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

by Jon Mooallem

  To me, the starvation video hinted at a bigger problem: that, maybe, this approach to polar bear conservation was reaching its breaking point. The polar bear had been useful as a pure white, cuddly harbinger of horrible things—a victim of climate change at just the right remove from our own species to be palatable and approachable and inspire us to change. Until now, working to save polar bears and working to stop climate change have meant the same thing. But they’re starting to diverge. The lives of the actual polar bears in Churchill—the most visible polar bears in the world—will become increasingly grim. Cubs will starve or be cannibalized, and a greater number of worn-down animals will crowd into the viewing area waiting for ice. If we choose to help them survive, it will require a kind of narrow, hands-on management—like getting out there and feeding them meat—that does nothing to stall climate change. Meanwhile, conservationists will have to work hard and more inventively to spin the animals’ worsening predicament in the same inspiring terms, without seeming dishonest or oblivious.

  —

  THE LIFT HAPPENED on a Friday afternoon. Not far from the Churchill airport, a crowd formed outside a huge Quonset hut left over from the military days. Yellow caution tape was strung along the roadside, and tourists gathered behind it, a hundred yards away, as more school buses pulled over to park, their flanks and windows discolored by a crust of dust and frost.

  The Quonset hut, known as D-20, has been turned into what Manitoba’s provincial conservation agency calls a “polar bear holding compound,” though nearly every reporter who comes to town prefers the phrase “polar bear jail.” It’s the centerpiece of the government’s Polar Bear Alert Program, a protocol for handling bears that wander into Churchill in the months before freeze-up. The program was put in place in the early eighties, partly in response to the mauling of Tommy Mutanen. Sightings of bears in town are reported to the agency through a hotline—675-BEAR—and bear patrol officers respond to haze it with pyrotechnics and noise-making shotgun shells or chase it back onto the tundra with their trucks.

  Any bear that can’t be chased away is drugged and transferred to one of the twenty-eight cells inside D-20. It’s held there for about a month and not fed during that time, so it won’t connect sneaking into Churchill with being rewarded with food. At the end of its sentence, if Hudson Bay still hasn’t frozen over, the bear is drugged again, airlifted by helicopter, and released north of town, closer to where the ice first forms. The idea is to dissuade bears from entering town again. Once a bear becomes comfortable mingling with humans, there is usually no choice but to shoot it. There were nine polar bears inside D-20 that afternoon. If you put your head close to the building’s corrugated side, you could occasionally hear them growling. Soon there would be eight.

  A school bus pulled up around the back side of D-20. There was a kind of VIP section there, with Robert Buchanan and his people milling around in their matching blue Polar Bears International parkas. Martha Stewart’s crew was there, too. Now off the bus came another group of dignitaries: the Canadian chapter of the World Wildlife Fund had arranged a trip to Churchill for some of its corporate partners, including a cohort of young executives from Coca-Cola, which has used polar bears in its commercials since the nineties. The World Wildlife Fund and PBI were actually paying for this afternoon’s bear airlift from D-20. The government was grateful for the help in exchange for doing the lift at a certain time and allowing all these guests to watch the spectacle up close, and Martha’s crew to film it. (PBI was also making its own educational film, which would be distributed to zoos and aquariums.) While we waited for the lift to start, I chatted with Steven Amstrup, Polar Bears International’s senior scientist, and soon Martha’s producer—the same raspy fellow from that afternoon on Buggy One—came to Amstrup with a question. The producer kept hearing people call polar bears the “world’s largest land carnivore,” and he wanted to know if that was true. Were they bigger than the Kodiak bears in Alaska?

  Amstrup explained that polar bears are equal in size to Kodiak bears, which are the world’s largest brown bears.

  “So,” the producer said, “can Martha say ‘world’s largest land carnivore’?”

  “Well,” Amstrup began again, “I’d like to correct that.” Polar bears are actually classified as marine mammals, he said, since they spend most of their time on sea ice. But the polar bear certainly isn’t the largest predatory marine mammal. That would be the orca.

  The producer thought a second. He didn’t know what to do with that information.

