Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (27 page)

Thirty-one minutes from now, they would all look up and watch Brooke’s trike pass directly overhead at five hundred feet, low enough so that, when he banked left to steer the cranes over for a second showing, everyone on the ground could see the broad white arm of his costume waving to them.

Soon we were twenty-four minutes away. Then eighteen minutes out. The whooping cranes hadn’t so much as twitched from their places behind Brooke. There was nothing to do. In the Cessna, Jack reached into the backseat beside me and pulled a granola bar from the pocket of his coat.

—

V
ERY LATE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT,
I’d run into Joe at the KOA campground’s game room. I was looking for Internet access. That winter, when I wasn’t on migration, I was home touring preschool after preschool with my wife, and now I’d promised that I would bang out all the applications before I came home from Florida.

It was dark out, and through the game room window, behind a nativity scene of porcelain miniatures, I could see Joe, sitting in a folding chair in an Operation Migration sweatshirt, one arm drooped across the exercise machine beside him. He had a load of laundry going in the coin-op washer outside and was waiting to dry it. His head was winched up—uncomfortably, it seemed—so he could stare at the television mounted from the ceiling. The only light in the game room came from a Christmas tree in the corner and the flickering of
Two and a Half Men
. I stopped for a second on the path outside, because I wanted to remember the image. It was a portrait of the twenty-first-century conservationist on the road—a man without the luxury of believing that anything would be simple, or of any expectation of closure, but still trying.

In the end, the embittered atmosphere around the whooping crane reintroduction had only made me admire everyone in the partnership more. Because, even as they thwarted themselves, everyone was still trying. There was no getting around that fact, and so much dignity in that persistence. I had never seen courageousness that looked quite like it.

It was heroism in the Sisyphean sense, just as all conservation may be, since implicit in that work now is the impossibility of its ever being finished. It requires rallying the will to build something that the future is likely to erase. Even Joe, in one of his darker moods, had admitted to me, “There’s no hope for whooping cranes in the long term.” Climate change, for one thing, will put much of the marshland we’ve protected for the species underwater. Joe seemed acutely conscious of how much climate change might upset or wreck. And he worried about the plastic infusing the world’s oceans, too, and overpopulation—the whole litany of environmental terrors. “I’ve been involved in this for so long, I’m to the point now that I wish I hadn’t had a daughter,” he confessed. “I worry my daughter’s going to have a shit life. I really do. That’s scary. I mean, we’ve left a mess. I think the world is facing a major crisis, and nobody cares. And I don’t know what to do, do you? But I feel like I’m doing something useful. I’m doing
something,
and I don’t know if it’s going to work out or be worth anything, but at least we’re trying.”

I didn’t have any better answers. After everything I’d seen, I had no solution for fixing a broken world. But, then again, that’s only one of the problems we’re facing. Another is just figuring out how we are supposed to live in a broken world. And, I realized, more than anything having to do with wild animals or biodiversity or the environment,
that
was the problem that I’d been wanting to give my daughter a head start in solving for herself.

—

B
ACK IN THE
C
ESSNA,
a voice cut in on the radio: “You guys still on course?” It was Liz, Operation Migration’s woman on the ground in St. Marks. She was standing on the stage at the party, killing time as best she could, reminding the crowd of Craniacs to buy their Operation Migration T-shirts and videos and whooping crane Christmas ornaments. People were desperate for an update. I could picture them assembled on the lawn, blowing into their hands or resting them on their sons’ and daughters’ shoulders, all turned to face in the same direction, searching the sky for movement.

I suddenly realized that none of us in the air had said a word in a long, long while; the radio had been silent. I don’t think Brooke had spoken at all. I’d spent most of the flight staring out my window at him in his trike, a thousand feet down, with the five whooping cranes fastened to his wing—the six of them in white, tied together as one object and hanging over Florida like a mobile above a crib.

It’s what I remember most—not the arrival, but the long, uncertain lull beforehand.

“We’re eight miles out,” Joe finally answered.

“We’re looking for you,” said Liz.

