After the science was complete, Alan began meeting with politicians, ranchers, and local communities in the countries where Jaguars range. By 2015, Panthera was working with people in fourteen of those eighteen countries. The work was wide-ranging and included landowner assistance and training, mitigating human-Jaguar conflicts, and opening possible new corridors, such as connecting the western population of cats with the eastern over the Andes in Ecuador, through memorandums of understanding with government leaders. Panama became crucial in this regard, as the slim isthmus is the only corridor connecting Central with South America. Local response to the Jaguar was surprisingly positive throughout its range. There is a deep cultural connection, after all, between the native people and the Jaguar, a demigod for ancient cultures such as the Olmec, the Maya, and even the Aztec. The cat was revered as the ruler of the night and the underworld. Despite the decline of these beliefs, the respect for the Jaguar persists in new generations, making their protection an homage to their ancestors. The Jaguar Corridor is the first large undertaking of its kind and has become a model for migrating species worldwide.
My admiration for wildlife photographers is immense. They brave weather conditions that no sane person would endure, often alone and for months on end, to get a shot of an elusive or rare animal. Steve Winter is such a photographer. I first became aware of his work in National Geographic, and when he shot Alan for an article I got to know him. He and his life partner, Sharon Guynup, a journalist, are staunch protectors of endangered species. Their book Tigers Forever is one of the best on the subject, with Steve’s iconic pictures and their cowriting.
The wildlife photographer Steve Winter checks his camera traps in Brazil’s Pantanal, 2010.
Steve and I went out on the fazenda one searing afternoon to inspect his camera traps. He was hoping for cat photos, and what he had was 161 pictures of cattle crossing the frame. He chuckled at his bad luck and reset his cameras; as we ambled back toward the river, we were rewarded with the sight of a tall graceful Rhea, South America’s Ostrich, with nine fuzzy chicks racing after her.
At the water’s edge was a caged barge crowded with cattle to be shipped downriver that night. The sun was beating down on the animals and several had sunk to their knees in the heat. I didn’t think many of them would survive and alerted Tom to the impending deaths. Indeed, within a few hours, by the time the ranch hands reached them, nineteen had perished. And they worried about the occasional Jaguar kill?
Our days in this Eden of Brazil were coming to an end. Ricardo and I were joined by another Conservation Council member, Jonathan Powell, who had been Tony Blair’s closest adviser when he was Britain’s prime minister. Jonathan was keen on birding and had also heard that we had seen eight Jaguars. The three of us set out at dawn to catch the early birds, then Ricardo drove us to out-of-the-way places such as his old study site deep in the forest. It was a ghost laboratory, like something out of a horror movie. Specimen jars sat on rickety old shelves covered with dust: baby reptiles caught forever in formaldehyde, snakes, frogs, eggs, and insects all in a row as jungle vines crept over them. A table was littered with mammal skulls, eye sockets eerily caught in the midday light. Vines crept through cracks in the wooden roof and would soon envelope all traces of the lab. Ricardo had left it ten years earlier to go south for a new position. We moved on to visit an old rancher and his wife in their neat small house in the middle of the vast dry landscape. They were friends of Ricardo’s and were delighted to welcome him again; they served us shots of guarana, a coffee-like powder mixed with water and sugar, which gauchos drink all day for the boost it gives.
A twelve-foot-long Anaconda inched across the road as we drove away, its girth that of an NFL linebacker’s arm. Capuchin Monkeys played in the brush while Jabiru Storks nested in the highest tree, three chicks peeking over the edge. Every morning or evening we would see another Jaguar, always on the riverbanks taking the cool breeze. This was the richest environment for wildlife I had ever encountered outside Africa.