  In the end, Amstrup and other PBI higher-ups would describe the segment that Martha produced as among the most solidly reported and properly messaged media pieces they’d collaborated on. (In an in-studio segment of the episode, while preparing a baked Alaska with the comedian Andy Samberg—the theme of the show was “Cold”—Martha even wore the blue Polar Bears International parka that the staff had given her, which, everyone had noticed, she declined to wear in Churchill.) Even now, outside D-20, there were signs that PBI and the television crew were starting to understand each other better.

  “What do you want to call them?” the producer finally asked Amstrup.

  Amstrup thought a second. “I like to say, ‘Polar bears are the world’s largest nonaquatic predators,’” he said, though he seemed to understand that it didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

  The producer smiled good-naturedly. “We’ll see if she’ll say that,” he said, and walked away.

  —

  IT BEGAN WITH A HELICOPTER landing right in front of us, a hundred feet from the D-20’s open door. A man in a reflective vest hustled out and hitched a fluorescent orange cable connected to the chopper’s undercarriage to the pile of black netting on the ground.

  Then out of the Quonset hut came a small ATV, towing a plywood flatbed. The tranquilized polar bear was on it, flat on its belly, positioned to face backward, so that the ATV didn’t blow exhaust in its face. Its fur was yellowing and crimped in places. Its huge muzzle was black with dirt. Two wildlife officers walked on either side of the bear in uniform, holding shotguns, like security guards or pallbearers.

  When they reached the netting, the ATV driver climbed down. Then the three officers together lifted the plywood from its base. One cradled the polar bear’s neck in his arms, as an EMT would, and they spilled the animal onto the netting. It was on its back now. Its left paw had landed across its chest, in the posture of a drunken uncle after Thanksgiving dinner.

  Behind the yellow tape, every tourist was holding a camera. There was something ritualistic about the scene—the way no one watching or participating in it said a word, yet all the players knew their parts. It was a ceremony of our saving a polar bear, or at least going out of our way to coexist with it peacefully and not kill it when it encroached on our turf. One PBI volunteer later told me that she’s cried at bear lifts in the past. The tears were partly because it’s difficult to see an animal laid out and drugged and partly because she was just so happy. “I am saving a bear that, in earlier years, would have been shot,” she explained. Here, really, was a metaphor for everything I’d seen in Churchill: the polar bear placed like a slack white prop in the center of a crowd that longed to do right by it, that was so impressed by the animal and cared so much that it could scarcely comprehend what to do with that concern.

  Soon the helicopter’s propeller churned again. The men came hurrying out of the noise toward the crowd. They were motioning at us with their arms. Their mouths were saying, “Stand back.”

  The chopper rose. The orange cable underneath it unwound and straightened. Then the edges of the netting began to lift. The furry shape inside folded in on itself, head and legs cradling toward the center. The bear contracted into a U. And then—impossibly—the entire package was off the ground, rising ten, then twenty-five feet in the air. The helicopter soared over the nearby power lines and kept climbing. The bear twirled slightly like a tea bag beneath it.

  Now it was quiet enough to hear the person
next to you talk again. Robert Buchanan waved some of his staff, Martha Stewart and her crew, and a few lucky preselected executives from the World Wildlife Fund tour onto two other helicopters, waiting nearby. They would follow the bear and be on the ground when it was released. Some would take photos with the tranquilized animal’s head in their laps and post the pictures on Facebook.

  Those of us left on land could only look up, still reeling from the implausibility of what we’d just seen: the wild animal’s ascension into a dirty white sky. It was all so obviously charged with meaning, but impossible to work out. I looked up and watched the image get tinier and fuzzier, until it was hard to know what it was anymore. Then, finally, the polar bear was gone.

  PART TWO

  BUTTERFLIES

  6.

  THE MIDDLE OF A HAIRCUT

  The Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge sits at the very edge of Antioch, California, an economically haggard suburb an hour east of San Francisco. It’s a narrow band of land at the anonymous, industrialized fringes of town, the kind of place not easily reached by any bus line, but around the corner from where a transit company parks its buses at night. The refuge is bordered by the San Joaquin River to the north and, across the road to the south, a sewage treatment plant. Its parking lot abuts a waste transfer station and a diner called the Red Caboose, a converted old Santa Fe Railroad train car that is popular with bikers.