THE MAN WHO CARRIED FISH

I
started out from home early one morning, long after the whooping crane migration was finished, closing the car door softly, and rolling away from the curb under Isla’s bedroom with the headlights off, so I wouldn’t wake her. Seven hours later, having twisted through the snow-caked Sierra and wound south, I reached Phil Pister’s house in a small desert town called Bishop, California.

Pister had celebrated his eighty-third birthday two weeks earlier. His skin was bronzed and rough-looking and pooled off his hands. I’d come to ask him to tell me a story—a story I’d heard in the course of my research a couple of times, but only secondhand and in the broadest strokes possible, as though it were a myth from outside of time. It was the story of one man—Phil Pister—who was tested in the desert. People called it the “Species in a Bucket” story.

It was August 18, 1969, Pister began. He was forty, and already fifteen years into his career as a fish biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game, here in Bishop. One afternoon, a young guy who worked for him named Bob Brown swept through his office door. The kid looked on edge. “And he says, ‘Phil, we’ve got to get out to Fish Slough, because if we don’t, that pond is going to dry up!’”

Fish Slough is a narrow, marshy depression in a valley of pale green scrub north of town. Water burbles out of the sand from a handful of springs at the north end, then flows south before heading for the Owens River. Much of the land in and around Bishop is owned by the city of Los Angeles. For almost a century, the city has reengineered the landscape into a giant funnel, diverting water to its residents more than two hundred miles away. Water has also been pumped out locally. Gradually, a rambling network of pools tightened into a thin spindle of water. And that particular summer, during a long heat wave, the high grasses were sucking the slough dry without anyone’s noticing. Except Bob Brown, the kid in Pister’s doorway. “What Bob didn’t say when he came in,” Pister explained, “but what was very obvious, is that if that pond dries up a species is gone.”

The Owens pupfish lives in the pools at Fish Slough and nowhere else in the world. It’s two inches long and otherwise so mundane-looking that it escaped my powers of description, no matter how intently I stared at the photo of one on Pister’s wall and tried to jot down something meaningful about it in my notebook. It is beige.

One biologist told me that, before European settlement, the Owens pupfish lived in Fish Slough “by the zillions.” But by the 1940s, with the pools in Fish Slough shriveling, the species had been presumed extinct. It was rediscovered by two visiting scientists in 1964. Pister was in the field with them, and, he told me, seeing a small riot of these ghosts still zipping around in the water, he experienced something comparable to a religious enlightenment. All of a sudden, the work he did for the state government seemed worthless. “Not only did I drop everything right then, Jon,” Pister said, “but I never picked it up again.”

There are roughly one thousand lakes in the region around Bishop, and Pister’s job at the time was to fill them, and keep them filled, with the species of fish that fishermen wanted to catch. America has been stocking its waterways with nonnative fish at least informally for more than a hundred years, just as game wardens might introduce deer, elk, partridge, and other animals for hunters. (Even John Muir, the prophetic champion of raw wilderness in the Sierras, advocated fish stocking. Good fishing opportunities, Muir argued, would draw Americans into the mountains, where they could be rejuvenated. Trout were “bait for catching men, for the saving of both body and soul.”) When Pister was on the job, fish stocking was a multimillion-dollar state-run operation. (Like many states, California still does a fair amount of it.) Trucks dumped trout and bass, mass-produced in hatcheries, into lakes and streams near the roadside. Mules carried them into the backcountry. At the most remote lakes, airplanes flew overhead and opened their hatches, and fish came raining down. In a way, the entire undertaking was a mirror image of the monumental salmon conservation project that the fish counters I’d met are a part of at Bonneville Dam. Back then, Pister was keeping rivers full of the fish that America thought were most delicious. Now there’s a movement to keep them filled with the fish we think are most ecologically appropriate. Either way, though, you could argue, we are engineering nature to satisfy our taste in fish.

Seeing the Owens pupfish still alive in 1964, Pister suddenly flipped from one mind-set to the other. He realized he’d been devoting his life to supplying anglers from Los Angeles with coolers full of trout. Meanwhile, the region’s native fish were quietly vanishing—largely into the stomachs of the bigger, hungrier fish that Pister was setting loose in their territory. And so he started working behind his bosses’ backs to restore Fish Slough, trying to give the newly resurrected Owens pupfish a fighting chance to rebound there. Soon he was laboring for the benefit of other native fishes, too. That is, Pister was spending enormous amounts of his own time and money undoing exactly the sort of “improvements” that he was engineering at his day job.

