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

by Jon Mooallem

  “Is that a second one?” one older women asked.

  “There’s one right here, too!” a man hollered.

  “Rock on!” someone said.

  “Oh, here’s a third one!” a woman shouted, though it was unclear whether one of the first butterflies had merely jittered through her line of sight.

  There was a fifth and sixth sighting, maybe more. Fingers were firing on the clicker counters. “We’ve got another one here!” Louis yelled.

  It was a monstrously eventful and confusing ten seconds. And in that pandemonium, it was immediately clear just how unscientific this process was going to be. The very baseline understanding of the species’ health was being provided by us, a bunch of civilians, who had only just been shown a photo of the bug a moment ago. And yet this is a common situation. As the budget for protecting endangered species and managing wildlife has stayed relatively stagnant, but the workload has exploded, more of that work has fallen to a standing army of curious and often retired volunteers—citizen scientists whom Princeton ecologist David Wilcove has compared to volunteer firefighters. In Maine, they count moose and frogs. In Ohio, they snatch Lake Erie water snakes out of the water and measure them.

  When the excitement was over, Louis went around to the witnesses individually to reconstruct what had happened. He felt confident that the tally ought to be capped at five. Then he called us back to take a good look at the first Lange’s metalmark, which was sitting obligingly still on the stalk of a buckwheat plant. We huddled around it. The girl with the tiger tattoo took a picture with her iPhone.

  I squatted and looked at the butterfly for a long time. It was the size of a quarter. The wings were rimmed in black with white speckles, then gave way to sunbursts of deep orange. I’d seen lots of photos of the species before that afternoon, but the butterfly was always blown up and perfectly centered in the shot. Looking at it now for the first time in the wild—seeing it as a tiny blotch on a big leaf, with so much air and space and civilization around it—brought a deflating new sense of scale. The bug seemed vulnerable to the point of helplessness. You wanted somehow to zoom in, to make it feel important and central again—a worthy protagonist of the bizarre, generations-long saga that’s played out at Antioch Dunes on its behalf.

  You wanted to make the butterfly look big again. And this could be why one of the older women in our group had taken to her knees only a couple of inches from the leaf and was now examining the butterfly through binoculars.

  —

  ONCE, THE ANTIOCH DUNES WERE what ecologists call a disturbance ecosystem. The landscape was in motion—slow motion. Wind-driven sand gradually piled into new dunes, and older dunes periodically collapsed. Certain plants thrived in that unruly environment, while the seeds of newcomers were never able to get a foothold in the shifting sand.

  One native that’s well adapted to this cycle is a tall, spindly plant with muted white flowers called “naked stem buckwheat.” The buckwheat is the Lange’s metalmark’s host plant. Every butterfly lays its eggs on a particular host plant, and whereas some species of butterflies are promiscuous, laying on a variety of plants, others, like the Lange’s, are committed to a single one. Strictly speaking, the host plant is the butterfly’s habitat—the platform it needs to survive, like sea ice for polar bears. Butterflies will thrive in even the most totally run-down-looking or artificial landscape if they find enough host plant there. In Miami, conservationists have expanded the range of a species called the Atala by planting its host plant in highway medians and attracting the butterfly there, into the middle of traffic.

  If you watched a time-lapse film of Antioch Dunes, you’d see, as dunes formed and fell asynchronously around the property over the decades, different plant species mushrooming and then dying back on top of the dunes in a predictable succession. The buckwheat is part of that succession. Every summer, some metalmark eggs laid on stands of buckwheat the previous year will turn into butterflies and take flight. Others will have had their plants senesce or the dunes blown out from under them. As certain encampments of butterflies dwindle, butterflies from other, nearby stands of buckwheat skitter in to lay eggs there and supplement them—what’s known as the “rescue effect.” Or they pioneer new colonies elsewhere, as new patches of buckwheat mature into good habitat. Around the dunes, individual colonies of Lange’s metalmarks will grow and die out chaotically. It’s not uncommon for the total number of butterflies in this kind of “meta-population” to spike and dip dramatically from year to year. But in the aggregate, the meta-population survives; there’s enough of a cushion so it can recover from any losses.