  At only sixty-seven acres, Antioch Dunes is among the very smallest of America’s national wildlife refuges. You could walk straight from one end of it to the other in under an hour, if it weren’t for the tremendous Georgia-Pacific Antioch Wallboard Plant, which, built before the refuge was established, still stands on a block of privately held land, splitting the refuge in two. The wallboard factory, which everyone calls the gypsum plant, is a daunting facility with its own water tower and container ship dock on the river. It makes drywall and emits a low-pitched thrum that you can hear when you’re walking around the refuge. Sometimes gypsum dust—a chalky white powder—drifts over the dunes and settles on the leaves of plants.

  I spent a lot of time at Antioch Dunes and grew to really like the place, but the fact is, it’s hard to describe the refuge without sounding like you are insulting it. Even calling it “Antioch Dunes” can sound snide, since there have been virtually no recognizable sand dunes here for at least twenty or thirty years. Long before the federal government bought and protected the land in the 1980s, the sand that had piled up spectacularly was gradually trucked away to make bricks and roads and at least one horse-racing track, until it was virtually all gone—dug down to near the water table in places—and a rowdy garden of shrubby, nonnative weeds and trees soon sunk in its roots. In an essay titled “In Memoriam: The Antioch Dunes,” a botanist accused the landowners who sold that sand of converting the area’s “permanently uncommon value into transient cash” and forever leaving “the people of California that much more bankrupt in soul and spirit.” He was writing in 1969, arguably before the place went most dramatically downhill.

  Recently, one afternoon in late August, a Fish and Wildlife Service employee named Louis Terrazas was showing a group of volunteers a large aerial photo of Antioch Dunes—giving us the lay of the land. We had assembled on the smaller of the two halves of the refuge, east of the gypsum plant, to count butterflies. Louis brought cookies and sunscreen for everyone. As we helped ourselves, he leaned the photo against the torso of a squat, slightly thuggish guy in camouflage shorts named Steve, using him like an easel. When I’d asked Steve what brought him out to count butterflies, he told me, “I’m here because I was a bad, bad boy.” It was a long story, which I couldn’t really follow, having to do with Steve’s tendency to run stop signs while doing a paper route at three in the morning, but the upshot was that a judge finally got tired of slapping Steve on the wrist and sentenced him to some whopping number of community service hours. He was handed a list of possible jobs. Louis was the only guy on the list who called him back.

  We were here to count a specific kind of butterfly: the Lange’s metalmark, a little-known but very critically endangered species. Antioch Dunes is the only place on Earth where the Lange’s metalmark lives. (There are also two endangered flowering plants here, the Contra Costa wallflower and the Antioch Dunes evening primrose—the refuge is the only one in the nation set aside for endangered plants and insects.) As a baseline for the butterfly’s conservation, the government needs to establish each year’s “peak count,” or the highest number of Lange’s spotted on a single afternoon. In the nineties, peak counts reached into the thousands. But the species was flirting with extinction, Louis now told us. In the summer of 2006, the Fish and Wildlife Service had been shocked to find that the population had suddenly crashed. Peak count was only forty-five that year, which is to say that all the Lange’s metalmark butterflies known to exist on Earth one afternoon could have fit inside a French press. “So . . . I wouldn’t see them in my backyard?” said an older woman in a Puerta Vallarta baseball cap. She’d adjusted her voice mid-sentence so that, by the end, she was clearly answering, more than asking, a question.

