Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  Both sides somehow eventually collaborated for a gigantic and impressive synthesis on the ecology of whaling in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems (James A. Estes et al., 2006).

  Chapter 5: Ecological Meltdown

  Much of the bibliographic information on John Terborgh was provided by Terborgh himself, via interviews and from his writings; in particular, see Where Have All the Birds Gone? (1989), and Requiem for Nature (1999). A good deal more was provided by his sister, Anne Terborgh, and former students and colleagues, most notably Scott Robinson and David Wilcove.

  For a more intimate view of the ecology of Barro Colorado Island—as well as a differing perspective on the impact of its missing predators—see A Magic Web (2002), by Egbert Giles Leigh Jr., with photographs by Christian Ziegler. For a more technical counterpoint toTerborgh’s interpretation of the predators’ role at BCI, see S. Joseph Wright et al. (1994).

  Much of the description of the Guri islands is gleaned and interpreted from interviews with its researchers, John Terborgh, Ken Feeley, and Gabriela Orihuela chief among them. Visuals and a captivating storyline can be found in the National Geographic documentary Strange Days on Planet Earth: Predators (2005), produced by Ron Bowman.

  Among the reams of publications describing the ecological meltdown of Lago Guri (see papers by Terborgh and Feeley, among others), Terborgh and colleagues’ 2001 Science paper most succinctly sums it up, while Jared Diamond’s accompanying commentary in the same issue adds color and context.

  Chapter 6: Bambi’s Revenge

  The Science of Overabundance (McShea, Underwood, and Rappole, 1997), though already slightly outdated, remains a great primer on the history and ecology of too many deer. Popular accounts include those from Andrew C. Revkin (2002), Erik Ness (2003), and Stephen B. Jones (1993), among many others.

  The story of Haida Gwai comes from conversations with Jean-Louis Martin and papers by his crew and colleagues, including those of Sylvain Allombert et al. (2005), Stephen A. Stockton et al. (2005), and Gwenaël Vourc’h et al. (2001–2003). A video documentary handsomely portraying the story is Michel Coqblin and Jean-Louis Martin’s Haïda Gwaii:A Natural Laboratory.

  The deflowering of Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is documented in papers by Christopher Webster et al. (2005) and Jennifer A. Griggs et al. (2006). Deer problems in the Shenandoahs were informed by conversations with Bill McShea and Chad Stewart at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia, and with Rolf Gubler at Shenandoah National Park. Gary Roisum, manager of Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria, Virginia, provided a tour through that park’s history and ongoing biological invasion and decay.

  An impressive body of research on the whitetail’s ecological impact can be found at the Web site for Don Waller’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, http://www.botany.wisc.edu/waller/Researchpage.html.

  Chapter 7: Little Monsters’ Ball

  The ecology of mesopredators as presented here was derived in large part through conversations with Stanley D. Gehrt, W. Douglas Robinson, Scott K. Robinson, Kenneth A. Schmidt, Michael E. Soulé, and David S. Wilcove, with accompanying papers from each. Other important authors unmentioned in the text include include Francisco Palomares et al., and Marsha A. Sovada et al. The baboon plague of Africa was informed by Justin Brashares, whose papers were forthcoming, and whose stories as told are more frightening than I have been able to convey.

  For cautions on extrapolating the mesopredator release concept too broadly, see Stanley Gehrt and William R. Clark’s “Raccoons, Coyotes, and Reflections on the Mesopredator Release Hypothesis” (2003).

  The coyote’s invasion of eastern and urban America is covered in papers by Matthew E. Gompper (2002) and in a popular account by Mary Battiata (2006), among others.

  Extensive summaries on the impact of domestic cats on the world’s native wildlife can be found online, in reports by Linda Winter (2006), “Impacts of Feral and Free-ranging Cats on Bird Species of Special Concern,” and by John Coleman et al. (1997), “Cats and Wildlife: A Conservation Dilemma.” For a sobering look at the cat’s ravaging of the world’s oceanic island fauna, see Manuel Nogales et al. (2004), “A Review of Feral Cat Eradication on Islands.”

