Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  It is all so elaborately and neatly interconnected. The dryness of desert regions entails clear skies and a paucity of plants; which together entail fierce surface heat by day, bitter chill by night; which leads to rock fracture, crumbling mountains, and the eventual creation of sand. The thermal convection of air brings strong winds, which exacerbate in their turn the aridity and the erosion; the irregularity of rainfall, acting upon soil not anchored by a continuous carpet of plants, creates arroyos, canyons, badlands, rugged mountains; wind and sand collaborate on the dunes and the sculpted rocks. Add to this a team of small, thirst-proof animals like the kangaroo rat, hardy birds like the poorwill, ingeniously appointed reptiles like the sidewinder, arthropods of all menacing variety, and what you have is a desert—a land of hardship, of durable living creatures but not many, of severe beauty, and in some ineffable way, yes, of cleanliness.

  In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence wrote of the desert-dwelling sort of man who had “embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free. He lost material ties, comforts, all superfluities and other complications to achieve a personal liberty which haunted starvation and death. He saw no virtue in poverty herself: he enjoyed the little vices and luxuries—coffee, fresh water, women—which he could still preserve. In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God.”

  Lawrence was talking about the Bedouin, but it might apply just as well to mad dogs and Englishmen, including himself. No cool distant tone of the anthropologist in those sentences, but an intimacy that sounds autobiographical (except for the sly comment about women, which didn’t suit his own taste in “little vices”) and more than a bit nostalgic. There unconsciously he came near God. Maybe that’s what Lawrence meant with his notion of cleanliness: For him, life in the desert had been next to godliness.

  Jeremy Bentham, the Pietà, and a Precious Few Grayling

  RUMOR HAD IT THEY WERE GONE, or nearly gone, killed off in large numbers by dewatering and high temperatures during the bad drought of 1977. The last sizable population of Thymallus arcticus, the Arctic grayling, indigenous to a river in the lower forty-eight states: ppffft. George Liknes, a graduate student in fisheries biology at Montana State University, was trying to do his master’s degree on these besieged grayling of the upper Big Hole River in western Montana, and word passed that his collecting nets, in the late summer of 1978, were coming up empty. The grayling were not where they had been, or if they were, Liknes for some reason wasn’t finding them. None at all? “Well,” said one worried wildlife biologist, “precious few.”

  Grayling are not suited for solitude. Like the late lamented passenger pigeon, they are by nature and necessity gregarious, thriving best in rather crowded communities of their own kind. When the size of a population sinks below a certain threshold, grayling are liable to disappear altogether, evidently incapable of successful pairing and reproduction without the advantages supplied by dense aggregation. This may have been what happened in Michigan. Native grayling were extinguished there, rather abruptly, during the 1930s.

  The Michigan grayling and the Montana strain had been isolated from each other and from all other grayling for thousands of years. They were glacial relicts, meaning that they had gradually fled southward into open water during the last great freeze of the Pleistocene epoch; then, when the mile-thick flow of ice stopped just this side of the Canadian border and began melting back northward, they were left behind in Michigan and Montana as two separate populations of grayling. These two populations were trapped, as it turned out, cut off by hundreds of miles from what became the primary range of the species, across northern Canada and Alaska. They were stuck in warmish southern habitats occupied more comfortably by competitor species such as cutthroat trout, brook trout, and mountain whitefish, and overlapping the future range of dominance of another problematic species, Homo sapiens. Their own future, consequently, was insecure.

  The Michigan grayling went first. They had been abundant in the upper part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and in the Otter River of the Upper Peninsula. One report tells of four people catching three thousand grayling in fourteen days from the Manistee River and hauling most of that catch off to Chicago. By 1935, not surprisingly, the Manistee was barren of grayling. Before long, so was the rest of the state. Saw logs had been floated down rivers at spawning time, stream banks had been stripped of vegetation (causing water temperatures to rise), exotic competing fish (such as brown trout and rainbows) had been introduced, and greedy pressure like that on the Manistee had continued. By 1940 the people of Michigan had just the grayling they were asking for: none.

  In Montana, where things tend to happen more slowly, some remnant of the original grayling population has endured, against similar adversities in less intense form, by way of a tenuous balance of losses and gains. Although they have disappeared during the past eighty years from parts of their Montana range, they have meanwhile expanded into some new habitat. More accurately, they have been introduced to new habitat, by way of hatchery rearing and planting—the ecological equivalent of forced school busing. As early as 1903, soon after the founding of the Fish Cultural Development Station in Bozeman, the state of Montana got into the business of grayling aquaculture; and for almost sixty years thereafter the planting of hatchery grayling was in great vogue.

