Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (31 page)

Jana wrote about her relationship to the Palos Verdes blue in the November 2007 issue of the inspirational magazine
Guideposts
, in an essay titled “Sanctuary.” Mattoni’s paper about the Sonoran blues at San Gabriel Wash is “An Unrecognized, Now Extinct, Los Angeles Area Butterfly (
Lycaenidae
),”
Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera
4 (1989).

The city attorney of Colton, California, is quoted disparaging the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly as a “maggot” in “Rare Fly Buzzes Into Debate on Jobs,” by Sandra Stokley, the (Riverside, CA)
Press-Enterprise
, May 12, 1997. Mattoni is quoted disparaging politicians in “Developers Wish Rare Fly Would Buzz Off,” by William Booth,
Washington Post,
April 4, 1997.

Looking into the perceived, and actual, kinship between kids and animals, I read Kahn and Kellert’s
Children and Nature
; Kellert’s
Value of Life
; Edward O. Wilson,
Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Gene Myers,
The Significance of Children and Animals:
Social Development and Our Connections to Other Species
; and, most important, Gail F. Melson,
Why the Wild Things Are:
Animals in the Lives of Children
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Other details in this section are drawn from Alie H. Kidd and Robert M. Kidd, “Reactions of Infants and Toddlers to Live and Toy Animals,”
Psychological Reports
61 (1987), and Maarten H. Jacobs, “Why Do We Like or Dislike Animals?”
Human Dimensions of Wildlife
14 (2009). It was the Kidds, moreover, who affirmed that children who don’t care about animals are normal—a detail mentioned in Myers,
Children and Animals
, 177. (I am quoting Myers’s paraphrasing of their conclusion.)
The footnote on children, fear, and biophilia draws on Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians, “The Ecological World of Children,” in Kahn and Kellert’s
Children and Nature
. Research about animal dreams is summarized by Paul Shepard in
The Others: How Animals Made Us Human
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996), 74–76.

The surveys of children by Stephen Kellert and Miriam Westervelt were published by the Government Printing Office in 1983 as
Children’s Attitudes, Knowledge, and Behavior Toward Animals
. Kellert also describes this research in his book
Value of Life,
44–47, which I quote from here as well.

The children’s book
Humphrey the Lost Whale: A True Story
was written by Wendy Tokuda and Richard Hall and illustrated by Hanako Wakiyama (Torrance: Heian International Publishing Company, 1986). The
New York Times
article that lays out the advantages of teddy bears as compared to dolls is “The Baby Doll of All Nations,” February 6, 1909.

10. T
HE
S
OUP
S
TAGE

Information about Pokémon founder Satoshi Tajiri comes from what appears to be the only in-depth interview he’s ever done: a Q&A with Tim Larimer for
Time Asia
, published on November 22, 1999. Thanks to J. C. Smith at the Pokémon Company International for answering some questions via e-mail, and to my nephew Sam Goldblat for making me curious about Pokémon in the first place.

The study of British children I mention is described in “Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokémon,” by Andrew Balmford et al., in
Science
295 (2002).

My writing about taxonomy owes a lot, again, to Holly Doremus and her work, particularly “The Endangered Species Act: Static Law Meets Dynamic World.” In describing the ways infants perceive four-legged animals, I’m cribbing from Paul Shepard’s
The Others,
45–47. The evolutionary biologist Ernest Mayr proposed the “biological species concept” in
Systematics and
The Origin of Species
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Worry about “an undesirable trend toward taxonomic chaos” was expressed in J. Gordon Edwards, “A New Approach to Intraspecific Categories,”
Systematic Zoology
3 (1954): 2. The 1953 paper I quote from is E. O. Wilson and W. L. Brown Jr., “The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application
,
”
Systematic Zoology
2 (1953).

The official description of Lange’s metalmark comes from John A. Comstock, “A New Apodemia from California,”
Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences
37 (1938).

Thanks to Benjamin Proshek for sharing, explaining, and re-explaining his research on Mormon metalmarks, and to his academic advisor at the University of Alberta, Felix Sperling. Rudi Mattoni’s Gulf fritillary experiment is written up in Thomas E. Dimock and Rudolf H. T. Mattoni, “Hidden Genetic Variation in
Agraulis vanillae incarnata
(Nymphalidae),”
The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera
25 (1986).