  Chapter 8: Valley of Fear

  William J. Ripple and Robert L. Beschta have contributed the lion’s share of published studies in this telling of Yellowstone’s ongoing ecological cascade. Their affiliated Web site, www.cof.orst.edu/cascades, is a smorgasbord of their projects and papers, as well as links to some of the endless wave of wolf news emanating from this hotspot of research on terrestrial trophic cascades.

  Additional and important contributions on the Yellowstone wolves and elk come from, among others, Eric J. Bergman and colleagues (2006), Hawthorne L. Beyer et al. (2006), Scott Creel et al. (2005), Daniel Fortin et al. (2004, 2005), Jeff P. Hollenbeck and Ripple (2007), Joshua S. Halofsky and Ripple (in press), Matthew J. Kauffman et al. (2007), Julie S. Mao et al. (2005), and John Vucetich et al. (2005).

  Yellowstone’s history of elk management is harshly, if not savagely, critiqued by Alston Chase (1987) in Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park, and by Charles L. Kay (1997) “Viewpoint: Ungulate Herbivory, Willows, and Political Ecology in Yellowstone.” The return of Yellowstone’s wolves is covered in detail by Hank Fischer (1995) in Wolf Wars, and also very stylishly so in Thomas McNamee’s (1997) The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone.

  The chase scenes were reconstructed from writings and interviews with veteran wolf-watchers Rick McIntyre, Doug Smith, and Daniel MacNulty, and vivid film footage from Bob Landis and Kathryn Pasternak. The elk kill can be seen in Landis and Pasternak’s Wolf Pack, and the bison battle in their Thunderbeast.

  Chapter 9: The Lions of Zion

  Susan L. Flader’s Thinking like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves and Forests (1974) informed much of this chapter’s perspective of Leopold’s relationship with predators, as did William J. Ripple and Robert L. Beschta’s “Linking Wolves and Plants: Aldo Leopold on Trophic Cascades” (2005).

  An unpublished essay by Berkeley biologist Dale R. McCullough, “Of Paradigms and Philosophies: Aldo Leopold and the Search for a Sustainable Future” provided a warts-and-all examination of the Leopold legend, including an eye-raising hypothesis on his supposed epiphany over the dying wolf that spawned “Thinking like a Mountain.”

  The life history of the cougar is admirably covered in Desert Puma, by Kenneth A. Logan and Linda L. Sweanor.

  Chapter 10: Dead Creatures Walking

  Parts of this chapter first appeared in the journal Conservation in Practice (now named Conservation) in my 2006 feature on rewilding, “Where the Wild Things Were,” as well as in a 1994 piece in Nature Conservancy magazine, “New Views of Ancient Times.” Paul Martin’s background and early thinking on rewilding is variously documented by himself and others, most recently in his own Twilight of the Mammoths (2005), and in Connie Barlow’s inspired Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners and Other Ecological Anachronisms (2001).

  A sampling of the professional response to C. Josh Donlan et al.’s rewilding paper (2005) includes letters to Nature by Martin A. Schlaepfer, Christopher Irwin Smith, Guillaume Chapron, and Eric Dinerstein and W. Robert Irvin. A more thorough critique appears from Dustin R. Rubenstein and colleagues in the journal Biological Conservation: “Pleistocene Park: Does Re-wilding North America Represent Sound Conservation for the 21st Century?”

  Beyond the accounts in published journals or news reports, the broader public reaction is for bigger books than this. The various samplings of color and profanity included here were provided by Donlan and Greene, from a manuscript in preparation, “NLIMBY: No Lions in My Backyard.”

  Chapter 11: The Loneliest Predator

  George B. Schaller and Gordon R. Lowther’s fascinating stint as australopithecine
scavengers is covered in Schaller’s 1973 book, Golden Shadows, Flying Hooves, and in Schaller and Lowther’s 1969 technical report “The Relevance of Carnivore Behavior to the Study of Early Hominids.”

  Discussions on the early evolution of human culture were derived from a variety of sources, most notably from Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee (1992) and Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature (1978), Hans Kruuk’s Hunter and Hunted (2002), Paul Shepard’s Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998), and Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman’s Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution (2005). Certain passages in this chapter were adapted from Stolzenburg (2005), “Where the Wild Things Were.”