  The indigenous range of the Montana grayling was in the headwaters of the Missouri River above Great Falls. They were well established in several branches of that grand drainage: the Smith River, the Sun River, the Madison, the Gallatin, and the Jefferson River and its tributaries—notably the Big Hole River. They had evolved mainly as a stream-dwelling species and existed in only a very few Montana lakes. However, they happened to be rather tolerant of low dissolved-oxygen levels, at least when those levels occurred in cold winter conditions (though not in summer conditions, when oxygen was driven out of solution by warming). This made them suitable for stocking in high lakes, where they could get through the winter on what minimal oxygen remained under the ice. In 1909, 50,000 grayling from the Bozeman hatchery were planted in Georgetown Lake. Just a dozen years later, 28 million grayling eggs were collected from Georgetown, to supply hatchery brood for planting elsewhere. And the planting continued: Ennis Lake, Rogers Lake, Mussigbrod Lake, Grebe Lake in Yellowstone National Park. Between 1928 and 1977, millions more grayling were dumped into Georgetown Lake.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t all. Back in 1909, hatchery grayling were also planted in the Bitterroot and Flathead Rivers, on the west side of the Continent Divide, in stream waters they had never colonized naturally. It was an innocent experiment, and without large consequences, since the grayling introduced there evidently did not take hold. But then, in what may have seemed a logical extension of all this hatchery rearing and planting, the Big Hole River received a dump of hatchery grayling. The fact that the Big Hole already had a healthy, reproducing population of grayling was not judged to be reason against adding more. From 1937 until 1962, according to the records of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP), roughly 5 million grayling from the Anaconda hatchery were poured into the Big Hole, from the town of Divide upstream to the headwaters: hothouse grayling raining down on wild grayling.

  This was before FWP biologists had come to the belated realization that massive planting of hatchery fish in habitat where the same species exists as a reproducing population is the best of all ways to make life miserable for the wild fish. Things are done differently these days, but the mistake was irreversible. The ambitious sequence of plantings was very likely the most disastrous single thing that ever happened to the indigenous grayling of the Big Hole.

  At best, each planting instantaneously created tenement conditions of habitat and famine conditions of food supply. In each
place where the hatchery truck stopped, the river became a grayling ghetto. At worst, if any of the planted fish survived long enough to breed with one another and interbreed with the wild fish, the whole planting program may have served to degrade the gene pool of the Big Hole grayling, making them less well adapted to the river’s particular conditions, less capable of surviving the natural adversities—drought, flood, temperature fluctuation, predation—of their natural habitat.

  Then again, it’s unlikely that more than a few of those planted grayling did survive long enough to breed. The mortality rate on hatchery grayling planted in rivers is close to 100 percent during the first year, and most don’t last even three months, whether or not they are caught by a fisherman. Those planted grayling come, after all, from a small sample of lake-dwelling parents, a sample comprising little genetic variation or inherited capacity for coping with moving water. Reared in the Orwellian circumstances of the hatchery, cooped in concrete troughs, without a beaver or a merganser to harry them, eating Purina trout chow from the hand of man, what chance have they finally in the most challenging of habitats, a mountain river? The term “fish planting” itself is a gross misnomer when applied to dropping grayling or trout into rivers; there is no illusion, even among hatchery people, that many of these plants will ever take root. More realistically, it’s like providing an Easter egg hunt for tourists with fishing rods.

  In 1962 the Big Hole planting ceased and the remaining wild grayling, those that hadn’t died during the famine and tenement periods, were left to get on as best they could. Then came the 1977 drought and, a year later, the George Liknes study. One of Liknes’s study sections on the Big Hole was a two-mile stretch downstream from the town of Wisdom to just above the Squaw Creek bridge. On a certain remote part of the stretch, a rancher had sunk a string of old car bodies to hold his hayfield in place against bank erosion. From that two-mile stretch, using electroshocking collection equipment that is generally reliable for fish censusing, Liknes did not take a single grayling. This came as worrisome news to me, because on a morning in late summer 1975, standing waist-deep within sight of the same string of car bodies and offering no great demonstration of angling skill, I had caught and released thirty-one grayling in four hours. Now they were either gone or in hiding.

  Grayling belong to the salmonid family, as cousins of trout and salmon and whitefish. In many ways they seem to be an intermediate form between whitefish and trout, sharing some resemblances with each of those clusters of species. In other ways, they depart uniquely from the salmonid pattern.

  The first thing usually noted about them, their identifying character, is the large and beautiful dorsal fin. It sweeps backward twice the length of a trout’s, fanning out finally into a trailing lobe, and it is, under certain circumstances, the most exquisitely colorful bit of living matter to be found in the state of Montana: spackled with rows of bright turquoise spots that blend variously to aquamarine and reddish orange toward the front of the fin, a deep hazy shading of iridescent mauve overall, and along the upper edge, in some individuals, a streak of shocking rose. That’s how it looks in the wild, or even when the fish is stuck on a hook several inches underwater. Lift the fish into air and the exquisiteness disappears. The bright spots and iridescence drain away at once, the dorsal fin folds down to nothing, and you are holding a drab gunmetal creature that looks very much like a whitefish. The grayling magic vanishes, like a dreamed sibyl, when you pull it to you.

