Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (21 page)

Staller was noncommittal when I asked him for a permit. Instead, he took me on a short drive around the refuge. We stopped periodically to look at ducks—it was obvious that Staller really likes ducks—and checked out some ditches and dikes.
*

I spent the rest of the day running errands with Operation Migration. But I came back to Staller’s office before quitting time. Staller, knowing I’d been with the crew, stopped me in the doorway and looked into my eyes for a long, uncomfortable moment. Finally, he said, “You don’t
look
brainwashed.” Then he cracked a conspiratorial smile and handed me my permit, which is why I was able to stand at Operation Migration’s camp every morning and stare at the treetops in the dark.

—

T
HE FIRST DAY OF MIGRATION,
when it finally came, started like every other day except that, after peering into the leaves for twenty minutes, the pilots decided that the weather looked good enough to give it a try, and everyone filed into vans and pickups, carrying their white whooping crane costumes under one arm, heading for the ultralight hangar.

Brooke was taking the first turn as lead pilot. While the other two trike pilots hung high in the air as spotters, he circled down toward an area of the refuge called Laskey Field, where the cranes had been shuttled a few days earlier as a staging area for departure. He landed so that his propeller faced the door of their pen and started broadcasting an MP3 of a whooping crane call from a bullhorn on his rear axle—the same croaking call that had been played to them at Patuxent. Then, with the birds popping up and down and tensing their wings inside the pen, two costumed interns opened the gate and rushed out of the way.

There were ten whooping cranes, all about six months old and four feet tall, still with patches of cinnamon-colored juvenile feathers that had yet to give way to white. They gathered in a mob behind Brooke’s trike as he rose out of Laskey Field. He managed to get four clinging to the tip of one wing, but within seconds they fell behind and scattered with the others. A few birds found their way back to Brooke, but again and again new cliques of rebels—three or four cranes at a time—kept breaking away.

They were heading for Site 4, the area of the refuge where they’d been penned for most of the summer—they were, in other words, going back home. Brooke kept circling back and maneuvering the edge of his wing in front of the cranes, trying to lure them. But any progress he made never lasted. The birds flapped away again. The formation would suddenly slacken, then dissolve, the way a school of fish dematerializes. “I’ll come down on the outside of them,” I heard Joe say on the radio at one point, swooping in to cut off a few deserters.

It was chaos. It was getting difficult even to keep track of the cranes. There were a few older whooping cranes in the vicinity, too, and also lines of wild sandhill cranes—the other species of North American crane, slightly smaller than the whoopers—commuting through the trikes’ airspace. Eventually, Brooke simply decided to follow the birds back to Site 4 and land with them, giving them a rest. He would shut down his trike, kneel on the ground in his costume, and hand out a few grapes for a snack; he’d let
the birds
feel in control for a moment, then try to get airborne again. But as soon as he landed, he saw one of the cranes hobbling at the other end of the grassy runway near the door to the old pen. Brooke was worried: the legs of young whooping cranes are fragile.

By now, Joe reported, the wind had shifted. The tailwind had become a headwind—a strong one. The first migration stop, a small family farm, was twenty-three miles to the south, and it was clear that they’d never be able to push that far even if the cranes suddenly cooperated. It would be another down day after all.

So Joe landed at Site 4, too, got out of his trike, and walked right past Brooke toward the injured bird. The scaly exterior at the bottom of its leg was torn off and raw. The bird needed to be coaxed into a crate and driven to a vet—it probably needed an X-ray. They whispered into the radio for another team member to come help and started herding the rest of the cranes into their old pen. They’d pen the birds here now and try to depart again tomorrow morning—weather permitting, of course.

Meanwhile, there was trouble back at Laskey Field, too. At the outset of the flight, Joe had spotted one crane that never got airborne with Brooke and asked OM’s third pilot, a Canadian metal sculptor named Richard van Heuvelen, to circle back and cajole it into the air. “I don’t know who it is,” Joe radioed, “but it never did fly.” It turned out to be crane number 2, the biggest and most willful of the cohort. Richard could see it, still lingering at the door to the pen. Richard considered his options. Then he called for someone on Operation Migration’s ground crew to let out the Swamp Monster.