  The portrayal of man-the-runner borrows primarily from David R. Carrier (1984), “The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution,” and from Dennis M. Bramble and Daniel E. Lieberman (2004), “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo.”

  A physiological explanation for the pronghorn’s speed can be found in Stan Lindstedt et al. (1991), “Running Energetics in the Pronghorn Antelope.” An evolutionary explanation, involving ghosts, is championed chiefly by John A. Byers in American Pronghorn: Social Adaptations and the Ghosts of Predators Past (1997) and more informally in Built for Speed: A Year in the Life of Pronghorn (2003). Carol Kaesuk Yoon gives a popular account of Byers’s hypothesis in “Pronghorn’s Speed May Be Legacy of Past Predators” (1996).

  Epilogue: Alone on the Hill

  The ongoing onslaught of the sharks, and just a few of the ecological and economic consequences yet discovered, can be found in the 2007 paper by Ransom A. Myers and colleagues, “Cascading Effects of the Loss of Apex Predatory Sharks from a Coastal Ocean.” For some recent stats on shark finning, see Shelley Clarke and colleagues (2006), “Global Estimates of Shark Catches Using Trade Records from Commercial Markets.”

  In addition, a rich vein of new research revealing shark-triggered cascades has lately been coming from the waters of western Australia, described in papers by Michael Heithaus, Aaron Wirsing, Lawrence Dill, and colleagues.

  Some of the contradictions of predator control are recently reviewed by me (2006) in “Us or Them,” which is pegged to a study by Kim Murray Berger (2006), “Carnivore-Livestock Conflicts.”

  The coyote’s success in the face of an astounding battery of persecution is a remarkable story in itself. For a better sense of the range of technologies employed against coyotes, see Eric M. Gese (2003), “Management of Carnivore Predation as a Means to Reduce Livestock Losses.” On a more graphic plane, Killing Coyote, by Doug Hawes-Davis, is a fascinating documentary of a venerable Western culture impassioned with seeing this scrappy little carnivore dead. As with the killer whale footage previously noted, some scenes are not for the weak of stomach. And nobody who wants to know something of the character of coyotes and our ambivalence toward them should miss reading J. Frank Dobie’s 1949 classic, The Voice of the Coyote.

  The activities of the U.S. Wildlife Services, which are responsible for managing nuisance wildlife, are published online at: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/prog_data_report_FY2006.shtml.

  To see the kill statistics, go to http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/annual%20tables/Table%20G,%20FY2006.pdf.

  A more sensational account of the U.S. Wildlife Services’ predatorial practices over the agency’s history is provided by Jack Olsen (1974) in Slaughter the Animals, Poison the Earth.

  Europe’s history of persecuting predators is synthesized by Urs Breitenmoser (1991), “Large Predators in the Alps: The Fall and Rise of Man’s Competitors,” and by J. C. Reynolds and S. C. Tapper (1996): “Control of Mammalian Predators in Game Management and Conservation.”

  Analyses and elucidations of sprawl and the expanding human footprint, with particular regards to Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountain West, come from papers by Patricia H. Gude, Andrew J. Hansen, and colleagues.

  The shifting baselines syndrome was introduced by Daniel Pauly (1995) and elaborated in his 2003 book in collaboration with Jay Maclean: In a Perfect Ocean. For further discussions on the syndrome, as well as the rise of slime, read Jeremy Jackson’s 2004 speech “Habitat Destruction and Ecological Extinction of Marine Invertebrates.” And for a deflating look at the state of the ocean’s fishes, see Jackson and colleagues’ “Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems” (2001), as well as Ransom Myers and Boris Worm’s (2003) report in Nature, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities.”

  A masterful exploration of man’s mental affair with several of his most dangerous predators is David Quammen’s Monster of God (2003). A more tightly focused story of one community’s dilemma dealing with mountain lions in their midst is well told by David Baron in The Beast in the Garden (2003). Our age-old fascination with wolves is elegantly portrayed by Barry Lopez in Of Wolves and Men (1978). And the grizzly bear’s allure can be better appreciated by reading The Great Bear (1992), a collection of essays by a range of accomplished writers, edited by John A. Murray. Or better yet, as I’ve mentioned a time or two, by meeting the great bear on its home turf.

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