By 1969, when Bob Brown came to Pister’s office door, there were about eight hundred pupfish living in a single small pool at Fish Slough. This was the pond that Brown was warning him about, the one going dry. Pister grabbed Brown and another coworker and raced to the site. There was still water left in the pond, but it was hot and virtually stagnant, bereft of oxygen. Many fish were dead. The men netted as many of the living ones as they could and transplanted them into “live cages”—small cloth-sided boxes that allow water to circulate through, but keep the fish contained. Then they put the live cages closer to the mouth of the spring, where the water was flowing more rapidly. The ordeal was over, it seemed. It was dark now, Pister told me. “I told my buddies to go get something to eat.”

Pister watched them drive away and started cleaning up. Before he headed home, he decided to take one last look. The situation had changed. Many of the pupfish in the live cages were now swimming belly-up at the surface, knocking into the thick, drifting traffic of those that were already dead. “I could see the bottom line on this. None of them were going to be alive much longer,” he told me. “And that is when I went across the marsh, holding those two buckets.”

He had two five-gallon buckets in his truck—the big white kind that they make pickles in, he explained. He filled them with water and began scooping up the fish that were still alive and putting them into the buckets. Then he lifted the handles and started to walk.

It was two hundred yards back to his truck. Pister had taken a few steps when the harrowing thought occurred to him that he was carrying the totality of a species in his two hands. He scanned the ground for snares of barbed wire and other obstacles, trying not to trip. Then he loaded the buckets onto his truck bed, sat in the driver’s seat, and turned the key.

He’d made a snap decision to move the fish to another spring at the opposite end of Fish Slough, where he knew the water was cooler and deeper. The two springs are about a half-mile apart and connected by a doglegging dirt road that is packed with rocks; it is not a smooth ride. I asked again and again, but Pister couldn’t remember what was going through his mind that night as he crept through the dark in his pickup, the two buckets of fish standing side by side on the truck bed behind him, joggling and splashing as he drove. I could almost see him: this minor Noah, moving the animals through an imperceptible flood. But there was a matter-of-factness to Pister’s telling: he was confronted with a small, obvious crisis and saw a way to solve it, so he did. When he finished telling his story, Pister just looked at me and said, “It’s something you do, you know?”

—

I
N 1931,
near the end of his life, William Temple Hornaday began his last book by slinging insults at America’s most prominent conservationists. He had given up on groups like the Audubon Society; they seemed to him cowardly and ineffective. Conservationists were not saving anything from destruction, he wrote, but only “humbly meandering along behind the firing lines, picking up the cripples.”

Hornaday called the book
Thirty Years War for Wild Life: Gains and Losses in the Thankless Task.
It was both a memoir of his many campaigns and a continuation of the same spittle-ejecting invective he’d been writing for most of his life. By then, he’d become insufferably morose. In the book’s final section, called “The Curtain,” he wrote, “Regarding the future of the wild life of North America and the world at large, the author of this volume is a calamity-howler and a pessimist of the deepest dye.” He had tried to “inject humanity and courage into the hearts of men,” to awaken them to the value of their nation’s wildlife, but now believed it couldn’t be done. Maybe, he wrote, the only hope for preserving animals now was to control the appetites of Americans “despotically” with “the power of a Mussolini.”

“Think it over,” Hornaday wrote. “But, meanwhile, prepare for the Worst.”

It’s now been forty years since America passed the modern Endangered Species Act, committing itself to a brand of ecological idealism that really isn’t so different from what drove Hornaday. It’s pretty simple stuff, rooted in the same lessons that Isla is now learning at preschool: Be considerate of others. Don’t take more than your share. Clean up your mess.

