Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (20 page)

And so, to keep the birds wild, every effort is made, from the time the chicks hatch in Maryland and for the rest of their lives, to prevent them from encountering even the slightest sign of humans. No one who works with the cranes is ever allowed to say a word around them. And everyone wears identical white costumes: a long, frumpy gown and white hooded helmet with mesh covering the face. (All together, it resembles a bee-keeping suit crossed with a Ku Klux Klan getup.) They also wear a crane-head puppet on one hand, which they use to show the chicks how to peck and forage. The crane bonds to the white costume, just as a chick would to its parents in the wild—trusting and readily following it around. Scientists call the process “imprinting.”

After a couple of months, the cranes are shipped from Maryland to Wisconsin, where Joe and Operation Migration’s other two trike pilots—all wearing the same white whooping crane costumes, working the same puppets, and abiding by the same monastic vow of silence around the birds—put them through a summer of flight training. Back in Maryland, the newborn chicks were played recordings of an ultralight engine, sometimes while still inside their eggs, and attuned to it as a pseudo-parental presence. Now, hearing that sound again, and drawn to the costumed pilot in the cockpit, they eagerly scuttle behind a trike as it taxis on the ground. Eventually, they scramble into the air and learn to form a line behind the wing. The birds take longer and longer practice flights, spreading behind the airplane in a lopsided or often one-sided V. Then, in the fall, everyone sets out for Florida: the trikes and the cranes, a Cessna flying above them as a spotter, and an entourage of motor homes and support vehicles spooling along the highways below.

The caravan hopscotches from one pre-scouted stopover point to the next, keeping up the same wordless, costumed charade around the cranes the entire way. The birds are transferred clandestinely, priceless works of art. From the time they land at each stopover to the time they can take off again, they’re stashed in a portable camouflaged pen, tucked out of view, and ringed by an electric fence. Costumed workers feed them twice a day, but otherwise the area is off-limits and resolutely shielded from trespassers, hunters, whooping crane lovers, journalists, and dogs.

I set out to follow one autumn’s migration. And it was only when I got on the ground that I realized that the journey was even less straightforward than it sounds. This work—this wholesale manufacture of wild birds by human beings—turns out to be so ambitious, tedious, and packed with perplexing arcana that, after ten years, it’s hard for those who have given their lives to the project even to agree on how well it’s working and what they should do next. Under the surface, I’d find a simmering clash of theory and practice—and also a clash of personalities: the artists and scientists, vagabonds and bureaucrats that had thrown themselves together into the sort of improbable partnership that is capable of conceiving and pulling off something so bizarre, if it wasn’t first swallowed by its own eccentricities. As in the time of Robert Porter Allen and George Douglass, the fate of the whooping crane hinged on the cooperation of very dissimilar people, the volatility of their individual spirits, and the resilience of their wills. At some point that fall, I would lose interest in the legendary wildness of whooping cranes and wind up wonderstruck, instead, by the wildness of human beings—whatever unfathomable force inside us that had once nearly destroyed the bird and was now beating just as uncontrollably in a cockpit at the front of the flock.

The journey from Wisconsin to Florida is 1,285 miles long. Many times, Operation Migration has left in the middle of October and not reached the end until late January. It’s a sluggish, sometimes maddening way to travel the length of America—so baldly inefficient, so crazy-seeming on its face that, I’d notice, it often needs to be explained multiple times to the greasy-spoon cashiers and gas station attendants that Operation Migration encounters along the way. It’s hard to believe. Already it’s come to this on Planet Earth: men dressed like birds, teaching birds to fly.

—

T
HE SCREEN DOOR
of Joe Duff’s RV battered shut behind him. It was before dawn one morning in early October, at the migration’s starting point, the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, northwest of Madison, Wisconsin. “We’re not going today,” Joe said, and brushed past one of the Japanese guys who’d been waiting at the door for him to appear.

Joe is tall with silver-threaded, wavy hair, bright gray-blue eyes, and high cheekbones that give him a flash of boyishness when he chooses to smile. When he doesn’t, like now, he can unintentionally project a detached and slightly smoldering intensity.

