Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (15 page)

“It was like Woodstock,” one
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter later recalled. Thousands of people lined the riverbanks. Entrepreneurs sold food and T-shirts. When Humphrey spent a few days in a narrow, shallow irrigation canal called Shag Slough, a shop in Rio Vista started selling mimeographed maps to the slough for a dollar, and crowds drove out to see the unthinkable: a living whale, up close, with a cow grazing behind it.

By the end of the second week, hundreds of unsolicited suggestions were flooding in from kids in science classes around the country and ordinary can-do Americans. (These included building a sexy papier-mâché female whale to attract Humphrey downstream.) At one point, a boatload of new-age parapsychologists coasted in behind Humphrey, seeking to generate a benevolent, telepathic force field to nudge him homeward. A money-market fund was set up in Humphrey’s name to cache donations. There were rumblings about Wayne Newton staging a benefit concert. One night, a local construction company cleared underwater debris out of Humphrey’s path. “It was a magical time,” Diana Reiss, a biologist who helped direct the rescue, told me. “You’d say, ‘We need
this
to save Humphrey,’ and you’d get it.”

When people remember Humphrey today, they tend to preface their stories by describing how sullen the mood in America was in October 1985. TWA Flight 847 had been hijacked that June—a United States Navy man was tortured and dumped dead on the tarmac—and, only four days before Humphrey entered San Francisco Bay, four terrorists from the Palestinian Liberation Front hijacked the ocean liner
Achille Lauro,
throwing an American retiree in a wheelchair overboard.

People made the point explicitly at the time: America needed this whale, needed something to rally around and save. It was easy to identify with the lost animal: helpless, in an unfamiliar and dangerous world, unable to find his way out. He’d left the ocean—maybe the last uncorrupted-seeming and mysterious region of the earth—and bored directly into this uglier human realm of ports, oil refineries, and heavy manufacturing plants. His very presence in our world seemed troubling and wrong. He deserved better than to be around us. So everyone, united in kindness, was trying to get Humphrey home.
*

For the most part, the rescuers had been experimenting with ways to frighten Humphrey downstream. Eventually, one Sunday morning more than three weeks after Humphrey had left the Pacific, they decided to try to
attract
Humphrey back to the ocean instead. They outfitted a fishing boat called the
Bootlegger
with underwater speakers and broadcast recordings of other humpback whales feeding. It worked. That day, the humpback would wind up following the
Bootlegger
for eleven hours, with an armada of thirty other boats falling in behind them to keep him from turning back. Finally, late the following afternoon, just in time to make the evening news, Humphrey was led under the Golden Gate Bridge and back into the Pacific.

It had been apparent that the new strategy would work almost immediately when the armada of rescue workers convened upriver that first morning. (“It looks like the Normandy invasion,” one woman said as the operation got under way—by now it included helicopters, an eighty-two-foot-long Coast Guard ship, military riverboats, and the usual long tail of houseboats, fishing boats, and dinghies.) As soon as the whale call recording was switched on, Humphrey surfaced out of nowhere and locked onto the
Bootlegger
. Someone on the riverbank with a boom box blasted “Born to Be Wild” as the whale, tight on the
Bootlegger
’s
tail, spouted a plume of water and snot into the air and—finally moving toward the ocean now—rolled under the Antioch Bridge and past the Antioch Dunes.

All of this had been unfolding in plain sight of the Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge. In fact, Humphrey had been dawdling in the area for several days, and all weekend people had flocked to the dunes to see the whale swim aimlessly back and forth, swatting the water with his fins, shadowed by his beleaguered entourage. The refuge was some of the only undeveloped, open riverbank left where people could stand and watch. Five thousand people were counted on one half of the property in a single afternoon—a mob that parked and walked where it pleased, ignoring signs and the small detail of refuge employees who had rushed to the dunes to try to instill order. Now, as soon as Humphrey and the
Bootlegger
got going, motoring past the Antioch Dunes and heading home, the crowd rushed into their cars and peeled off for the next viewing opportunity in a neighboring town. “The place cleared out like the plague had hit,” one refuge employee reported.