  There were sixteen of us volunteers—a few older couples, a garrulous oil industry grunt at Chevron, a college student with a Day-Glo tiger tattoo on her back who’d heard about the butterfly count on Craigslist. Except for Steve, the traffic violator, we were all here because we wanted to be—for the benefit of the butterfly, or our own benefit, or some inscrutable intertwinement of the two. Butterflies occupy a special place in our imaginative wildernesses, transcending their status as bugs. They don’t sting, bite, buzz in your ear, or scamper across your kitchen floor. If you woke up to find one had alighted on your nose, you’d lie perfectly still, puzzling out whatever beneficent message the cosmos must be communicating to you—whereas you wouldn’t do this if you woke up with a banana slug on your nose, or a cockroach. We see butterflies as delicate, uncorrupted—which is probably why we’re so keen to paint them on our daughters’ cheeks at birthday parties or stitch them in glittery thread on their pajamas. We had to invent unicorns and fairies to keep little girls company. But we let the butterflies in, too, just as nature made them.

  In that sense, the story of the Lange’s first sounded to me like a melancholy children’s book. A fragile, beautiful butterfly had been hemmed in on all sides by filth and modernity until its home—fenced off, closed to the public—faded into a kind of forgotten badland. Stolen cars have turned up at Antioch Dunes. Once, Louis told me, a biologist found the body and head of a dead pig in two separate black garbage bags, dumped at the front gate. And a short drive away is the house that belonged to Phillip Garrido, who kidnapped eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard in 1991, held her in a warren of outbuildings in his backyard for eighteen years, and fathered two daughters by her. In our imaginations, butterfly habitat is always a pretty place on a beautiful day. But somehow the Lange’s metalmark had persisted here long enough to attract some human attention—not much, but enough, in our age of conservation reliance, to change everything.

  The Antioch Dunes came apart slowly; it took the entirety of the twentieth century for them to devolve into what they are now. The butterfly was tossed around on the surface of that confusion. There were, I’d find, people tossed around, too—people who loved the place, and other neglected landscapes like it, and tried to counteract the entropy taking hold. I found their stories rising and falling in the history of the Antioch Dunes, almost cyclically: Each generation of idealists was running after butterflies, trying to save them but never quite catching up, until, having watched so much nature deteriorate in their lifetimes, they finally buckled over, jaded. And just as they did, without fail, the next generation of idealists would appear, obliviously hitting their stride.

  I wanted to trace the changes at this one specific track of land across all that time. But looking so closely at an insignificant-seeming bug, at an insignificant-seeming place, eventually drew me into deep uncertainty about so much else. It turns out
that the Lange’s metalmark flies in a confounding and counterintuitive wilderness, where some of our most comforting ideas about nature unravel. I kept chasing the butterfly, wherever it led me. And before I knew it, I was all the way back at conservation’s first principles, faced with petrifying questions like, what exactly are we preserving, and why—questions worth asking, even if they can’t be answered.

  —

  LOUIS PASSED AROUND some laminated photos of the Lange’s metalmark so we would recognize it in the field. It was orange and black and looked to me like a smaller Monarch butterfly, but probably only in the way that all unfamiliar meat tastes like chicken to the uninitiated.

  This was the middle of the Lange’s flight period, he explained—the few weeks every summer when the butterflies emerge from their cocoons and zip from place to place, mating and laying eggs. It lasts about a month, until they’ve all been picked off by dragonflies or succumbed to old age. (Butterflies live hard and fast.)

  It was up to us volunteers to form a long line and pace every transect of the dunes with handheld clicker counters, trying to spot the butterflies, one by one, as they quivered through the air. The trick, Louis said, was to stay in line; anyone who got too far ahead might spook a Lange’s and flush it out of the plants before it could be positively ID’d. Also, we had to keep looking behind us for butterflies scattering in our wake. It sounded hard. “You ready?” Louis shouted.

  He gave the signal, and we began creeping through the brush. We moved in almost perfect lockstep for a few paces. Then someone saw something and shouted. Someone else yelled, “No, I think it’s a buckeye,” noting that the buckeye butterfly, also pictured in Louis’s mug shots, was bigger than the Lange’s.

  “We got one over here!” I heard Louis yell from the far end of the line. He wanted everyone to keep walking in formation, but our heads were turned now, and there was an immediate and unmistakable drifting to the right, toward Louis and the butterfly. Then someone on the opposite end of the line yelled, “There’s another one right here!” and some of us started drifting that way, too.