Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (30 page)

Basic info about the Lange’s metalmark, both here and in later chapters, comes largely from Richard A. Arnold and Jerry A. Powell, “
Apodemia mormo langei
,” in
Ecological Studies of Six Endangered Butterflies (Lepidoptera, Lycaenidae: Island Biogeography, Patch Dynamics, and the Design of Habitat Preserves)
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), a book adapted from Arnold’s dissertation.

7. S
HIFTING
B
ASELINES

Recently, Liam O’Brien built a Web site, sfbutterfly.com, a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more, and get excited about, the butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area. I also learned about the region’s butterflies from Arthur Shapiro at the University of California at Davis, and an undated and unpublished article Shapiro sent me called “Urban Survivors: San Francisco Butterflies Today,” by H. V. Reinhard. The French lawyer I mention was named Pierre Joseph Michel Lorquin.

I learned more about Hans Hermann Behr, James Cottle, and the butterfly scene of turn-of-the-century San Francisco from stories in the
San Francisco
Chronicle
and
the
San Francisco Call
. These include “A Doctor’s Career,”
Morning Call,
October 1, 1893; “The Butterfly: Something About the Gaudy Ephemera,” by Charles Belknap,
San Francisco Chronicle,
November 2, 1890; and “By Day He Catches Burglars; By Night He Catches Bugs,”
San Francisco Sunday Call,
February 20, 1910. I also read Behr’s essay “Changes in the Fauna and Flora of California,” in the
Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences
(1888) and “Butterflies—Try and Get Them,” by Laurence Ilsley Hewes in the May 1936 issue of
National Geographic
. James Cottle’s memoir is called “On the Wing—a Retrospect,” and was published in
The Pan Pacific Entomologist
4 (1928). Two histories by Robert Michael Pyle were also valuable: “Conservation of Lepidoptera in the United States,”
Biological Conservation
9 (1976) and “A History of Lepidoptera Conservation, with Special Reference to Its Remingtonian Debt,”
Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society
49 (1995).

Harry Lange recounted the day he caught Xerces in the Presidio in “Saying Goodbye,” by Mark Jerome Walters in the December 1998 edition of
National Wildlife
. Thanks to Ed Ross, the entomologist who was with Lange that day, for meeting with me. I also learned about Lange from Hannah J. Burrack, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, who’d interviewed many of his colleagues for a University of California, Davis, symposium in his honor, and from “Harry’s Just Wild About Battling Bugs,” by Art German in the
Sacramento Bee
, January 28, 1993.

The term “shifting baselines syndrome” originated in Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baselines Syndrome of Fisheries,”
TREE
10 (1995). My other sources on the subject include Daniel Pauly et al., “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs,”
Science
279 (1998); and Karen A. Bjorndal and Alan B. Bolten
,
“From Ghosts to Key Species: Restoring Sea Turtle Populations to Fulfill their Ecological Roles,”
Marine Turtle Newsletter
100 (2003).

Peter J. Kahn Jr.’s writing on environmental generational amnesia is outright revelatory. See his book
Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), and “Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia,” in
Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural and Evolutionary Investigations
, eds. Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Stephen R. Kellert (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 93–116.

To learn about rewilding, I read Josh Donlan, “Re-wilding North America,”
Nature
436, August 18, 2005, and C. Josh Donlan et al.
,
“Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty-First Century Conservation
,
”
The American Naturalist
168 (2006). The letters from the public—“colossal asshat” and so forth—are quoted in C. Josh Donlan and Harry W. Greene, “NLIMBY: No Lions in My Backyard,” in
Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past
, ed. Marcus Hall (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 293–305.

8. O
UR
V
ANISHING
W
ILDLIFE

Thanks to Dé Mackinnon, my mother-in-law, for sending me the newspaper clip about turtles causing trouble at JFK. I can’t cite the specific article, however, because, not realizing its significance at the time, I threw it out.