On our last evening Tom asked me to go fishing with him. My luck held even though I am not much of a fisher. I reeled in a ten-pound sleek silver catfish, one of many species of catfish in the Paraguay. When Tom landed a smaller gold-speckled catfish, I told him it meant that the price of silver was going to rise. Tom had initiated many probing conversations about life, philosophy, and conservation during our time together. He is a born historian and a committed environmentalist, who generously made it possible for us to come to the Pantanal and witness the work of Panthera.
Alan’s star kept rising. The 60 Minutes segment was very popular with viewers. National Geographic did an hour-long movie about him, as did the BBC and others. Readers love his books because he couples his passion with exciting personal adventure stories about wildlife.
Panthera’s leaders, left to right: Luke Hunter; Alan Rabinowitz; Rafael Hoogesteijn, a Venezuelan Jaguar biologist and cattle rancher; Tom Kaplan; and Howard Quigley
The little boy from Queens still stutters a bit, which serves only to make him a hero to fellow stutterers and organizations like the Stuttering Association for the Young, which he wholeheartedly supports. His leukemia may be slowing him down physically; mentally he is accomplishing more than ever. “But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” wrote Andrew Marvell. Time is short—both for the animals and for Alan.
His legacy is written in the policies of the countries where he has worked: Belize, Thailand, Myanmar, and those of Central and South America in particular, which now all have protected areas and laws in place for the great cats. In Asia and Africa the cats will survive in large parks if enough enforcement is in place to deter poachers. In the New World, Jaguars and Cougars will roam free if the corridors survive human development and are kept open, and as long as the political and social will is there to allow them their freedom.
Alan’s contribution to wildlife conservation is immeasurable. He is a hero for all time. If the great cats of the world survive the onslaughts of this century it will be because of my friend the Tiger Man, the little boy who grew up to keep a promise he made to a Jaguar more than fifty years ago.
PART 2
WILDLIFE WOMAN
9
Birds
We lived on Pill Hill, where almost all fathers were doctors. Hawthorn Road was a short street with just eleven houses. My dad finally came home from the war after five long years with the Fifth Army Hospital in England, and he and my mother bought the old clapboard house in Brookline, Massachusetts, for $10,000. Those postwar years were special. The country was in a celebratory mood, and for families reuniting there was joy in the air. We kids spilled out of our homes to play Kick the Can before supper or to race down Cumberland Avenue to look for turtles or minnows in the Muddy River shallows.
My life as an adventurer began at three years old.
There was a vacant lot we called “the woods” catty-corner from us where I climbed trees, examined bugs, and first became interested in the natural world. The intense fear I had of spiders dissipated when my mother took a huge spider from under the back porch eaves and let it crawl up her arm and over her head. She didn’t flinch. I thought she was the bravest person in the world. In our little plot bordering Boston, she taught me what she had learned of nature as a girl in Nova Scotia, and she began to name the birds. There were starlings squeaking noisily in the locust tree, a Mockingbird perched on the streetlamp, and a Robin who woke me each morning with his sweet song.
At the end of the street was a clay tennis court where our neighborhood gang hit the ball around when the weather was good. There was always a flock of House Sparrows there, snug against the chicken wire eating something. At ten years old I became intensely curious about flight. I jumped off rocks and bluffs trying to fly, and made balsa-wood wings to aid in the effort. My favorite story was the myth of Icarus, who flew on wings of feather and wax too near the sun and plummeted to the ground. I loved the illustration of him in the book
of Greek myths Dad read to us before bed. Icarus was like a great eagle soaring toward the sun, his wing tips bowed against the air. It was the ultimate picture of freedom. I guess my brother Tom loved it too because in his twenties he joined the Marines, served in Vietnam, and became a pilot for life.
The little sparrows gave me an idea. I took my clunky balloon-tire bike up the embankment on the far side of the tennis court and then pedaled like mad across the court in ambush. It worked! One sparrow couldn’t get up in time and was caught in the chicken wire. I held the creature in the palm of my hand and felt its trembling heart. The bird was so light. I looked into its eyes, its beak yammering in protest, then turned it over on its back and extended one wing, examining the structure. I turned it over again, opened my palm, and watched as it magically lifted into the sky. Perfection.