The three Japanese guys were television reporters. They were waiting to film the start of that fall’s migration for what they described as Japan’s equivalent of
Good Morning America
. Joe was away from the refuge when they’d arrived, and because reporters can get pushy and try to talk their way into putting on a white costume and getting close to the cranes, he’d warned one of Operation Migration’s other pilots before he left, “Don’t let them push you around.” This turned out to be unnecessary advice. The Japanese men seldom spoke and dispensed a small wrapped gift to every person they interviewed. Just before Joe stepped out of his trailer, the smallest of the men had been milling outside the door, considering and reconsidering whether it would be too presumptuous to knock.

The Japanese guys had been standing by in Necedah for a week already. When they arrived, Operation Migration was still going through its final preparations: dismantling equipment and sorting through the kitchens of their RVs, separating the boxes of pasta that mice had crapped in over the summer from the clean pasta. But after a few days, everyone was ready to go, and it was only a matter of catching the right weather. Now Joe made it clear that the weather still wasn’t right, and we’d all be waiting at least one more day.

The weather lords over Operation Migration like the gods in a Homeric epic, limiting or enabling their actions. Not every day that looks sunny and clear is a good flying day; not even most days are. Though wild cranes can fly the entire migration in as little as a week, swirling up to eight or ten thousand feet on columns of rising, warm air and coasting for miles, the trikes can’t keep up with the birds at such altitudes and must stay closer to the ground, forcing the birds to flap the whole way. And both the trikes and the cranes have fussy, sometimes opposing requirements as to the kinds of weather and wind they’ll fly in. Conditions need to be almost perfectly calm during a narrow window just after dawn. The slightest headwind can give the birds an excuse not to bother following the planes, or make the trip to the next stopover take so long that the birds won’t have enough stamina to make it. Even a tailwind can be the wrong kind of tailwind: if the air is too choppy, the trike wings will wobble and jerk, and the birds, unable to lock in, will eventually lose patience and land.

Consequently, everyone in Operation Migration obsessively consults his or her favorite esoteric weather report, but ultimately, no one places trust in any of them. And so a routine was now solidifying at Necedah. Before sunrise every morning, OM’s three pilots would stand outside at their campsite, under a sliver of moon, and stare silently at the trees, trying to discern any movement in the leaves, to gauge the wind speed and direction. Then the Japanese guys would pull into camp and hop out of their truck. One of them would say, “Joe, how is the weather?” and because the weather was inevitably not good enough to fly, they’d all be back in their truck within minutes, heading for their motel room to confront another day without a single commitment in central Wisconsin. This went on for several days. It got a little baffling. One morning, for example, the pilots reached an immediate and solid consensus that the day was a no-go, based on the agitated rustling of the trees. But I couldn’t see any rustling. “You can hear it,” a pilot named Brooke Pennypacker whispered to me. I couldn’t hear any rustling, either.

That fall, OM would be making its tenth whooping crane migration. There were, by that time, about a hundred older cranes flying around Necedah, the majority of them graduates of previous years’ journeys. Having each been shown the way once by the trikes, the cranes had been migrating back and forth by themselves every autumn and spring ever since, set in motion like so many sweeping pendulums. They’d soon begin heading south again. Occasionally, you’d spot their waiflike white shapes standing in the reeds far away. It was impressive—all that physical, free-ranging proof of the reintroduction’s success. And yet, as I was starting to understand, after a decade of work the entire project had now reached a dramatic, and not especially friendly, crossroads.

The reintroduction is overseen by a coalition of eighteen government agencies and nonprofits, including Operation Migration, called the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, or WCEP (pronounced “
Wee-
sep”). When WCEP formed, it was trying to help deliver the species from the throes of a crisis; the airplane idea, as odd as it looked, got more whooping cranes out onto the land, so they simply kept at it. “The reality,” one partner at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told me, “is that, for much of the life of the project, we’ve more or less done this by the seat of our pants.” But despite having put some real distance between the bird and extinction by now, they’d never quite evolved out of that finger-in-the-dike mind-set. Earlier that year, an external review of WCEP had slammed the partnership for its “inertia to change . . . communication problems and internal politics.” There was too much gut instinct, not enough empiricism. “Underlying many of these problems,” the auditors wrote, “is a misunderstanding and poor appreciation of just what
is
science.”