I read about sea turtles in Columbus’s time in Wilcove’s
The Condor’s Shadow
, 154, which relays the 660 million estimate. The subject is also covered in Bjorndal and Bolten’s “From Ghosts to Key Species” paper. I read about bears ruining Internet connections in “For Idaho and the Internet, Life in the Slow Lane,” by Katharine Q. Seelye,
New York Times
, September 13, 2011.

Other good accounts of early American wildlife can be found in Peter Matthiessen’s
Wildlife in America
(New York: Viking, 1959) and Jennifer Price’s essay collection
Flight Maps
:
Adventures with Nature in Modern America
(New York: Basic Books, 2000). Details about Martha’s posthumous flight to San Diego come from newspaper stories about the trip and from James Dean, at the Smithsonian, who I also thank for a fun behind-the-scenes tour.

Details about buffalo in this section come from Dehler’s “An American Crusader”; Barrow’s
Nature’s Ghosts
, 113–20, which does a good job of framing Hornaday’s effort in the context of other conservation; and William Temple Hornaday’s own book-length report,
The Extermination of the American Bison,
published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1889 and reprinted by the Smithsonian Press in 2002. The account of buffalo charging into a moving train is in Richard Irving Dodge,
The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants
(New York City: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 121–22. The “rate of extermination” quote comes from “A Mighty Herd Has Gone,”
Washington Post,
April 15, 1889.

Gregory Dehler’s dissertation on Hornaday, “An American Crusader,” was the key source for me as I tried to understand the man’s life and work. In addition, I read Hornaday’s
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
(New York: Scribners, 1922);
Thirty Years War for Wild Life: Gains and Losses in the Thankless Task
(New York: Scribners, 1931); and
Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation
, cited previously. I also drew from Hornaday’s speech, “Last Call for Game Salvage,” published in
Proceedings of the North American Wildlife Conference Called by President Franklin D. Roosevelt
(1936).

The truth is—if it’s not already obvious—that I got a little obsessed with Hornaday. I spent many hours reading old newspaper stories about him, primarily in the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
. His complaints about litter at the zoo, for example, were published as “Director of Zoo Makes Protest,”
New York Times,
May 28, 1908, and he remembered “Dohong,” the philosophizing orangutan, in “Dr. William T. Hornaday, King Among Beasts, Tells of the Great Animals He Has Known,”
Washington Post,
November 22, 1908. Hornaday’s chart, in which the beaver scores 100 for “Original Thought,” was published in
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals,
41.

The historian Frank Graham describes Hornaday as being written out of the history of the environmental movement in
Man’s Dominion
(New York: M. Evans & Company, 1971), 207. Hornaday’s unpublished memoir, which I quote from, is titled
Eighty Fascinating Years
, and part of the William Temple Hornaday Papers at the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, New York. Details about his funeral were pulled from Dehler’s dissertation and “Notables Attend Hornaday Rites,” in the March 10, 1937, edition of the
New York Times
.

Much later, when I was done writing about Hornaday but still often found myself fishing through newspaper archives for stories about him anyway, I found one called “Dead Curator Calls Upon Live Ones to Preserve Bison Family He Slew,” by Paul Sampson in the
Washington Post,
July 23, 1957. The article explains that the Smithsonian had recently dismantled Hornaday’s taxidermy buffalo group—the one he assembled after his hunt in Montana. Workmen discovered a rusty metal box buried in the exhibit’s fake ground. Inside the box was a note that Hornaday had written to his successors at the museum. “When I am dust and ashes I beg you to protect these specimens from deterioration and destruction,” it said.

For estimates of the number of insect species, and their ecological contributions, I relied on Scott Hoffman Black and D. Mace Vaughan, “Endangered Insects,” in Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of Insects
, volume 2
(San Diego: Academic Press, 2009), 320–24. To learn about the modern history of insect conservation—or the lack of insect conservation—I read “The Danger of Deception: Do Endangered Species Have a Chance?” Scott Hoffman Black’s written testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources Oversight Hearing, May 21, 2008, and the two historical studies, cited previously, by Robert Michael Pyle.