Thanks to Brent Plater, of the Wild Equity Institute, for several good conversations about his lawsuit. Also with us that day in Antioch was Peter Galvin, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity; Galvin was assisting Plater with the Lange’s metalmark suit and added to my understanding of what was at stake. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife letter I quote from was written by Cay C. Goude, an assistant field supervisor at the agency, to the California Energy Commission, August 17, 2010.

For an example of the right-wing response to Wild Equity’s lawsuit see Jane Jamison’s editorial, “Eco-Nuts Torture California Businesses with ‘New’ Pollutants,” published on the Web site Right Wing News on January 22, 2011. Jamison warns that Californians will soon be paying more for electricity because of “nutty control-freak environmentalists who survive as parasites of government bureaucracies . . . in behalf [
sic
] of bugs which end up on windshields and car grills anyway.”

PART THREE: BIRDS

11. C
ONSTRUCTION
W
ORKERS

As I point out, the months I spent hanging around the men and women of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership happened to be an unusually fraught and uncertain period for the partnership—and especially for Operation Migration. I’m grateful to them for letting me in anyway. I’ve tried to portray some of the difficulties and disagreements I glimpsed because I believe that they reveal, rather than diminish, how admirable these people actually are.

Sincere thanks to John French, Brian Clauss, Barb Clauss, and Charlie Shafer at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center; George Archibald, Joan Garland, Marianne Wellington, Eva Szyszkoski, and Barry Hartup at the International Crane Foundation; John Christian, Tom Stehn, Doug Staller, and Joel Trick, past and current U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees; and Marty Folk of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Special thanks are due, of course, to the staff of Operation Migration: Liz Condie, Walter Sturgeon, Richard van Heuvelen, Jack Wrighter, John Cooper, Gerald Murphy, Geoff Tarbox, Trish Gallagher, Heather Ray, and Caleb Fairfax; and to Joe Duff and Brooke Pennypacker, both of whom inadvertently taught me quite a bit about life while teaching me about flying with birds.

Historic population sizes of whooping cranes are based on data from the Whooping Crane Recovery Team and Dr. Ken Jones, compiled by Betsy Didrickson of the International Crane Foundation.

The story of Josephine and Pete (and of Robert Porter Allen and George Douglass) is detailed in Faith McNulty,
The Whooping Crane: The Bird That Defies Extinction
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1966). To learn about this period, I also read Robin W. Doughty,
Return of the Whooping Crane
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989) and Cindi Barrett and Tom Stehn, “A Retrospective of Whooping Cranes in Captivity,”
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop
11 (2010). In
Nature’s Ghosts
, Barrow also writes beautifully
about Allen’s work.

Louisianan Claude Eagleson’s description of cranes circling like square dancers is quoted in Gay M. Gomez, “Whooping Cranes in Southwest Louisiana: History and Human Attitudes,”
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop
6 (1992):
21
.
“Two Nebraska Duck Hunters Kill the Last of the Pompous Bird,” was published in the
Washington Post,
February 7, 1904.

The range and population size of whooping cranes before European settlement are described in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s March 2007 revision of the International Recovery Plan (
Grus americana
), pages 9–10. The
New York Times
blamed the crane’s extinction on its “lack of cooperation” in “Scarcest of Crane Vex Wildlife Service; Whoopers Dodge Efforts to Save Them,” February 4, 1946.

Several documents helped me better understand WCEP and the transition it was undertaking in the fall of 2010: “The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership Five Year Strategic Plan,” December 2010; “The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership Guidance and Partnership Transition Documents,” August 27, 2010; and “The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership External Review Program Review, Final Report,” March 31, 2010, by Jane Austin, Leigh Frederickson, Dr. Devra Kleiman, Dr. Phil Miller, and Dr. Tanya Shenk.

Operation Migration’s Web site was an invaluable resource in a number of different ways. I relied on it extensively for details about past migrations, for descriptions of flights I did not witness firsthand, or to check my descriptions of ones that I did. Also useful were issues of
INformation
, the magazine OM
publishes for its supporters, and a DVD the group produced called
Hope Takes Wing
.