So WCEP was now taking a step back—to question some of the assumptions that they hadn’t stopped to question before, run lots of studies, and think through the most efficient and cost-effective ways to go forward. At a series of meetings just before I arrived in Necedah, WCEP also totally reorganized itself, revamping the sometimes aggravating looseness of the organization into a proper bureaucracy, with different “teams,” and flowcharts demonstrating how the teams were supposed to communicate with one another and make decisions.

All of this reassured the scientists in the partnership; they tended to like flowcharts and wanted to learn everything they could about whooping cranes and keep rigorously refining the process. But there are no scientists in Operation Migration. They’re all laymen, all of whom had taken a circuitous route to crane conservation and uprooted their lives over the last decade. They basically wanted to keep plowing ahead and worried that—ten years and a hundred whooping cranes into the project—the more scientifically conservative attitude rising within WCEP could unnecessarily undermine the momentum they’d built. “We are not scientists,” Brooke told me. “We’re construction workers. We’re building a flock of whooping cranes. I’m not ashamed of that.” The partnership had always been full of hardheaded, passionate people—idealists with differing convictions about how to do the most good. (One member recalled facilitating a two-hour debate about whether to outfit the cranes with tracking bands that snapped around their legs, or bands that were glued on.) But negotiating this turning point had made a long-standing undercurrent of competitiveness between some of the WCEP partners even more glaring. There was especially a fairly widespread resentment of Operation Migration.

“OM has the ability to piss a lot of people off,” one government scientist in the partnership told me. Joe Duff, by his own admission, wasn’t always the easiest guy to work with. He knew he could be inflexible and in the past had been quick to lose his temper. But he also felt his team had an unfair reputation as glory hounds and egomaniacs. (They always got the majority of the media attention, simply because they were the ones flying the airplanes in front of the birds, he said.) Meanwhile, three key people at the Fish and Wildlife Service who’d been Operation Migration’s biggest champions in the partnership were now retiring. Joe had taken to calling these men “the patron saints of whooping cranes.” They’d understood that little about what was being attempted, and about some of the people attempting it, fit neatly into the strictures of the existing wildlife bureaucracy. But for them, saving the crane was deeply personal—the central work of their careers. And so, without cutting corners exactly, they’d always found a way to move the recovery forward and keep the peace. Their replacements weren’t necessarily so accommodating or forgiving. One partner described the new guard to me as “dedicated bureaucrats,” rather than dedicated conservationists. “They want to preserve their jobs.”

One of these newcomers was Doug Staller. Staller, a high-energy guy with a military crew cut, had recently been made the new manager of the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge by the Fish and Wildlife Service. He was under the impression that his predecessor had cut Operation Migration too much slack. And so, that summer, Staller started restoring order. He had, for example, barred OM from training the cranes in certain areas of the refuge, claiming that the ultralights were bothering other species of birds. I’d noticed whooping crane banners on the light posts up and down Necedah’s struggling main drag. The wireless password at my motel was “whooping-crane.” But Staller didn’t seem to care about that sort of charisma or feel a special obligation to the whooping crane; instead, he kept invoking the “congressional mandate” of the refuge to be a sanctuary for all migratory waterfowl, equally. When we met, Staller even questioned why WCEP was going through all the fuss, dressing up in costumes and such, to pamper what were supposedly wild animals. “Actually,” he told me, “I have thought long and hard about bringing my two big Labradors out here on a long leash and—not catching a crane—but just chasing them,” to toughen them up.

I’d gone to see Staller my first morning in Necedah because, whereas guests used to come and go freely from Operation Migration’s little encampment of RVs on the refuge, Staller now required everyone to have a permit, issued through his office. He seldom issued them. He told me he worried that journalists like me would hang around with OM and get “seduced” by their celebrity, taking their side in the disagreements now weighing down the partnership. “This is biopolitics at its worst,” Staller said.