Puberty hit with a vengeance. Icarus was replaced by the goddess Aphrodite, and sparrows by boys. I discovered acting. The woods were replaced by theater and an equally enchanting world of make-believe. I did not get back to birds for twenty years.
My career was well established when Ed and I bought our house in Putnam County, just sixty miles north of New York City, a place where our four boys from our first marriages could play and grow. A gracious lawn rolled down a slope past a lily pond over a brook to a pasture and an old orchard of twenty trees. Behind us was a forest bordering on state conservation land. Wildlife was everywhere.
A herd of White-tailed Deer wandered the orchard eating drop apples. Occasionally a River Otter slipped into the brook’s pool, created by the dam of an old sawmill. He splashed for Brook Trout and Water Snakes. Opossums cornered by our curious dog played dead in the woodpile. Rabbits made smooth bowls in the earth beneath cat briar and birthed a dozen bunnies. Wood Turtles with bright orange legs bred in the wetlands and baby turtles could be found nibbling on pasture flowers in May.
One spring day a family of Barn Swallows came wheeling up the lawn from the South, circling excitedly round and round like kids tumbling out of a station wagon at their summer home. They nestled under the back deck and busily built mud cups for eggs, as they had for all the years the previous owners occupied the house.
A pair of Eastern Phoebes, sweet black-topped flycatchers, arrived on March 25, as they did every year afterward, give or take a day or two. They staked out a little shelf under the roof overhang and built a nest of moss and grass and mud. Their soft fee-bee call was comforting. They darted out from a branch above the stream or the pool and grabbed little white moths or flies for their chicks. It took hundreds to fill the four gaping mouths every day.
By the second year of living in our “Pumpkin House”—so named for the big window in front and the two above on either side, which made the house look like a jack-o’-lantern lit up at night—it became clear to me that we shared our place with hundreds of species—or thousands, if you included insects. And all these creatures predated us in lineage of the land—maybe for millennia. We were the interlopers, but we would be careful not to interrupt the conditions that allowed them to thrive.
They became friends and, perhaps sensing my joy in them, moved closer: the House Wren, the Robin, the Phoebe, and Barn Swallows practically lived in the house with us, and in time the little Brown Bats did live in the house with us, under the roof, while the slender Ring-necked Snakes birthed their young in the foundation.
One day I opened an unzipped suitcase in a closet to find an exquisite Flying Squirrel protecting four pink babies on ragged tufts of mattress stuffing. As much as I admired her beauty I could not see us sharing the cathedral ceiling space with five Flying Squirrels, and so began the comical attempt to evict her. I put on thick ski gloves and innocently went to pick her up, whereupon she dashed out on the second-floor railing and leapt to the fireplace, climbing the stones all the way to the ceiling.
I probed the distance between us with a long tree clipper, which induced her to glide gracefully through the air to the floor twenty-five feet below. Then she ran up the spiral staircase toward her babies as I raced to close our bedroom door. This scenario repeated itself for the better part of two hours.
She was the most beautiful rodent I ever saw, with big brown nocturnal eyes, a gray-brown back, and a cream-colored belly. When she opened her paws to “fly,” the expanse of soft furry skin from hind leg to foreleg was pulled taut and allowed her to sail with ease through the air like a paper plane, angling this way and that with her wrists before landing gently on the oriental rug. I was entranced. I caught her a few times but she struggled free after vigorously biting my thick gloves. At last I caught her in a butterfly net and shut her up in a cardboard box.
I moved her babies down to the basement, cradled in a towel, and put a plate of nuts and fruit next to them on top of the old foundation. Then I released their weary mother nearby. The stones had so many cracks between them I suspected she would find her way out. She did. When I returned a few hours later her tiny pink babies were gone and she had eaten every bit of fruit and all the nuts. I half expected a thank-you note like Santa leaves.