  But that cycle at Antioch Dunes has now ground to a stop. With the sand largely gone, dunes have stopped rising and collapsing. And without that disturbance, invasive plants could settle into the stable ground and overpower the native ones. The stands of buckwheat have become fewer—and farther between. An individual Lange’s metalmark may never venture more than a thousand feet from the buckwheat plant it hatches on—the range within which it can lay its eggs is extremely limited. So the distance between certain butterfly colonies can easily become insurmountable, cutting off the rescue effect. One big meta-population fractures into smaller, isolated islands, each clinging to its buckwheat and surrounded by an uncrossable sea of weeds.

  In recent years, the most recklessly spreading weed has been a scraggly, purple-flowered legume with a sinister-sounding name to boot. It’s called hairy vetch. The insidiousness of hairy vetch, and the many levels of damage it does, can’t easily be summed up. (In some cases, the vetch physically wraps itself around buckwheat plants and steals their sun.) The plant is Louis Terrazas’s nemesis. As the primary person assigned by the Fish and Wildlife Service to manage the habitat at the dunes, he spends his year in one long counterattack against the vetch. (Theoretically, he can mow, whack, or blast pesticides at it from a backpack sprayer, but he has to be careful not to harm any stands of buckwheat in the process, since they may have Lange’s larvae on them, or any of the federally endangered plants at the refuge, which he painstakingly marks in advance with fluorescent orange flags. Truthfully, a lot of Louis’s job comes down to yanking vetch out of the ground by hand.) When I first visited, a few months before the butterfly count, Louis was throwing everything he had at the vetch, trying, alongside the occasional community service worker, to whip the landscape into shape before the butterflies started breaking free from their cocoons later that summer. But the vetch was still everywhere. “This place eats our lunch,” Louis confessed. He pointed out areas that he’d cleared that spring but which the vetch was already recolonizing. Elsewhere, other nonnative plants, like ripgut brome and yellow star thistle, had crept in to fill the niche that Louis had torn the vetch from. “Right now,” he said, “we’re kind of like in the middle of a haircut. Like, when you look in the mirror and say, ‘Man, this isn’t looking so good.’”

  But in a sense that haircut will never end. It’s easy to call the vetch a weed and rip it out of the ground to give the buckwheat some space, but the place has changed so completely that, on some level, the weeds now belong at Antioch Dunes more than the native plants do. They are heartier, thriving—better adapted to the new ecosystem that human beings didn’t realize they were creating by taking away all that sand. Keeping the Lange’s metalmark at Antioch Dunes means keeping the naked stem buckwheat there. But that now means keeping someone like Louis Terrazas there, too, slogging around with a weed whacker. If the butterfly is going to survive, we have to simulate the disturbance in the ecosystem now—we have to be the wind. As another Fish and Wildlife employee told me at the dunes one afternoon, “This place will never run on its own.”

  There’d been wariness of conservation reliance like this looming in the back-and-forth over whether Dan Cox should have fed those starving polar bear cubs in his video. Lost in the ignorance and outrage were a few sensible people who claimed to understand the problem of climate change perfectly, and to understand that feeding individual pol
ar bears wasn’t going to remedy the larger, more horrible situation. But they still wondered if we should be feeding the Hudson Bay bears anyway—because, like it or not, that’s what might be necessary now to keep those animals in the world. Conservationists cast any long-term effort to feed polar bears as logistically problematic, prohibitively expensive, and dangerous. But it’s also philosophically ugly. Making polar bears dependent on us for their very survival in such a hands-on way can feel like just as much of a defeat as letting them die out. It would mean conceding that their ecosystem is irreparably broken, and that we have to be responsible for them in perpetuity, not just step in temporarily to save them. It feels too much like playing God—even if, arguably, that’s exactly what we’ve become. After all, we’re the ones who upset so many ecosystems in the first place—we override the natural course of evolution when we endanger species, too, not just when we try to save them.