  Apart from this dorsal fin, in its optimal display condition, the grayling does resemble that most maligned and misunderstood of Montana creatures, the mountain whitefish, Prosopium williamsoni. Both are upholstered, unlike the various trout species, with large, stiff scales—scales you wouldn’t want to eat. Both have dull-colored bodies, grayish silver in the grayling, brownish silver in the whitefish, though the grayling does carry as additional adornment a smattering of purplish black spots along its forward flank, playing dimly off the themes in the dorsal fin. Grayling and whitefish are distinguishable (from each other, and from their common salmonid relatives) by the shape of their mouths. A trout has a wide, sweeping, toothy grin. A whitefish mouth is narrow, virtually toothless, and set in a snout that is cartilaginous and pointed, almost like a rat’s, which probably contributes to the unpopularity of whitefish among fly fishermen, who don’t enjoy disengaging their delicate flies from such rubbery muzzles. The grayling mouth, as you can see if you look closely, is an uneasy compromise between those other two forms: a prim orifice, neither wide nor narrow, set with numerous tiny teeth and fendered with large cartilaginous maxillaries, too short and inoffensive to be fairly called a snout. My point is this: The grayling is one of America’s most beautiful fish, but only a few subtle anatomical differences separate it from one of the most ugly. A lesson about pride, I suppose.

  But a superfluous lesson, since the grayling by character is anything but overweening. It is dainty and fragile and relatively submissive. With tiny teeth and little moxie, it fails in competition against trout, at least along the southern periphery of its range—and that’s another reason for its decline in the Big Hole, where rainbow and brown and brook trout, none of them indigenous, now bully it mercilessly. Like many beautiful creatures that have known fleeting success, the grayling is dumb. It seeks security in gregariousness and these days is liable to find, instead, carnage. When insect food is on the water and the fish are attuned to that fact, a fisherman can stand in one spot, literally without moving his feet, and catch a dozen grayling. Trout are not so foolish. Drag one from a hole and the word will be out to the others. The grayling cannot take such a hint. In the matter of food it is an unshakeable optimist; the distinction between a mayfly on the water’s surface and a hook decorated with feathers and floss is lost on it. But this rashness, in the Big Hole for example, might again be partly a consequence (as well as a cause) of its beleaguered circumstances. The exotic trouts, being dominant, seize the choice territorial positions of habitat, and the grayling, pushed off into marginal water where a fish can only with difficulty make a living, may be forced to feed much more recklessly than it otherwise would.

  At certain moments the grayling seems even a bit stoic, as though it had seen its own future and made adjustments. This is noticeable from the point of view of the fisherman. A rainbow trout with a hook jerked snug in its mouth will leap as though it is angry, furious—leap maybe five or six times, thrashing the air convulsively each time. If large, it will run upstream, finally to go to the bottom and begin scrabbling its head in the rubble to scrape out the hook. A whitefish, unimaginative and implacable, will usually not jump, will never run, will stay near the bottom and resist with pure loutish muscle. A grayling will jump once, if at all, and remain limp in the air, leaping the way a Victorian matron would swoon into someone’s arms—with demure, trusting abandon. Then, possibly after a polite tussle, the grayling will let its head be pulled above the water’s surface, turn passively onto its side, and allow itself to be hauled in. Once beaten, a rainbow trout can be coaxed with certain tricks of handling to give you three seconds of docility while you extract the hook so as to release it. A whitefish will struggle like a hysterical pig no matter what. A grayling will simply lie in your hand, pliant and fatalistic, placing itself at your mercy.

  So no one has much use for the grayling, not even fishermen. It grows slowly, never as large as a lunker trout, and gives unsatisfactory battle. It is scaly, bony, and not especially good to eat. Montana’s fishing regulations allow you to kill five of them from the Big Hole in a day* and five more every day all summer—but what will you do with them? Last year a Butte man returned from a weekend on the river and offered a friend of mine ten grayling to feed his cat. The man had killed them because he caught them, very simple logic, but then realized he had no use for them. This year my friend’s cat is dead, through no fault of the grayling, so even that outlet is gone. A grayling does not cook up well, it does not fight well. It happens to have an extravagant dorsal fin, but n
o one knows why. If you kill one to hang on your wall, its colors will wilt away dishearteningly, and the taxidermist will hand you back a whitefish in rouge and eye shadow. The grayling, face it, is useless. Like the auk, like the zebra swallowtail, like Angkor Wat.

  In June 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that completion of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River was prohibited by law, namely the 1973 Endangered Species Act, because the dam would destroy the only known habitat of the snail darter, Percina tanasi, a small species of fish belonging to the perch family. One argument in support of this prohibition, perhaps the crucial argument, was that the snail darter’s genes might at some time in the future prove useful, even invaluable, to the balance of life on Earth, or at least to the welfare of humanity. If the Penicillium fungus had gone extinct when the dodo did, according to this argument, many thousands of additional human beings by now would have died of diphtheria and pneumonia. You could never foresee what you might need, what might prove useful in the line of genetic options, so nothing at all should be squandered, nothing dismissed, nothing relinquished. Thus it was reasoned on behalf of snail darter preservation. The logic is as solid as it is pernicious.