The birds continued to enthrall me the most as the seasons went by in our country home. The Great Blue Heron, sensing sanctuary, barely budged when we ran down to the lily pond hoping to keep just one Goldfish alive after the rest had been devoured. We saw the looping display of the Woodcock courting in the orchard and the Louisiana Waterthrush, which is not a thrush at all but a warbler, teetering at the edge of the brook, its sweet song burbling against the water’s lap. The fuchsia-red blaze against the white of the Rose-breasted Grosbeak looked like a crucifix on an Easter chasuble.
While I came to know the birds at my feeder best, there was one stationed fifty feet into the woods that kept his distance. This was a bird whose song transported me. I waited for it in the morning before I rose and in the evening at dusk. It is the bird I love the most, and the song gives me chills. It seems of another realm. We were lucky to have a Wood Thrush call our place home. In the thirty-four years we lived there we had several generations of Wood Thrush songsters, and I can say emphatically that there are singers and then there are singers.
At some point the one I called “the grand old man” began to sing. He was with us for five years. His song was to the previous Wood Thrush as Pavarotti’s is to Garth Brooks’s: both are good singers, but the former takes your breath away. I spent enough time listening to the grand old man to begin to believe that he knew he was remarkable. I had the feeling that perhaps the whole forest stopped to listen. He began to improvise, and the song became more than the standard “e-olay.” It became intricate in its dynamic, one phrase drawn out and full-throated and the next rippling down softly as if spilling from a bowl. He had a deep alto resonance. He was raising the bar in the Wood Thrush world.
One evening an astonishing event occurred. It was one of those perfect late July evenings, golden light and about seventy-five degrees. We were sitting on the back deck when the grand old man tuned up. He sang gloriously for about five minutes and then suddenly was joined by not one but two others who must have been sitting about ten or twenty feet on either side of him. He would begin and then the second one would come in softly and then the third, almost as if singing a round, but then they deviated. They would truncate phrases, pull a note out of a high register, take off from one another, undercut with a low note, one doing a percussive rat-a-tat chip-chip as counterpoint and then they would end with a flourish before starting again. This went on for about twenty minutes—a Wood Thrush jam session. Jazz in birdland—worthy of Charlie Parker or Miles Davis. Were the other two learning from the master? Were they juveniles learning from Dad? If so, they were learning without any prior lessons that I had heard. I never knew the answer but in the two weeks that followed we were treated to three more concerts and then nothing after August 3, 1999, although the grand old man was with us for a few more years.
Succeeding thrushes never equaled his song and in fact some were almost screechy. The grand old man was my “spark
bird,” the one who turned my love for birds into a passion. I never look or listen to a bird today without seeing or hearing its individuality—especially if I am lucky enough to live with them nearby.
Here is a bit of a poem by the nineteenth century’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, on the English Song Thrush:
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing…
What is all this juice and all this joy?
Indeed! What is all this juice and joy? Hearing the grand old man sing was to believe he did it for the joy of it, especially in August after the breeding season. The English Thrush cannot compare with our Wood Thrush of the Western Hemisphere, but thrushes the world over pour out their joyous morning songs to the delight of human beings everywhere.
The Audubon Society has more than 460 chapters all over the United States. I joined the Putnam Highlands chapter hungry to learn about birds by going out with folks who knew them. An older man named Tom Morgan took me along on May mornings to spot warblers migrating north. Tom was bent over from osteoporosis, making it hard for him to look up, so he knew the songs of all the birds—hundreds of them. It was a wonder to me how he distinguished between a Magnolia Warbler, a Yellow Warbler, or a Redstart. We would sit on a granite outcropping in the hilly terrain of Fahnestock State Park and Tom would tell me about the birds: “Hear that? A Canada Warbler. And there’s a Fox Sparrow, and a Scarlet Tanager.” I was hopeless at the art for many years.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 9