  Still, once you purposefully cross that line, it’s not clear where you would draw a new one. Some people write to polar bear biologists suggesting that we feed polar bears; others imagine melting down plastic soda bottles to build motorized rafts, so that the bears can float around the Arctic as the ice disappears. Once you go hands-on, in other words, you have to decide when you’re going to take your hands off. As J. Michael Scott, the conservation biologist who helped coin the term “conservation reliance,” put it to me, “I could keep polar bears alive in San Diego if I really wanted to.”

  And yet here at Antioch, on behalf of a tiny butterfly that no one’s ever heard of, on a refuge where no one goes, America seems to have quietly blown past that threshold a long time ago without ever really considering these questions. With the Lange’s, as with other endangered species, we’ve gone all in, dramatically manipulating its ecosystem to promote its survival—sending Louis out there to groom the dunes to accommodate the butterfly’s predilections and plant new arrangements of its favorite plant, as though he were the landscaper of some aristocrat’s country estate.

  Which is not to say that it’s working. That afternoon in August, we were embarking on the sixth volunteer butterfly count of the summer at Antioch Dunes. The surveys had begun three weeks ago, but no one had spotted any butterflies until a couple of days earlier, when a single Lange’s was seen on the opposite side of the gypsum plant. That is, when we started that morning, peak count was one.

  —

  WE DIDN’T SEE ANY more Lange’s after that initial burst of five. One day the following week, the count hit twenty-eight. But that would prove to be peak count for the year. It was a new all-time low, and sent those working on the recovery scrambling.

  One of the last transects we surveyed that afternoon was on some of the refuge’s highest ground, a weedy dune with an old utility tower on it, once used to anchor power lines before running them across the river. The lines now ran through a second, newer tower, across a bowl-shaped valley, on an equally high hill.

  Louis positioned us in a line abutting the bottom of the tower. Some of our waists were actually touching the rusted crossbar at its base. We had to survey the land under the tower, which meant that, on Louis’s signal, some of us would be climbing over that steel bar into the tower’s skeletal interior, then clambering between the metal cables and support structures and out the other side. If anyone had managed to keep up the fantasy that we were spending the day in a pristine wilderness, this conclusively killed it. Just as Louis was about to say go, one of the volunteers noticed a gap in our line. His name was Liam O’Brien, and he’d been fighting back a measure of cynicism all day. “I’ll go over here in the gap,” he shouted. “God forbid any metalmarks are there.”

  Liam is an energetic and knowledgeable butterfly lover who, when we’d first gone around a circle introducing ourselves that afternoon, elicited speechlessness and some actual gasps by relaying that he’d been out to count Lange’s in 1997, and that they’d counted more than twenty-two hundred of them that day. He is forty-eight and lanky, with styled, whitening hair. He tends to move and speak in choppy, purposeful bursts. A moment earlier, he’d whirled around, tracking a fast-moving flickering in the air for as long as he could with his finger, and shouted, “That looks like a dogface! That’s a California dogface!” hoping to give everyone the opportunity to see California’s state butterfly. At one point, as we shuffled between transects, Liam whispered to me, “I’m not the annoying butterfly guy, am I?” I started to tell him that I didn’t think he was; he was offering his little factoids in a helpful, totally egoless way. But something caught his eye, and he shot off in another direction. “Heliotrope!” I heard him say. “Great, great plant.”

  Liam and I had driven to the dunes together that day. I’d met him earlier in the summer in San Francisco and would occasionally seek him out at the café where he has coffee every morning, to bounce butterfly questions off him. He made his living with butterflies. He led butterfly walking tours in San Francisco every spring and summer. He painted butterflies to illustrate trail signs for local parks. He’d started a small, neighborhood-wide recovery of a butterfly called the green hairstreak and, despite being mostly self-taught, had also spearheaded the government’s reintroduction of the endangered Mission blue to a hilltop in San Francisco called Twin Peaks.

  That afternoon’s metalmark count had left Liam in an introspective mood. Driving home, he told me that, as much as he loved butterflies, he wondered if the whole enterprise to save the Lange’s was becoming a little foolish. “The tsunami of change that’s going on at that place, with the nonnative weeds—you want to know, is this just an exercise in futility? What is it going to take to put these pieces of a puzzle back together when the puzzle itself has already changed?” He wondered about his own butterfly conservation projects in the city, too: whether he was wasting his time; whether, via some indiscernible chain of causes and effects, he might even be doing more harm to the environment than good. Totally possible, Liam said. There was no way of knowing. But in the end, he told me, “I just want to be part of a generation that tries.”