The dunes had been trampled. Endangered plants were destroyed, new trails had been stamped into the sand, and existing ones were smeared open and destabilized to the point where, a week later, after heavy rains, an entire section of hillside collapsed into the river. With it went many buckwheat plants and whatever Lange’s metalmark eggs had been laid on them that summer. An internal Fish and Wildlife Service memo noted, “It is ironic that one endangered species”—the humpback—“could have such an impact on three other endangered species.”

It was a tragedy of charisma. Because of their affection for a single celebrity whale, hordes of people had jeopardized an entire species of anonymous butterfly. They weren’t an angry mob; they were a loving mob. But they loved only certain things.

—

F
ISH AND
W
ILDLIFE’S
response to Humphrey was swift and, ultimately, maybe more damaging than the crowd itself. The agency put a fence around Antioch Dunes, locking out the dirt bikers, fishermen, campers, and butterfly poachers, as well as about a thousand hikers and picnickers who visited the dunes legally during the year. If you believe that nature needs us to leave it alone, this sounds like an unequivocally good thing; but in retrospect, that traffic was actually providing the last vestiges of disturbance in the disturbance ecosystem: wearing down dunes and shifting around sand to keep the niches for native plants like the buckwheat open. Maybe they were providing too much disturbance, or disturbing too recklessly. But entomologists I spoke to argue that even the stampedes to see Humphrey may have been only simulating the kind of dramatic dune collapse that would have happened there occasionally for the last one hundred and forty thousand years. Now, with nothing to disturb the dunes, the landscape got almost entirely socked in with a circus of weeds. As a consequence, by 1987, peak count
for Lange’s metalmark slipped to 248.

Scrambling to secure Antioch Dunes after the Humphrey debacle, a new biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service also ordered Richard Arnold to terminate his research on the butterfly. (According to Arnold, she felt his study—his handling butterflies and scribbling on them with Sharpies—was only further damaging the species, even though Arnold had data proving his techniques were safe.) Arnold had started studying the Lange’s while at Berkeley, under the mentorship of Jerry Powell. In fact, Arnold had helped Powell with his years-long study trying to sketch out the ecosystem’s decline. By now, Powell was well on his way to feeling that the butterfly’s case was hopeless. But Arnold, as part of a younger generation, was still optimistic; he hadn’t written off the dunes. He had reams of data, not just about the butterfly, but also about the refuge’s two federally protected plants. Powell had even more data. Arnold felt they were working toward offering Fish and Wildlife everything it needed to make a blueprint for restoring the dunes and balancing the needs of Antioch’s three endangered species. At the very least, Arnold might offer the government a meticulous account of one butterfly species’ meandering road to extinction, which would bear lessons for saving others. “I think they lost a golden opportunity,” he says.

When asked to leave, though, Arnold wasn’t motivated to put up a fight. In truth, he was already looking for an exit strategy, searching in vain for a graduate student to take over his research and molder in the Antioch heat without pay, for only the love of the butterfly. He was discouraged by what he saw happening to the habitat. But the real problem was, Arnold had a rash. After years of prolonged exposure, he’d developed an allergy to the gypsum dust that, in those days, poured over the dunes from the wallboard factory next door. “It was a nasty situation,” he says. It required frequent steroid shots. “I wanted to continue the work, but I was suffering so badly.” In the last twenty-five years, Arnold has consulted on butterfly conservation projects up and down the state of California, but he’s been back to the Antioch Dunes only a couple of times. “I can’t risk going out there.”

After that, in the nineties, management of the Antioch Dunes proceeded in sometimes constructive fits and starts. At one point, a huge garden of buckwheat was planted. Truckloads of new sand were dumped on the property and sculpted into artificial dunes. But the landscape had a way of shrugging off any improvements and jostling back into disarray. The butterfly numbers bobbled up and down.

We don’t think of evolution as being steered by chance. But just as the story of the dinosaurs’ extinction starts with a freakish meteor crash, the recent natural history of the Lange’s metalmark butterfly was jagged off course by a humpback whale and a man’s rash. It wasn’t until recently—when peak count plunged into the double digits—that Fish and Wildlife hired an ecologist named Jana Johnson to help undo those decades of damage and neglect.

