Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (22 page)

The 1990s was actually a period of fervent experimentation in North American whooping cranedom, with government scientists and graduate students grasping at only slightly less far-fetched ideas to overcome the migration obstacle. They tried driving sandhill cranes—again, as a stand-in for whooping cranes—on a migration in a horse trailer. When the birds didn’t fly back, they drove them again, but stopped every fifteen or twenty-five miles along the way to let the cranes fly around for a few minutes, hoping this would orient them enough to connect the dots later. There were multiple attempts to imprint sandhills on an ambulance and then have the birds fly a migration behind it, swooping over back roads like police helicopters in an action movie car chase. Unfortunately, on one such trip, many birds got injured or killed when they flew into the power lines beside the road. (The researchers had mapped out a route that forced the birds to cross over power lines hundreds of times.)

By the end of the decade, there had been more than twenty different attempts to lead birds on a migration behind some sort of motorized vehicle. They tried everything. (At one point, a Russian artist was even commissioned to build a remote-controlled, super-sized whooping crane robot that could fly at the head of a flock.) But they ultimately conceded that nothing worked as well as the ultralights. And in the fall of 2001, a joint panel of U.S. and Canadian government agencies entrusted Operation Migration with whooping cranes, giving Joe and Lishman ten birds for their first migration to Florida. OM made the trip in forty-eight days. Joe told me that it’s still the fastest they’ve ever done it.

Joe was narrating this history for me over dinner one night at a steak-and-seafood joint in Necedah called the Reel Inn. The truth was, he explained, he’d fallen into conservation inadvertently. When Lishman asked him to join the first goose migration, back in 1993, he was newly divorced and bored. He’d started to suspect that he’d taken the life of a luxury car photographer as far as it could go, and was considering selling his studio and starting a marina in Ontario’s lake country with a friend. Joe had been watching Lishman work with the geese and was seduced for the same, essentially selfish reasons as his friend—for the thrill of flying with birds. But at some point, Joe looked up and found himself attending meetings of government biologists. He was filling out bureaucratic permit applications to wildlife agencies and typing up scientific papers about the ultralight migrations and publishing them in
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop
. He was committing himself to the work, in other words, with a determination that not many people who knew him at the time would have expected. Lishman would eventually get tired of the migrating lifestyle; he stopped flying with Operation Migration in 2004. But Joe was too invested to stop, even as he remarried and had a child, rebuilding his personal life in ways that made him want to stay closer to home. When I met Joe in Necedah, his daughter had just turned eleven. “It’s kind of normal for her, my being gone,” he said. “It’s getting harder, though.” Almost every autumn of her life, he has told her goodbye and spent the rest of the year flying away from her—very, very slowly.

—

O
PERATION
M
IGRATION FINALLY
got its eleven whooping cranes out of Necedah two days after that botched first try. The trip through the rest of Wisconsin was typical and slow. There were fits of flying broken up by wind and rain, which stranded them at stopover sites for days at a time. On day nine, they crossed the border into Illinois, the first of many modest milestones on migration. But almost as soon as they did, the Midwest was blasted with a weather system of biblical fury, and OM found itself grounded northwest of Chicago, in Winnebago County, for what looked to be a long, long time.

There are chores to do on down days: feeding and checking the cranes, flushing the bowels of the RVs, and keeping a supply of fresh pumpkins in the pen for the birds to spear and stomp to stave off their boredom, and to keep them from spearing and stomping each other.
*
Crew members and other WCEP partners also visit schools along the route, fielding enthusiastic questions from little kids while standing in front of the blackboard in their full white regalia. (Classes around the United States and Canada follow each year’s migration on the Internet as part of their science curriculum.) When I tagged along on one visit, to a third-grade classroom in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, an Operation Migration intern closed her presentation by inviting the children to feed each other grapes with the beak of her crane puppet.

In the end, the crew wound up grounded in Winnebago County for eleven days, a new Operation Migration record for immobility. By the time they made the next stop, the migration was in its twenty-first day overall, and they’d traveled a total of 185 miles from Necedah—about a four-hour drive.

But OM slowly gained momentum through Illinois, soaring over the endless, checkered grid of early-harvested fields and the monstrous wind farms that, over the years, have multiplied in their path. Soon they were crossing into Kentucky, and south through the state into Marshall County, just shy of the Tennessee border. There they set the birds down on a soy farm owned by a boisterous old widow named Martha.