My discussion of the Hutcheson Memorial Forest and the assumption that “what nature needs most is for people to leave it alone” owes a great debt to Holly Doremus’s brilliant paper “The Endangered Species Act: Static Law Meets Dynamic World,” in the
Washington University Journal of Law and Policy
32 (2010). Fortunately, I met Holly when I was just starting this book; it was exciting, and encouraging, to discover that she was asking a lot of the same questions and already had a few very compelling answers. I’m also grateful to her for lending a critical eye to several sections of the manuscript.

Additional information about the Hutcheson Memorial Forest is drawn from Daniel Botkin, “Adjusting Law to Nature’s Discordant Harmonies,”
Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum
7 (1996): 29–31; and “The Woods of Home,” by Lincoln Barnett in the November 8, 1954, issue of
Life
magazine. Thanks also to Gordon Pratt, the lepidopterist who told me, “We can’t just throw up a fence and think everything’s going to go back to how it used to be”—for helping me better understand the butterfly’s recovery.

To reconstruct the story of Humphrey the Whale, I spoke with Bernie Krause, who wrote about the rescue in his book
Into a Wild Sanctuary: A Life in Music and Natural Sound
(Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1998), 107–28; Jean Takekawa of the Fish and Wildlife Service; and Wendy Tokuda, a CBS television reporter who covered the rescue. I benefited especially from a long interview with Diana Reiss, who writes about Humphrey in
The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 1–22.

I also read coverage of the whale rescue in the
Sacramento Bee
,
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Los Angeles Times
, Associated Press,
Washington Post
,
USA Today
,
Newsweek
, and
New York Times
. Coverage by
ABC News
and
Nightline
was available on YouTube.
The Great Whale Rescue: An American Folk Epic
(New York: Pharos Books, 1986), by Tom Tiede with Jack Findleton, gives a valuable firsthand account. Findleton described his “sensitive feelings” in “Hooked on Rescue: Emotions of U.S. Rode With Whale,” by Richard C. Paddock,
Los Angeles Times
, November 9, 1985.

The Fish and Wildlife Service detailed damage done by crowds to Antioch Dunes in the refuge’s 1985 annual narrative.

9. W
ITHOUT
C
HANGE
, T
HERE
W
OULD
B
E
N
O
B
UTTERFLIES

Thanks, again, to Jana Johnson at the Butterfly Project at Moorpark College, and to her students, for letting me throw questions at them while we all stared at butterflies.

For more about the effects of conserving top predators, see James A. Estes et al., “Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth,”
Science
333 (2011). I read about the net worth of bats in a March 31, 2011, press release from the U.S. Geological Survey, “Bats Worth Billions to Agriculture: Pest-control Services at Risk,” which summarized “Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture,” by Justin G. Boyles et al., in
Science
332 (2011).

Robert Michael Pyle writes about the “extinction of experience” in
Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland
(Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001), 140–53.

Information about Rudi Mattoni and the Palos Verdes blue comes from conversations with many people, especially, of course, Rudi himself. On the rediscovery of the Palos Verdes blue, also see “A Butterfly Flutters Back from the Brink,” by Marla Cone in the
Los Angeles Times
, March 30, 1994. The Palos Verdes blue’s initial, presumed, baseball-related demise is detailed in “Palos Verdes Blue Butterfly May Never Again Do Its Aerial Ballet,” by Ann Johnson in the April 7, 1985,
Los Angeles Times
. Also useful were “Mister Butterfly,” a profile of Rudi by Nick Green for the (Torrance, CA)
Daily Breeze,
September 27, 1999, and “The Importance of Farming Butterflies,” by Ashley Morton in the May 20, 1982, issue of
New Scientist
.

I never had a chance to see Defense Fuel Support Point, San Pedro, for myself but based my description in large part on Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich’s intriguing essay “Invertebrate Conservation at the Gates of Hell,” in
Wings: Essays on Invertebrate Conservation,
published by the Xerces Society, Spring 2008. I gathered details about the military’s role in conservation from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s report, “The State of the Birds 2011: Report on Public Lands and Waters.”