12. C
RANIACS

Thanks to George Archibald for a great afternoon of talking and watching sandhill cranes in Baraboo. To learn more about his work with Tex, I relied on Doughty’s
The Whooping Crane,
105–6, and many newspaper and magazine stories, including “Dr. Archibald Dances with Cranes So Their Tribes May Increase,” by Linda Witt,
People
magazine, April 24, 1978; “Man and a Bird Dance Together to Preserve Species,” by Bayard Webster,
New York Times
, March 25, 1980; “Odd Couple’s Mating Dance Finally Lays an Egg,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 2, 1982; “What Gee Whiz Means,” a
Washington Post
editorial from June 7, 1982; and “Peeping in the Shell,” by Faith McNulty in the January 17, 1983, issue of the
New Yorker
. I also watched an excellent video about George and Tex produced by the International Crane Foundation.

Aldo Leopold wrote about cranes in his essay “A Marshland Elegy” in
A Sand County Almanac
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). When I visited George Archibald in Baraboo, he took me down the road to Leopold’s old cabin and quoted a very long passage, from memory.

I interviewed William Lishman on Skype and drew additional details about his house and art from his Web site and from a February 20, 1992, article in the (Montreal)
Gazette
, “Underground Digs.” Lishman chronicles his first flights with geese and the origins of Operation Migration in his memoir
Father Goose
(New York: Little Brown and Company, 1995).

Robert Horwich answered many questions about his work by phone and e-mail and pointed me to several helpful scientific papers, including Robert H. Horwich, John Wood, and Ray Anderson, “Release of Sandhill Crane Chicks Hand-Reared with Artificial Stimuli,”
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop
(1998) and Robert H. Horwich, “Use of Surrogate Parental Models and Age Periods in a Successful Release of Hand-Reared Sandhill Cranes,”
Zoo Biology
8 (1989). A collection of studies detailing early attempts to teach cranes to migrate was published in
Proceedings of the North American
Crane Workshop
8 (2001). The remote-controlled whooping crane is mentioned in “Pilots Train Cranes to Fly Away Home,” by Less Line in the December 9, 1997, edition of the
New York Times
.

Thanks to Mary Vethe and her third-graders at Pineview Elementary in Reedsburg, Wisconsin.

In the fall of 2008, I tagged along for a short stretch of Operation Migration’s ultralight migration while working on a story about the project for the
New York Times Magazine
(“Rescue Flight,” February 19, 2009). It was during that trip, and not during the 2010 migration described in the book, that I met Squire Babcock outside the church in Kentucky. However, that brief scene and a couple of stray quotes from WCEP members are the only material I’ve pulled into the book from my earlier reporting.

13. T
HEIR
I
NCREDIBLE
E
SSENCE

Information on Humphrey the Humpback’s return comes largely from the stories by the Associated Press,
Washington Post,
and
USA Today,
which headlined one of its articles: “Humphrey: Advanced, Dumb or Lost.” The government spokesman hoped Humphrey wouldn’t come back in “Humphrey Finally High-Tails It Back to the Sea,” by Herb Michelson,
Sacramento Bee,
November 5, 1985. The woman wished she could talk to Humphrey in “Return of the Wrong Way Whale,” by Cynthia Gorney,
Washington Post,
October 23, 1990. And the San Jose commuter voiced his strong suspicions that a supreme intellect was at work in “Humphrey Hysteria
,
”
USA Today
, October 24, 1990.

The Internet videos I refer to are titled “How to Snuggle with an Elephant Seal” and “Touched by a Wild Mountain Gorilla.”

I’m grateful to Joana Varawa, aka Joan McIntyre, for her time, forthrightness, and perspective on so many things, and for sharing sections of a memoir she’s writing. I feel lucky to have gotten to know her. The book she edited,
Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins
(New York: Scribners, 1974), is gorgeous and strange, and her first memoir,
The Delicate Art of Whale Watching
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), taught me much about her post–Project Jonah life. Thanks also to Eugenia McNaughton, a former Project Jonah employee, for meeting with me.