The landowners at every stopover have volunteered their property and get no compensation for letting the birds and the half-dozen motor homes and trucks accompanying them invade their land. They don’t know when OM will arrive exactly, and have no idea how long the weather will force them to stay. And, like everyone else, the landowners are prohibited from even seeing the birds and wind up barred from the portion of their own property where OM has hidden the pen. On top of everything, they’re asked to keep the entire affair a secret—no bragging to friends and neighbors, or posting pictures on Facebook—since, for security reasons, the public is not supposed to know the cranes’ exact where abouts. (OM asked that I not use any of the landowners’ full names.) Still, over the years, the crew has grown close to many of their host families, cobbling together genuinely warm relationships from just the few days when they visit together every autumn. For the crew, it can feel like stepping into a family portrait—a living Christmas card—and noting small differences from the previous year’s snapshot: Kids get bigger. Friendly old dogs disappear. A few years ago, OM was rerouting the southern half of its migration to avoid some tricky terrain and had to scout and recruit new stopover hosts. One of the pilots, Brooke Pennypacker, drove around knocking on doors with his girlfriend, explaining the whole story—the costumes, the airplanes, the top-secret flock of imperiled birds—trying to sound as sane as he could. And it was amazing, Brooke told me, how many people welcomed him in right away and said yes. Few of the hosts are hard-core environmentalists. “But they’re like a lot of people: they would help if they had the opportunity.”

That kind of generosity fuels Operation Migration’s journey. The group gets little, if any, government money every year and has to scrape most of its budget from individual donors. A fan base of so-called Craniacs now follows the reality show–like drama of the migration every fall on OM’s Web site. A small camera mounted on the lead trike streams live footage to the Web, and Operation Migration’s blog pumps out updates several times a day. There are dramatic recaps of flights, stories about the antics of individual birds in the cohort, and news about other, older whooping cranes in the flyway who’ve graduated from the ultralight program and are now on their own—sort of like the wedding announcements and updates in the back of alumni magazines.

In short, OM has found creative ways of making ordinary people feel close to a species it is also, simultaneously, devoted to keeping as far away from people as possible. They’ve created an intimacy that’s entirely vicarious. The only time the public is even allowed to catch sight of the birds is during early morning “flyovers,” when, setting out for the next stop, the pilots lead the cranes over a predetermined gathering point, like a parking lot or wildlife sanctuary. Folks assemble at the flyover locations before dawn, bundled in their parkas, wiping the frozen sleep from their young children’s eyes. Many have read enough online about the individual cranes’ personalities to gossip knowingly about that year’s class. They buy T-shirts and DVDs from Operation Migration’s director of communications, Liz Condie, and they hand over care packages for the crew. The gifts are almost always food: heavy hams, pies, pots of chili. “Everybody puts on ten pounds on migration,” Liz told me one morning, after, in the span of two or three hours, I’d watched her collect several dozen donuts, three batches of homemade fudge, and a carrot cake. No one ever thinks to bring them a salad.

I met a lot of Craniacs at flyovers, and I liked them all. I met bird watchers and waterfowl hunters; veterinarians, tree farmers, receptionists, and stay-at-home moms. I met ex–military pilots and aviation buffs who like to geek out about the specs of the trikes. I met a woman who got enchanted by whooping cranes while recovering from brain surgery—“This is my life now,” she told me, “see wildlife and learn”—and a man who worked for a washer-and-dryer manufacturer and had driven two hours to see the departure from Necedah in an SUV with one bumper sticker that said “We Love Whoopers” and another that read “Certified Craniac.” And in southwestern Kentucky, outside a tiny white church, I met a bespectacled novelist named Squire Babcock who was lingering in the twenty-three-degree weather, still staring over the bare, black field to the spot where, a few minutes earlier, the trikes and birds had disappeared at the horizon. Babcock had been invited to the flyover by a friend and, not knowing much about the project, was still trying to get his head around what he’d seen—how utterly selfless it was, how completely
not
geared toward humans, at a time when nothing on Earth seems to be not geared toward humans. “It’s such an intensive effort,” he said. “And it’s just about the birds. It’s not about the people doing it.” Babcock could hardly fathom it. “This is almost like a kind of spiritual statement on the part of these people who are doing this,” he said. “These people are heroes.”