If a bird refuses to launch, or abandons the lead trike and lands back at the pen, an OM operative will often throw a brownish tarp over him- or herself and run at the crane, crumpling the tarp loudly or blasting an air horn to scare it back into the air. They call the maneuver the Swamp Monster. But this time, when one of OM’s interns Swamp Monstered crane number 2, the bird didn’t shoot skyward and latch onto Richard’s wing; instead, it made a beeline straight into the oak trees bordering Laskey Field and hid. The intern took off the Swamp Monster tarp and pursued the crane on foot in his regular white costume—he was dressed as the reassuring parent figure again. But number 2 kept retreating farther into the woods. The intern kept approaching. Number 2 wanted no part of him. It was as though this bird had had a terrible epiphany.

This could have been the first day of migration. Instead, one crane was now injured and a second had apparently experienced some sort of crippling psychotic break in midair. And rather than migrate twenty-three miles to the first stopover point, Operation Migration managed only to take the birds back to the same pen they’d transferred them out of a few days earlier. “We went backwards,” Joe said.

CRANIACS

I
n the early 1980s, thirty-five years after Josephine’s trysts with Pete and Crip at the zoo in New Orleans, America found itself swept up in another high-profile whooping crane love story—another bit of desperate matchmaking, which, if it worked, might afford the species a healthier future. The circumstances of this new couple, Tex and George, were even stranger: Tex was a female whooping crane; George was a human being.

At the time, the government biologists at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center were honing their skills at breeding whoopers in captivity, trying to extract as many genetically healthy new birds as they could from the shrunken gene pool. Tex, who’d been born at the San Antonio Zoo in 1967, was valuable in this regard. As the sole offspring of two captive cranes that had lived in the wild, she potentially carried genes that no other captive bird did. There was a problem, however. Tex’s sibling had died after hatching—one account describes Tex’s mother sitting on the chick. So, as a precaution, the zoo’s director snatched Tex into protective custody, raising her for six weeks in a cardboard box in his family’s living room. Having barely seen her parents, or any other whooping cranes, Tex was left to imprint on the one animal she did see: the zookeeper—a dark-haired white man of medium build named Fred Stark. (“This is what happens to a lot of animals,” one researcher told me, explaining how easily imprinting can go wrong. “You know ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’? It followed her everywhere? Well, the lamb imprinted on Mary.”) In short, Tex believed she was a human. She wouldn’t mate with other captive cranes—she wasn’t interested. But when a dark-haired white man of medium build walked past her pen, she would holler and grind.

George Archibald happened to be a dark-haired white man of medium build. A young ornithologist who’d worked with whooping cranes at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, he had recently founded a nonprofit, the International Crane Foundation, with a friend in Baraboo, Wisconsin. In 1976, he convinced the government to ship Tex there, and when mating season started in the spring, George subdivided Tex’s enclosure with chicken wire and claimed half of it for himself. He put in a cot and lived there as Tex’s companion. They passed entire days together: foraging, gathering material for their nest, going on walks. And they danced. George would do deep knee bends and spring up with his arms out like wings. He’d issue loud whoops and shout, “Come on, Tex! Come on!” And soon he and Tex would be dancing together, just as wild cranes do during courtship. This would get Tex aroused—
People
magazine described George’s dancing as bringing Tex to “a fervid emotional climax”—and then when the crane stood motionless and extended her wings, two of George’s assistants would rush out from a hiding place with a syringe and inseminate Tex with the semen of another captive crane, flown in fresh daily from Patuxent.

George did this for three consecutive springs, because each year either the egg that Tex laid was infertile or the chick died while hatching. In 1982, he went back at it—for six straight weeks this time. He didn’t enjoy it. He was miserable, actually. (“I was getting a little bit weird,” he told me when I met him in Baraboo, though he wouldn’t elaborate.) He had a small shed at his disposal, to stay out of the rain, with a table, a typewriter, and a stack of books. But he spent a lot of time just staring numbly at the grass. That year, however, Tex laid an egg with George sitting beside her, and in early June the egg hatched. George named the chick Gee Whiz. A
Los Angeles Times
headline read: “Man, Crane Proud ‘Parents’ of Chick.”