  7.

  SHIFTING BASELINES

  Butterflies swarmed the center of Liam O’Brien’s life abruptly, fifteen years before I met him. Before that, he’d spent a decade as a professional actor. He mostly appeared onstage, doing Shakespeare and musicals, but he got a short-lived break in film in 1990, when he was cast alongside David Cassidy in a hokey sci-fi comedy called Spirit of ’76. (Liam played an evil geek named Rodney Snodgrass.)

  Six years later, he was living in San Francisco, working as an understudy in a production of Angels in America. And that was when it happened: a tether snapped tight between Liam O’Brien and butterflies. One day, he saw a butterfly with electric yellow and smudgy black wings landing in the garden outside his bedroom window. It was a western tiger swallowtail, a native of San Francisco. Liam had always kept a notebook of illustrations—a kind of visual journal—and, the next thing he knew, he was out in the garden with his pens and watercolors, capturing the swallowtail on paper. Soon he was touring around California in his Econoline van, painting and drawing as many of the state’s butterfly species as he could find.

  In 1998, Liam tested positive for HIV. He’d been losing his motivation to compete for acting gigs, and, in a way, the virus gave him permission to focus on the thing that made him happiest: butterflies. He set out to learn more, to collect names and explanations for what he was seeing. He went to annual butterfly counts and started hanging around some of the most respected butterfly scientists, or lepidopterists, in the Bay Area—a klatch of stoic, sometimes crotchety old men (they were mainly men) accustomed, since childhood, to chasing butterflies through woods, bogs, and canyons by themselves. Liam, on the other hand, is a snarky, spirited gay man with a big booming voice and no scientific background. But somehow he managed to win that crowd over. He found it ironic: We associate butterflies with feminine, gentle things. People use the terms “butterfly chaser” and “mariposa” as slang for gay men. “But I just happe
n to be gay. I go to the Lepidopterists’ Society’s annual meetings, and I’ve never seen such a collection of shabby straight men in my life.”

  One of Liam’s mentors gave him a piece of advice: “Learn where you live”—dig deep, and study what’s around you. So, in 2007, Liam decided to conduct his own exhaustive survey of San Francisco’s butterflies, trying to see which butterfly species historically found within the city limits survived there. He spent more than two hundred days in the field that year, walking the defunct naval yard, the oceanfront scrub, and the weedy hillsides between posh Victorian houses, noticing which butterflies flew where. He was looking around, getting to know his neighbors.

  Butterfly-wise, the San Francisco Bay Area happens to be a national treasure. The profusion of butterfly species in the region is arguably unparalleled in the United States; there were as many as fifty-seven before the Gold Rush. This diversity is a function of the severe changes in climate across the region, from dank, wet, and foggy to sunny and hot; even temperatures in different neighborhoods of San Francisco can differ by twenty-five degrees on a given day. This patchwork of microclimates creates something akin to the Galápagos Islands for butterflies, with different species and subspecies attuned to each area. In 1849, a French lawyer came to the region in search of gold but wound up chasing butterflies instead. He discovered about forty-three new species, eight from San Francisco proper.

  The city became a hot spot for lepidopterists in the late nineteenth century. It was a time before biology and natural history had professionalized as fields, when a lawyer with a good eye and durable walking shoes could make valuable contributions. The most accomplished lepidopterists of the era were weekend warriors. One was a professional stage actor, like Liam. Another, Hans Hermann Behr, a physician, was once described as “always in danger of falling into forgetfulness on professional subjects when he caught sight of a butterfly he ardently wanted.” Butterfly collecting wasn’t a dignified hobby. It was seen as childish and useless—dorky. Although the stigma wasn’t ever erased, a more glamorous, swashbuckling counterimage of the collector did momentarily emerge. It was best embodied by one of Dr. Behr’s pupils, a San Francisco police officer named James Cottle.