The commanding, even mystical allure of the project was apparent as soon as Operation Migration made its first experimental trips south. The simple image of an aircraft leading birds riveted people—just the sight of it. Especially children. When they flew over upstate New York with that first cohort of geese, Lishman remembers, kids poured out of an elementary school to watch them pass overhead and school buses pulled over on the side of the road.
*

The whooping crane has been an iconic species for generations, a symbol of all dwindling wild things and places. But now it’s as though the ultralights and cranes had fused into a new form of hybrid charismatic megafauna—an indicator species, helping people situate themselves emotionally on a planet that feels as if it’s losing its wildness completely. The old relationships have changed. As Joe put it, “The creatures that taught us the art of flying are now being helped by the aircraft they helped design.” It’s disorienting. But it’s also inspiring, in a way that seeing a flock of wild whooping cranes soar by, alone, might not be.

I’d felt it myself when, just after sunrise one morning at Necedah, I first saw a trike ushering the cranes across a foggy marsh. It was the exhilarating weirdness that comes from suddenly understanding that more is possible than you thought. It might be like what watching the plains ripple with buffalo once felt like, or the sky darken with passenger pigeons. Maybe it was what the men and women of the Pleistocene felt, twelve thousand years ago, taking in the scale of North America’s mammoths and automobile-sized armadillos, just before they started bringing those animals down with their spears. Philosophers talk about “the sublime”—about being diminished by a beauty larger than one’s self. But this is a little different: it’s the beauty of humans trying to fix a larger beauty we broke.

It never got old, the sight of an airplane leading birds. It can even feel weirdly familiar, like a picture from a bedtime story. Joe told me that, once, when his daughter was four, she turned to a friend and asked, “What kind of bird does your dad fly with?”

THEIR INCREDIBLE ESSENCE

T
here’s a very inconvenient postscript to the story of Humphrey the Humpback, the whale that got lost near Antioch Dunes. And I suppose I held it back because I worried it might spoil the uplifting resolution of the rescue’s final scene: how crowds lined the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog to watch the whale return to the ocean; how Humphrey paused underneath them to swim in circles, leap repeatedly out of the water, and slap its tail as though, as Isla’s picture book about Humphrey’s adventure described it, the whale was “saying goodbye and thank you to all his friends who had helped save his life”; and how a government spokesman—relieved, though still stumped about why the whale came upstream in the first place—could only tell the media, “Now all we can do is keep our fingers crossed and hope he doesn’t come back.”

The problem is, Humphrey did come back. One morning five years later, in October 1990, the same humpback, identified by markings on its tail fin, swam into San Francisco Bay and promptly beached itself in the mud beside a low-lying stretch of highway near Candlestick Park, tying up rush-hour traffic. It took only two days to turn Humphrey around this time, though the whale nearly died in the process. People tended to the animal around the clock, draping wet towels over its exposed skin.

The incomprehensible persistence with which Humphrey had now twice, unmistakably, swum straight into civilization made it clear how little we knew about the whale. (For one thing, scientists only recently discovered that Humphrey was actually a female.) That void was filled with lots of wide-ranging speculation. One theory was that Humphrey was a forerunner of a new species, trying to take an evolutionary leap onto land. It was the not-knowing that made the animal’s predicament even more painful to watch. “I just wish we could talk to him,” one woman on the side of the road told the press.

I thought about Humphrey while tracking the long genesis of Operation Migration’s work—how, over two decades, the entire collage of peculiar ideas had been pasted together into the costumed spectacle I was now watching. Layered inside that history, I picked up on a certain longing for closeness and collaboration with animals—for mutual understanding—and for proof that the wall between our world and theirs is an illusion; that we can enter their world, and help them, and solve problems by working closely together. It’s what made George Archibald’s dancing with Tex feel magical to the public, even as George himself felt beaten down by the work. And it’s what Squire Babcock seemed to be moved by, but still struggling to express, outside the church in Kentucky. Ultimately, what all those Craniacs and I were gathering in the cold to watch was really a kind of interspecies communication. It was a very rudimentary and not so romantic kind, but something
was
being genuinely said and understood. The white costumes were saying, “Follow me.”

Lately, a small genre of YouTube videos has centered on these momentary and almost metaphysical close encounters between people and wild animals: The woman who manages to cuddle with an elephant seal on a beach, for example. Or the middle-aged American tourist who sits stock-still on a rock in Uganda while a troop of mountain gorillas calmly encircles him. Soon the juvenile gorillas clamber up the back of the man’s shirt to inspect and groom his silver hair, as though initiating him into their ranks. The astonished, euphoric look on these people’s faces is always the same. (“I’m a gorilla!” the tourist says in a quavering whisper when the gorillas have finally trudged off.) It’s a look we’d never expect to see on someone rooting around with pigs in a barnyard, or even nuzzling a pet golden retriever. That glee, that flash of illumination, only seems to come from finding equal footing with the wild ones. We believe that they have something to teach us—that glimpsing what is common between us and the animals elevates, rather than degrades, our humanity. It’s why William Lishman first raced into the air to fly with geese in the summer of 1985, and why, a few months later, clear across the continent, so many ordinary people felt called to help Humphrey the lost whale—and why they felt called to help Humphrey again, five years after that. For most of American history, whales were seen as commodities to be cracked open for their oil. But by October 1990, even an average commuter from San Jose, standing on the side of the highway, could be found making sense of Humphrey’s return by telling a reporter from
USA Today,
“Whales are so intelligent. I think they’re connected somehow to a supreme intellect in the universe, and he’s here to help us somehow.”