George was flown to Los Angeles to appear on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. He knew the publicity was valuable, but suspected that he’d been invited on the show only to be made fun of. He is a private person, he told me, and understood how strange, or even indecent, the affair looked. “It was embarrassing for me. I mean, here was this guy living with a crane.” One of his heroes, the visionary ecologist Aldo Leopold, had written a famous essay about cranes in which he calls the bird “wildness incarnate”—a resident of an “untamable past” that we humans left behind. But here, one of those stately birds had been so pitifully marooned in the modern human world that it was practically married to a man—it was about to become a punch line on late-night television. While George waited in his hotel room in Los Angeles, leafing through his Bible for some reassuring scripture, the phone rang. It was a colleague back in Baraboo, calling to tell him that Tex was dead: a thirty-five-pound raccoon had torn into her pen and ripped her apart during the night.

As it turns out, the tragedy spared George any humiliation on television. It elevated the saga of George and Tex beyond ridicule. After fielding some questions on the air that night, George composed himself and announced, “Last night, while I was on my way to California, Tex was killed by a predator.” The studio audience was stunned and stopped giggling. Twenty-two million people were watching, and the poignancy of that moment arguably brought whooping cranes to a level of visibility and sympathy that they hadn’t had since the days of Josephine, two generations earlier. The story of George and Tex, a
Washington Post
editorial noted, showed what hard work could accomplish at a time when species were vanishing at a rate of one per day. “Gee Whiz’s birth,” the paper wrote, “is one tiny step in the other direction.”

But the truth was that no one working on the whooping crane recovery knew what the next step would be: how they’d ever manage to get these psychologically bungled whooping cranes out of the lab and into the wild, released from human custody untainted and unattached. It was a peculiar puzzle to have to solve. And as you might imagine, their ultimate solution—hiring airplane pilots in white suits—was reached at the end of a long chain of other, only marginally less unnerving ideas, each one building on the last.

—

O
PERATION
M
IGRATION
traces its roots to a summer morning in 1985, three years after George’s appearance on
The Tonight Show,
when a man named William Lishman took his ultralight for a ride.

Lishman lives in a rural area of Ontario, northeast of Toronto, in a house that he designed himself. It’s a circular, domed cavern, almost completely underground, which, Lishman has said, provides his family “the security of a cave and the coziness of a cottage.” Lishman is an artist. His sculptures include a full-scale replica of Stonehenge built with old cars, and a life-sized metal Arnold Schwarzenegger, balled up as a fetus inside a twenty-two-foot-tall wire-frame uterus—a piece Lishman calls
Hasta la Vista Baby
.

Lishman had wanted to fly ever since he was a boy. All humans fantasize about flight, he says—it’s natural to look up at birds and feel envious. But Lishman’s feelings about birds move beyond envy, almost into reverence. In a memoir, he goes so far as to speculate that maybe, millennia ago, birds evolved into a technological civilization like our own, but then “thought it out well enough” and foresaw the kinds of societal and environmental problems that such a civilization would inevitably create for itself. So, instead, the birds learned to “engineer their own genetics” and evolved—albeit, seemingly backward—into the creatures we see today. They traded modernity for boundless, liberated lives. “They have no alarm clock making them report for work each day,” Lishman writes. No income tax or laundry. “Their comfort is self-contained, the only upkeep their feathers,” and they swish across the earth, following the best weather. He imagines all birds linked together by a vaguely telepathic “bird Internet,” and a flock as basically being a V-shaped kibbutz, where each individual can “enjoy the camaraderie of their kind and fly with far greater efficiency than if they traveled alone.”

I mention all this background to give some inkling of the mind-bending euphoria and freedom that Lishman felt that morning in 1985 when, flying his ultralight, he accidentally startled a flock of ducks into the air and found himself momentarily flying among them. The wild-looking man with a bristly brown beard was suddenly soaring inside a cloud of birds, sharing the air with them. It was as though he’d forged a living sculpture. He craved that closeness again. So he learned about imprinting and raised a brood of Canada geese, imprinting them on himself so that they’d follow him and his plane. Soon he was leading the geese on regular flights around his property, confusing and thrilling his neighbors. In 1989, he produced a short video called
C’mon Geese,
which is what he yelled at the birds from his cockpit to get them to follow.

It had now been seven years since George Archibald’s work with Tex, and those dreaming of reintroducing whooping cranes—of making them wild—had surmounted a few, but not all, of the roadblocks in their way. A big breakthrough had come after a psychologist named Robert Horwich approached George’s International Crane Foundation believing that a whooping crane’s freakish willingness to imprint on virtually anything might be turned into a tool to help the species, rather than just a hazard to be worked around, as it had been with Tex.