WITHOUT CHANGE, THERE WOULD BE NO BUTTERFLIES

E
very August since 2007, Jana Johnson has captured a handful of female butterflies at Antioch Dunes, transferred them into plastic containers, and secured them in the backseat of her SUV like small children. She then drives the Lange’s 350 miles south, to Moorpark College, the two-year community college where she teaches in Ventura County, outside Los Angeles.

The idea is to capture female butterflies that appear to have already mated in the wild. (They tend to have enlarged abdomens and look a little banged up.) Jana calls them “foundresses.” Having mated once, they will continue to lay eggs in captivity until they die. Jana and her students work to harvest as many eggs as they can, then rear them through the winter into butterflies. As in William Temple Hornaday’s buffalo reintroduction, they are laboring to pump out large numbers of an endangered species in a controlled environment, then releasing them into the wild to bolster the faltering population. Her first summer on the job, Jana managed to keep one foundress alive in Moorpark for twenty-eight days. The butterfly laid more than two hundred eggs in that time. It died while laying an egg, in fact. “She was a good lady,” Jana told me. “She went down swinging.”

Jana calls her outfit the Butterfly Project. It occupies a narrow, rectangular yard on a hilltop of the Moorpark College campus. The Butterfly Project is wedged inside America’s Teaching Zoo, a fully functioning zoo, housing about 125 animals, that serves as a noisy laboratory for students in the college’s exotic animal training program. It’s here that young men and women who dream of directing a troupe of performing capuchin monkeys at Universal Studios, or wrangling the live lions at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, come to learn their trade. (The degree program is called Exotic Animal Training and Management, which all the students call EATM for short. They pronounce it “Eat ’em,” and I never once heard someone acknowledge the cruel, karmic possibilities of giving that nickname to a program for lion-tamers-in-training.) It’s not uncommon while at the Butterfly Project to see a potbellied pig, or Spirit the mountain lion, or a humpy white Indian cow called a zebu pace by, out for a walk with its new student trainer, establishing a bond. A few of the younger animals at America’s Teaching Zoo are on loan from Hollywood movie studios, sent to Moorpark to be broken in. Others are retired animal actors. One morning, I met a turkey vulture named Puppy who had a cameo in
Airplane!

It was August, and Jana had delivered that year’s foundresses from Antioch Dunes only a few days before. With peak counts so low, she was permitted to catch only four butterflies. Meanwhile, the eggs laid in captivity the previous year were tearing free from their cocoons. There were now twenty-six adult butterflies in-house, and a twenty-seventh would wriggle out just before lunch. Each one had to be fed two or three times a day, by hand, with a Q-tip soaked in honeywater—an aggravating job that wound up taking all morning. In the afternoon, the foundresses were transferred onto potted buckwheat plants so they could keep laying eggs. (Students assemble homemade enclosures for each butterfly by shoving the buckwheat through the bottom of an upside-down quart-sized clear plastic deli container from a Smart & Final grocery store, ventilating it, and sealing it off from pests with duct tape and toilet paper.) The other butterflies, meanwhile, spent their afternoon split into groups of four or five. The hope is that these adults will pair off and breed, and students sign up for one-hour “mating watch” shifts to keep them under observation. It’s monotonous work; the kids are allowed to bring a book, but Jana requires them to look up and check for butterfly sex every time they turn a page.

The students also have to move the containers frequently from place to place, in and out of shade, to keep the butterflies inside from getting too hot or too cold, and to try to catch a certain mysterious quality of dappled sunlight that appears to put the insects in the mood. And so, all afternoon, Moorpark students stare at butterflies, periodically stand up, pick up their designated deli container, walk a few paces, and sit down in another ratty collapsible vinyl chair, where they resume staring blankly into the container as though it were a campfire—all while the car alarm–like shrieks of the zoo’s primates occasionally go off in the background. “We call it walking the butterflies,” I heard Jana explain while training a new student named Paul, preparing him for the tedium of mating watch. Paul was unfazed. “I inspect a thousand fruit cups at work every day,” he told her. “I totally know what you mean.”