Understandably, beliefs like those will start to feel confused when the children who have internalized them start applying them to a larger, more complicated world. Even the situation of the Owens pupfish isn’t as simple as the “Species in a Bucket” story makes it sound. I’d imagined Pister, having reached the end of the road, tenderly tipping the buckets into the new spring and watching the pupfish scatter. But in fact first he had to poison out all the other, predatory fish there. Then, later that summer, he built a gravel dam to shore up that new sanctuary—and on and on the management went, and still continues today.

When I visited Fish Slough recently, a retired government biologist named Terry Russi told me that the pupfish are “really no better off than they were forty-five years ago,” when Pister moved them. The species lives in only four tiny pools, one about the size of the truck that Pister rescued it in, and right-wing residents of Bishop, with their ideological disdain of government projects, have occasionally tried to sabotage the operation by putting bass in the slough to gobble up the endangered fish and end the whole affair. By now, the government doesn’t even disclose the locations of some Owens pupfish habitats, and there are no signs about the fish at Fish Slough. Instead, the spring where Pister brought his buckets that night is fenced with barbed wire, attended by a $17,000 instrument to measure its flow, and blockaded at one end by a fish-proof barrier to keep out predatory fish and keep the pupfish inside. The scene was part witness-protection program, part hospice. Standing at the edge of the pond, Russi explained that if vegetation is allowed to build up on the barrier’s stainless-steel grate, the way scirpus and bulrush reeds had collected there now, the barrier won’t work—predators can swim right over it. And so, mid-sentence, Russi suddenly dropped to all fours and started pulling the reeds out.

This is what a lot of America’s war for wildlife looks like forty years into its current phase, ten years longer than Hornaday had been fighting his own war when he finally seemed unable to stomach it any longer. In fact, over the last ten years, support for all kinds of environmental causes has sagged in our country. Conservationists have been driven to take more absolute and truculent stands, because they believe that even the smallest defeat will erode the bigger principles. They’ve opposed solar panel arrays and wind farms—green energy projects that would, in theory, help all species—for the sake of the desert tortoises or imperiled birds that live nearby. Meanwhile, on the other side, fuses have started blowing. During the time I was writing this book, I kept noticing headlines about horrendous explosions of spite toward protected species: the corn and soybean farmer in Minnesota, for example, who in 2011 became so irritated by American white pelicans trampling his crop that he eventually snapped and smashed thousands of their eggs and stomped young chicks to death. Since 2007, eleven whooping cranes have been found shot dead in the wild. One was the matriarch of the First Family, and in that case, even though government investigators found the shooters and got a conviction, an unimpressed judge in Indiana sent the men away with a $1 fine.

This is why, when I’d first heard the “Species in a Bucket” story, I assumed it wasn’t true. It sounded too pat, like just the sort of fable that American conservationists would need to tell themselves at a time when their work has become mercilessly convoluted and drawn out. The simplicity of what happened at Fish Slough in 1969 seemed to absolve everyone and bring the entire issue back into comprehensible terms—a basic place of agreement from which we might start over. There are people who wouldn’t have gone through the trouble to move those fish, had they been in Phil Pister’s place. But if you strip away the politics, the money, the philosophical arguments, and the appeals to moral responsibility—if you just see the man and the fish—I’d like to believe that almost everyone can appreciate why he did. Even Isla understood it. “Because fish need water,” she explained, when I got back from Bishop the next evening and told her the story.

—

“W
HAT A GREAT STORY,”
Brooke Pennypacker said.

It was September, a year after the whooping crane migration I’d followed to Florida began, and Brooke and I were having dinner at a roadhouse deep in central Wisconsin. I’d just repeated the legend of Fish Slough for him, and Brooke, who saw life as nothing but a chain of stories, was now visibly turning over the implications of this one in his mind.

Operation Migration had survived—at least for another year. That January, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership finally found a new site from which to launch an ultralight migration, now that Necedah was off the table: a remote state wildlife preserve called White River Marsh. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources hustled to get all the permits hammered into place only two weeks before Operation Migration needed to start training cranes. Then a gaggle of Craniacs arrived to help. A pen needed to be built. A pond had to be dug. Trees had to be felled to clear a runway for the trikes. They worked in a downpour, like neighbors raising a barn.