday was an ardent populist, though he often had trouble putting up with the actual populace. Scandalized by people freely dropping their trash around the Bronx Zoo after lunch, for example, he complained in a letter to the
New York Times
that America was becoming a society of litterers—then removed most of the benches, so that there was nowhere to eat lunch anymore.

Ultimately, it may be impossible to fix into a consistent shape all the eccentricities and outlandish opinions of Hornaday’s life. Little about him meshes with our modern ideas about wildlife conservation, ecology, or political correctness. He blamed the decline of the buffalo partly on the animal’s “own unparalleled stupidity.” The anthropomorphism of animals sickened him, except when it didn’t. (He once wistfully remembered an orangutan “friend” named Dohong whom he described as “an engineer, an investigator and a philosopher.”) And he used his observations at the zoo to work up a chart titled “Estimates of the Comparative Intelligence and Ability of Certain Conspicuous Wild Animals, Based upon Known Performances, or the Absence of Them,” in which he rated twenty different species on a scale of zero to a hundred in categories like “Perceptive Faculties,” “Nervous Energy,” and “Use of the Voice.” (The beaver, for example, scores one hundred in “Original Thought.”) He was also a racist. In 1906, he put a pygmy man from the Congo named Ota Benga on display in a cage at the zoo.

Still, it’s not hard to see a peculiar heroism in his life’s work. So many stories I stumbled on while learning about the Lange’s metalmark followed the same arc: people losing hope as, through their lifetimes, they watched the animals disappear and the baselines shift. Meanwhile, baselines for success were getting defined downward, too, with conservationists laboring to safeguard and cherish what those who came before would have regarded as scraps.

But Hornaday’s thinking about wildlife conservation seemed to only grow progressively more optimistic and ambitious as time wore on. It occurred to him that
more
of the world he inherited could be saved, not less. He’d started out wanting to save buffalo for future generations by stuffing them, then evolved to build a reliquary of living animals at a city zoo. Finally, he devoted himself to something even more audacious: putting actual buffalo back out there, on the plains.

—

I
N 1905,
nineteen years after his buffalo hunt in Montana, Hornaday founded the American Bison Society with his friend President Theodore Roosevelt. The group rounded up surviving buffalo and brought them to Hornaday’s zoo to be bred in captivity. By 1907, the society was working with the federal government to ship batches of animals to large, fenced preserves on the plains. It was wildlife conservation’s first captive breeding and reintroduction program, a cornerstone of many endangered species recoveries today.

The public rallied behind the buffalo project. This was, after all, only five years after Roosevelt’s hunt in Mississippi had birthed the teddy bear, when America was starting to reckon with having torn apart a continent’s worth of wild animals—and to romanticize, and not only fear, whatever was left. Now William Temple Hornaday, nattily dressed in suit and top hat, was boldly crating up bison in New York City so that they could once again fill the Great Plains, shipping them out on the same railroads that had helped obliterate the animals. It felt like a reconciliation, as though an injustice was starting to be incrementally righted. The
New York Times
wrote that Hornaday “deserves the gratitude of the Nation.”

From there, Hornaday’s ambitions only expanded further. Backed by a discretionary fund established by wealthy friends, he lobbied Congress for landmark laws to protect fur seals and migratory birds. He also lobbied the public directly. In 1913, he tried to snap the American people into action with his most famous book, an encyclopedic screed titled
Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation
.

It had been more than a century since Thomas Jefferson began
Notes on the State of Virginia,
writing to far-flung acquaintances, collating their observations about the bigness of American fauna—evidence with which he could combat Buffon’s Theory of American Degeneracy. Now Hornaday did almost the opposite. He asked game wardens and wildlife experts across the continent for firsthand reports of how badly that wildlife had been whittled down. “The sandhill crane has been killed by sportsmen,” a man in Minnesota wrote. “I have not seen one in three years.” Another reported that white-tailed deer were entirely gone from Delaware. “Antelope, mountain sheep and grizzly bears are
going
, fast!” one operative in Wyoming wrote Hornaday. Even the rabbits were on the ropes.

Our Vanishing Wildlife
became a bestseller. It was an antagonistic and panicky book; at times, the pages seem to be riveted together with exclamation points. Hornaday covered the decimation of all species in the same frenzied tenor, from the iconic grizzly and the whooping crane, down to the pheasant and the squirrel. (“A live squirrel in a tree is poetry in motion; but on the table a squirrel is a rodent that tastes as a rat smells,” he wrote. “We ask every American to lend a hand to save Silver-Tail.”)