Jana is forty-one, with long blond hair and a playful presence that’s more summer camp counselor than biology professor. She calls the butterfly larvae “chunky dudes,” and high-fives students who report in good news. She grew up in Austin, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and there’s a winning guilelessness about her that sometimes oozes into sentimentality about her work. (I once heard her tell a couple of Fish and Wildlife bureaucrats out of the blue about a lovely quote she’d found online: “Without change, there would be no butterflies.” “I like that,” Jana said, smiling.) I was both impressed and surprised that she could feel such romantic conviction, given the condition of Antioch Dunes and of her makeshift butterfly operation at Moorpark, all of which was only making me ambivalent. One afternoon, over frozen yogurt at a strip mall down the hill from the zoo, I told Jana as much. The Lange’s was forcing me to ask a question I’d mostly been trying to duck: why save any species? Compared with the polar bear, the butterfly had no public profile and middling charisma. It was hard to know who would miss it.

“Intrinsically, I just know I’m doing the right thing,” Jana told me. Still, she’s learned that you can justify saving butterflies intellectually to different people in different ways, and she started to run through some answers. She talked about “Spaceship Earth,” the idea that the planet is a spacecraft we are all living on, and that each species we destroy represents a rivet falling out of its hull. Eventually, so many rivets can be lost that the craft crashes. Wildlife does work to keep the planet functioning. And protecting individual species has proved to be a way to protect, or even repair, entire ecosystems. (Conserving top predators like wolves, for example, can initiate powerful changes all the way down a food chain, snapping the entire landscape back into balance.) This argument for biodiversity is compelling enough that an entire field has developed to itemize the work that species do and put a monetary value on their “ecosystem services.” (One recent study pegged the net worth of bats, as insect-eating helpers to America’s agricultural industry, at a minimum of $3 billion.) And yet the Lange’s is clearly one of the many species that the world would get along fine without. Even if it were an invaluable constituent of its ecosystem, that ecosystem has changed so severely that putting the butterfly back couldn’t correct it.

Jana tried another tack. She is a single mother—I’d noticed artwork by her two young sons hanging in the Butterfly Project greenhouse—and she told me about a recent trip she’d taken with her boys, driving cross-country from California to Boston. She’d gone out of her way to eat and shop at locally owned businesses, she said, to show her boys that different parts of America were, in fact, different and unfamiliar from their experience; that the United States was not one contiguous Los Angeles. There are organisms that are doing exceptionally well as humans take over the planet, Jana said: rats, pigeons, starlings, roaches, kudzu, jellyfish. Some of them are pretty cool. But they’re like ecological Applebee’s and Walmart, she said, spreading through nature and homogenizing it, while putting the more fragile mom-and-pops out of business.

One of America’s first butterfly conservationists, Robert Michael Pyle, has written about what he calls the “extinction of experience”—the idea that, while it may be important to protect species that are on the verge of disappearing forever globally, it’s also crucial to maintain the biological diversity that we find around us, locally. As Pyle’s hometown in Colorado grew from rural to suburban, many of the butterfly species he used to catch as a boy disappeared. None went extinct—they all still flew elsewhere in the United States, and sometimes abundantly—but what did go extinct is the experience of seeing them in that town and of living among them. The animals we encounter in childhood serve as our “windows on the world,” Pyle writes, and “a face-to-face encounter with a banana slug means much more than a Komodo dragon seen on television.” In that sense, if a species vanishes from within our immediate reach, it may as well be extinct worldwide. And if we don’t personally experience biodiversity, we won’t expect biodiversity to exist anywhere, or be sad to learn it is disappearing: if our baseline starts out dishearteningly low, we’ll hardly be alarmed when it shifts further.

“The point,” Jana told me, “is to keep some uniqueness in the world.” Not just for her sons, but for their sons, too.

—

J
ANA WAS COMFORTABLE
working in places like Antioch Dunes, able to see their promise. Before the Lange’s, she’d devoted herself to another beleaguered butterfly, condemned to an even grimmer landscape.

In 1994, a UCLA lepidopterist named Rudi Mattoni and two colleagues happened upon a remnant population of a gleaming blue butterfly called the Palos Verdes blue. The blue had once flown widely in Southern California, on coastal scrub. But it was believed extinct since a municipal baseball diamond was built over its last known habitat in 1983, supposedly by accident. Now Mattoni had found a population on a 331-acre Southern California naval facility known as Defense Fuel Support Point, San Pedro, built to store and distribute fuel during World War II. It’s a field of underground fuel tanks, next to an oil refinery that periodically ejects glowing gas flares several dozen feet into the air. Mattoni’s rediscovery of the butterfly occurred right around Easter. The national media portrayed it as a hopeful allegory of resurrection in an especially hopeless-seeming place.