I don’t know when this reverence for animals was forged. Lots of indigenous cultures, of course, felt roughly the same way about the animals they encountered. But if there was a tipping point, a moment when it was obvious that such feelings were permeating the mainstream, it was probably one afternoon in the mid-1970s when a woman named Joan McIntyre was paid a phenomenal sum of money to speak at a retreat for IBM’s “Golden Circle” of top-performing salesmen in San Francisco. With trippy footage of whales and dolphins projected behind her, she looked out on what appeared to her to be two thousand men in identical suits and haircuts and began to explain, rather rhapsodically, how liberated these animals are, and how they make love in all possible combinations: mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters.

It was the era of free love, and McIntyre—a conservationist cut from a new cloth—saw no reason why humanity couldn’t extend its love to whales.

—

J
OAN
M
C
I
NTYRE,
then in her early forties, was a glamorous and sharp-witted hippie from Berkeley who still carried the spirit of a twenty-two-year-old. She’d recently spearheaded an antifur campaign for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, and now had a large grant, no strings attached, to pursue a new cause.

Her interest in whales was piqued, in part, by
Songs of the Humpback Whale,
a record album of male humpbacks’ haunting croaks and bellows released in 1970.
*
In an interview, McIntyre later explained that something about those moaning animals tapped into feelings of loneliness that she’d carried with her since childhood. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother shuttled her between Chicago and Los Angeles, chasing work during the Depression. She was a solitary child and disappeared into the many books about fictional animals that were popular at the time, nature faker–esque tales whose animal protagonists were often friendless or abandoned. When she got involved in antifur activism in the late sixties, as an adult, it was because she could not stop herself from feeling empathy for those fur seals and minks—actually
feeling
it. It was as though, at some point in her youth, McIntyre had learned to see the world of animal sentiment and suffering she’d read about in storybooks hidden in the actual world.

When she set out to combat the commercial whaling industry in the early seventies, most nations’ whaling fleets had harpooned themselves out of a job; stocks of many species were driven so low that hunting whales was unprofitable. But the Russian and Japanese fleets were still at it, while species like the right whale and humpback nose-dived toward extinction. McIntyre began lobbying the International Whaling Commission, the multinational body that set hunting quotas, for a ten-year moratorium on all whaling. She wanted at least to hit the pause button, so that populations could be better studied and rebound. McIntyre had studying to do herself. She’d never even seen a whale.

Starting in 1971, McIntyre made a series of visits to laboratories and aquariums to learn about whale and dolphin intelligence. They were research trips—she called them “pilgrimages”—and among the most significant was her visit to the Communications Research Institute on St. Thomas. It was the headquarters of an Ivy League–educated neuroscientist named John Lilly who’d become enchanted with the enormous brains and intelligence of cetaceans while doing research for the U.S. military. (Among other things, Lilly was studying mind control, experimenting on dolphin brains as proxies for human ones.) Communicating with whales and dolphins became Lilly’s life’s work. He believed dolphins in particular could be coaxed to speak—to tune and shape their squeals into English words—and he and his colleagues saw themselves as working to usher in a harmonious “bispecies culture . . . of Dolphin and Man.” Among many esteemed visitors to the lab was Carl Sagan, who felt that trying to talk to a dolphin was a prudent practice round for our first contact with extraterrestrials. Sometimes Lilly gave the dolphins LSD.

McIntyre was drawn to St. Thomas by a story that was, in a way, a famous precursor to the pseudo-marriage of George and Tex—another sensationalized case of animal-human cohabitation. In 1965, a young woman named Margaret Howe—a hotel worker on the island who’d shown up at the institute and started helping out—had the idea that creating a
need
for dolphins to communicate with humans might force a breakthrough, the way exchange students pick up languages abroad. And so she moved in with a bottlenose dolphin named Peter, and they lived together for two and a half months in a specially constructed “flooded house.”