Horwich had never worked with birds before; he studied early psychological development in humans and other primates. But he suspected that young cranes went through the same developmental patterns of attachment as primates, and that understanding those phases would allow him to hack into the birds’ psychology, and manipulate them, by posing as their parent. To keep birds from imprinting on their human caretakers, researchers at the International Crane Foundation had started feeding newborn chicks with bird-shaped puppets, poked through the holes of high-walled boxes. Now Horwich wanted to actively—
intentionally
—get cranes imprinted on him. But he would wear a costume and never speak. This would allow him to act as the cranes’ surrogate parent for longer, teaching them more and more as they grew. The birds would never know that the creature they were following around was a human. George Archibald told Horwich to try it—he was not in a position to laugh at odd ideas. But George added, “I don’t think cranes can be that dumb.”

In 1985, Horwich was given ten sandhill cranes, as proxies for whooping cranes, with which to run his experiment. He led them around the marshes at Necedah, wearing a gray sack and mask with some feathers sewn on the wing-arms. Soon he taught them to fly, running alongside them like a boy launching a kite. That fall, nearly all of Horwich’s sandhills followed older sandhills on migration; they returned to the refuge the next spring. They were still afraid of humans—still wild. Horwich hadn’t left a mark.

Still, conservationists were aiming to establish a brand-new population of whooping cranes, geographically separate from the last surviving one out west. And, unlike with Horwich’s sandhills at Necedah, in such a reintroduction there wouldn’t be any older whooping cranes around for the first, costume-reared generations to follow on migration—no older, more knowledgeable animals to show them the way. And even if there were older whooping cranes around, it seemed unlikely that they—not being a colonial species like sandhills, and bonded to only their own chicks—would tolerate these young interlopers, or that the younger birds would be interested in following the older ones in the first place. (Even now at Necedah, older whooping cranes often harass or attack Operation Migration’s latest class of juveniles.)

For years, there appeared to be no way around this problem. (Scientists had already tried outsourcing the job to sandhill cranes, switching out the eggs in sandhill nests in Idaho with whooping crane eggs and hoping that the more cordial sandhills would adopt the whooper chicks and teach them to migrate. But the young whooping cranes turned out to be sexually confused by their surrogate parents, in the same way that Tex had been by her zookeeper: they were attracted to the wrong species. No new whooping cranes were ever born during that fifteen-year experiment, though the birds did manage to produce one “whoop-hill” hybrid.) Then, one day, long after Robert Horwich had moved on from his job at the International Crane Foundation, he saw a picture in a magazine of an ultralight plane leading a flock of geese. The caption under the photo said very little about the ultralight pilot. But Horwich, grasping at another far-fetched idea, tried to write the man a letter anyway. He addressed the envelope:
WILLIAM LISHMAN, THE GUY WHO FLIES WITH GEESE, BLACKSTOCK, ONTARIO CANADA.

—

B
Y THAT TIME,
George Archibald had been shown Lishman’s video,
C’mon Geese,
by a friend and was arranging meetings between the artist and other leading crane conservationists. Lishman had only wanted to fly with birds because it made him feel amazing, but he was intrigued that his new skill-set might be repurposed to do some good. It was unclear whether an ultralight could actually teach birds a migratory route, so, after some false starts, it was decided that, in the fall of 1993, as a test, Lishman would lead eighteen geese from his property in Ontario to a bird sanctuary four hundred miles away, in Virginia. Lishman needed another pilot. He asked a buddy of his from the ultralight circuit—a thrill-seeking, slightly cocky car photographer with a star in his tooth named Joe Duff.

Joe and Lishman made it to Virginia in seven days. The following spring, thirteen of the geese returned to Ontario on their own. The scheme worked, in other words: the birds had learned the route and could make the return trip themselves. The two pilots set up a nonprofit, Operation Migration, so they could fund more experiments and, over the next several years, did a number of progressively more ambitious migrations with geese and sandhill cranes. They migrated farther and farther, with more and more birds, then gradually phased out all talking during their trips and incorporated Robert Horwich’s costume idea to keep the birds from getting tamed down in the process. One autumn at a time, Duff and Lishman were building a case that—no matter how it might have looked to the Canadian and U.S. government agencies responsible for the whooping crane—these two artists in their funny airplanes could help resurrect one of the world’s most endangered birds.