As strange as it sounds, military bases are actually proving to be strongholds of biodiversity. Land owned by the Department of Defense now has more endangered species on it per acre than land owned by the Department of the Interior, the arm of the government that is actually responsible for setting up refuges to conserve those species. And the military prides itself on the number of endangered species that have survived on these large hunks of habitat, accidentally kept intact as bases and maneuver sites, and is working actively to sustain them. These animals include many rare and endangered birds—Kirtland’s warblers, red-cockaded woodpeckers, brown-headed nuthatches, sulfur-bellied flycatchers—and butterflies, including the Taylor’s checkerspot, largely concentrated in Washington State, on a grassland abutting a live-fire artillery range. In 2008, two former colleagues of Mattoni’s, Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, wrote an essay that celebrated these run-down habitats, as well as “derelict and degraded” urban fragments like Antioch Dunes. Though they may look nothing like our romantic images of nature, they are important sanctuaries for imperiled insects, and especially butterflies. The essay, titled “Invertebrate Conservation at the Gates of Hell,” argued that we should get over our queasiness about such places, and undo the strain of biblical thinking that sees everything but big, unbroken wildernesses as fallen from grace. Beginning to care about the butterflies sticking it out in these unspectacular niches can help us confront the world as it actually is, not how we’d still like to imagine it—to see nature in its modern context without bitterness and with a sense that lots can still be done.

After rediscovering the Palos Verdes blue at the fuel depot, Rudi Mattoni was put in charge of a captive breeding operation for the butterfly. In 2003, he hired Jana as his assistant. She had moved to Los Angeles from Austin several years earlier as a newlywed. Her husband was going to try to make it as an actor, and she was starting graduate school in ecology at UCLA. But before long, her marriage ended, devolving into what would become a contentious and drawn-out divorce. Pregnant with her second child, she was desperate for money and needed a new, more conventional job with regular hours. (Her previous fieldwork, studying the effects of wildfires on lizards in the chaparral, involved a lot of jumping around during controlled burns.) She was on the verge of moving back in with her mom in Austin when Mattoni took her on. She’d be breeding the butterfly in a fluorescent-lit double-wide trailer at the fuel depot.

The work wore Jana down. Every morning, she had to go through and individually inspect several thousand eggs or larvae with a dissecting microscope. It was horribly labor intensive—the larvae can be about the size of an eyelash—and, worse, extremely depressing: huge numbers of the young turned up dead each day; she was essentially a butterfly undertaker. (“I cried a lot,” she told me.) Meanwhile, the captive rearing program was producing only enough butterflies to breed more butterflies in captivity, not enough to release any at the fuel depot, or to set up new populations elsewhere in the species’ historic range. Jana found this discouraging. It didn’t represent a failure, exactly, but an absence of hope. She talks about her work as “undoing an injustice that was done to nature by man.” But here nothing was being done to correct the injustice done to the butterfly or to restore its former glory. The butterfly was still stifled—trapped on the military base. She felt stifled, too.

Mattoni, her boss, was an accomplished but, by all accounts, bullheaded man. Captive rearing of endangered butterflies has always been as much of an art as a science, with scientists developing their own idiosyncratic strategies and tricks. Mattoni was a pioneer of the field. In the late seventies, for example, he’d bred pink bollworm moths for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (The moths Mattoni bred were sterilized, then released into the wild to mate with the pink bollworms that were plaguing California’s cotton crop, eventually wearing that wild population down; it was a canny form of pest control.) Mattoni founded a company and worked up a large-scale, laboratory-like moth “factory” and, by 1982, was churning out two million pink bollworms a day. He became known in entomological circles for a lecture he gave called “How to Breed Two Million Moths for Fun and Profit.” His approach with the Palos Verdes blues wasn’t nearly as industrialized or clinical, but the general ethos was the same. He’d started on the project believing that there was no butterfly he couldn’t breed by the millions, either, if he wanted to.