There was a kitchenette, an office with a chair and a desk, and a cot—all in twenty-two inches of water. Their daily schedule resembled that of a language-immersion preschool, with Howe patiently trying to teach Peter to say both their names, the numbers one to five, and so on. (She wore bright red lipstick so that Peter could better track the movements of her mouth.) They also watched television. “No matter how long it takes,” Howe assured Lilly, “no matter how much work, this dolphin is going to learn to speak English.”

Like George Archibald, though, Howe had essentially imprisoned herself with the animal and quickly experienced an agonizing loneliness. At night, she cried in her waterlogged bed. She complained of depression—also chafing. The dolphin, meanwhile, wouldn’t leave her alone; he squealed over her voice with jealousy when she tried to talk on the phone, and he bruised her shins with his constant prodding. By week five, Peter was getting frequent erections, which kept him from concentrating on his lessons. So Howe learned to massage his penis, giving him an orgasm, so he’d calm down.

Ultimately, the scientific results were not illuminating. Peter the dolphin did not learn English. But living with an animal became an ascetic, spiritual exercise for Howe and her reflections on it were fascinating. (Her journal was included in Lilly’s book,
The Mind of the Dolphin
.) Howe had ideas about how to tweak the experiment in the future, to make it more productive. “We owe it to the dolphin and to our curiosity to try it,” she wrote. But Lilly, ostracized by the scientific establishment, soon lost his funding. In 1967, the Communications Research Institute closed. When Joan McIntyre arrived four years later, she found only squalor. Deformed sea turtles swam in the dolphin pool, and the hillside was strewn with trash. Howe was still living on the island, and McIntyre tracked her down. But Howe, disappointed by the way her relationship with Peter had been portrayed in the press, wouldn’t disclose much. As McIntyre later put it, “Everyone saw her as a quirky animal-fucker.”

In retrospect, the Communications Research Institute can be seen as one root of a new kind of empathy for wild animals in America—a feeling that Joan McIntyre would help carry off the island and back to the continental United States. Today that ethos subtly colors even mainstream conversations about what’s at stake in wildlife conservation, and it was maybe even more mainstream back then. In 1972, for example, McIntyre helped bring whales into global focus as icons of the entire environmental movement—the polar bears of their day—by organizing a raucous march at a United Nations conference on the environment in Stockholm. There was a school bus gussied up to look like a whale and hippies handing flowers to the policemen they passed. But marching alongside McIntyre was former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel—a middle-aged Republican real-estate developer in a prim white tennis sweater, waving an American flag.

—

T
WO YEARS LATER,
in 1974, McIntyre published the holy book of this new whale-friendly worldview—an anthology pulling together many of the people and ideas she’d encountered on her research pilgrimages. It was called
Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins
. Its pages exploded with native legends, scientific treatises on the anatomy of whale brains, beat poetry, briefs on whaling policy, and many drawings of naked people. Though it is obscure now, the book sold well and, as one historian puts it, was embraced as the
Silent Spring
of the burgeoning Save the Whales movement.

Publicizing the book, McIntyre emerged as a vibrant and unpredictable ambassador for the animals. At the time, one newspaper profile noted, most ecological crusaders were “edifying dullards.” McIntyre, however, carried on about whales as “sensual, sexual animals,” and about fostering more “whale connectedness”; for one photo shoot, she spontaneously French-kissed an aquarium’s killer whale. (“I want to make love to a sperm whale!” she announced to a
Washington Post
columnist.) For her, the whale was “the guardian of the sea’s unutterable mysteries” and the “deep calm mind of the ocean, connected to body, living
in
the world, not looking out at it.” In short, the animals weren’t innocents that we were obligated to protect. They were equals, maybe even superiors. McIntyre was decoupling the meaning of these animals from their ecosystem, warning that the most profound consequences of their extinction could be spiritual, not ecological.

Maybe this sounds stale and flaky—the stuff that gets garbled through a cloud of smoke in dorm rooms late at night. But that’s just the point: in 1974, this was apparently a fresh and mesmerizing way to talk about wild animals. It was literally news, splashed onto the pages of the country’s most straitlaced newspapers. McIntyre was making a novel argument for saving species, swirling the outrage and urgency of William Temple Hornaday together with the sentimentality of the nature fakers and dialing up the intensity of both. The result was sexy, heartfelt, explosive, and exuberantly unscientific—a vision of whales as shamanistic creatures who only “play, swim, look for food, love, eat, travel, take care of their young and each other,” as she told one newspaper. “That to me is, like, a very instructive lifestyle. Their way could be an incredible teacher to us.”