Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Tom Morgan, who taught me how to listen to the birds, Putnam County, New York, 1975

  When I was asked to join the Gone Birding team for the World Series of Birding in the 1980s I thought they were kidding. However, as the on-camera host of the Gone Birding! video game, I had developed a reputation as an actress who might help promote the cause of protecting birds.

  I found myself in a car with four ace birders at midnight in a swamp in New Jersey next to I-95, where refineries belched smoke and flame. We had twenty-four hours to see or hear as many species as possible throughout the state. This little patch of brackish water, left over from the ancient coastal marsh that had been sucked up by mankind’s need for energy, happened to house the Black Rail, a tiny secretive denizen whose metallic call rang out loud and clear in hopes of attracting a mate. It was our first bird of the marathon, a little gem in the middle of hell.

  We zoomed down the highway to our next spot, probably for owls, and so it went through the night until dawn brought us more birds than we could handle and the thrill of rare ones we never expected. We visited wetlands and forests and shorelines. The count grew as the day wore on, and our weariness increased.

  I was in awe of my colleagues, especially Julie Zickefoose, whose watercolors and stories of rehabilitating injured and orphaned birds have become legendary. She was in her twenties back in the 1980s, and she had an ear to die for. She would roll down the window, cup her hand to her head, and call out: “Carolina Wren, Great Crested Flycatcher, Swainson’s Thrush, Fish Crow…” as we sped by. This crazy chase left no time for lunch, or even relieving oneself except on the fly, pun intended. We staggered into Cape May headquarters late Saturday night with our tabulation. It was a respectable count, probably 170 or so species, but far from the best because I was almost dead weight for the team. There was a lifetime of learning ahead. I began to listen, really listen.

  —

  We may never know what Pterosaurs sounded like, but paleontologists have a pretty good idea what they looked like from examining their fossilized bones. They were reptiles that flew in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, 200 to 65 million years ago. To put it another way, they were on earth for around 135 million years, 134.8 million years longer than modern human beings. They were far more diverse than the line of flying dinosaurs that evolved into our birds.

  There were hundreds of Pterosaur genera, some with a wingspan of only ten inches and some with a wingspan of thirty-six feet, the first fossil of which was discovered in Big Bend National Park in Texas a few decades ago. They came with elaborate tails, crests, beaks, and even plated forearms on which they walked. If you have seen the animated movie How to Train Your Dragon 2 you get an idea of what the skies might have looked like when Pterosaurs filled them. Flying reptiles everywhere.

  The Cretaceous was a warm period with a mean temperature above 60 degrees, a carbon count of 1,700 parts per million for much of the time (today we are at 400 ppm), and, in the late years, a higher oxygen level than we have now. It was a wet world, a fecund breeding ground for reptiles, shellfish, and Pterosaurs, which ended when a six-mile-wide asteroid or comet collided with Earth in what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, killing most creatures, all the nonavian dinosaurs, and all the Pterosaurs. At least, that is the hypothesis. No event 65 million years ago can be proved to have taken place, but rocks the world over speak of something catastrophic happening after impact. The crater it made is 110 miles wide and the collision was equivalent to a billion atom bombs.

  The World Series of Birding team, left to right: Me, Ollie Komar, Peter Alden, Alf Wilson, and Julie Zickefoose, New Jersey, 1980s

  While it lasted, the flying experiments called Pterosaurs were astonishing, as were the variety of dinosaurs. But the Cretaceous period was particularly fertile in many ways. Flowering plants began to develop. The ginkgo trees that line New York City streets today were planted because they can withstand carbon overload and pollution, as they must have 100 million years ago. Ants, butterflies, and bees evolved, making use of the flowers and trees. They survived the big extinction event 65 million years ago, as did marine reptiles, snails, clams, amphibians, lizards, and snakes. Omnivores, insectivores, and carrion eaters had more food to eat among the dead plant and animal matter than did the pure herbivores or carnivores. Birds, descended from a line of theropod dinosaurs, took over the niche left by the extinct Pterosaurs, and the age of the great mammals began. Deciduous plants thrived in the cooler climate; grasses created savannahs and prairies. The mammals expanded through adaptive radiation, some taking to the trees, like primates, lemurs, and the like, and some to the seas as cetaceans, such as whales.

  The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles has an exhibit about the Age of Mammals. It headlines three forces in six words: Continents Move, Climates Change, Mammals Evolve.

  Landmasses on earth are constantly moving. Mountains are uplifting, volcanoes are erupting, and fault lines are colliding or widening. The climate is constantly changing. Oceans warm and cool, glaciers melt and expand, the sun’s heat increases and decreases. Most of these forces have nothing to do with us, are beyond our control, and have been happening for billions of years.

  Today’s climate, however, is warming so rapidly in comparison to the climate stories told by ancient ice cores and rocks that scientists say it is indisputable that human beings have accelerated the warming. How high can the carbon count’s parts per million go before life for us is unsustainable?

  The Age of Mammals is now the Age of Human Beings, or the “Anthropocene Age,” as Paul Crutzen defines it today. Whether that age began with the first atom bomb detonations and the rise of plastics in the mid-twentieth century or the first use of fertilizers in the earlier part of the twentieth is negligible in the long scheme of things. We have made a difference. We have been making a difference since we discovered fire, made superior arrowheads, and walked out of Africa.

  There is no mammal that can compare with human beings. We make things: symphonies and clarinets, wheat fields and bread, hospitals and MRIs, rockets and computers. And we make things to kill: pesticides, herbicides, dynamite, guns, and bombs. We are the apex killer, the mammal that kills for revenge, for food, for land, for ideas, and for love. And for fun. No other creature is so versatile in killing.

  We have conquered the earth. But the earth is resilient. She has been around for four billion years, changing with each new onslaught, adapting to the vicissitudes of space and time, surviving chaos. The earth will survive. It is we humans who will not. And we will take down many living creatures with us. But not all. Some will survive to evolve and begin again.

  This is the most likely scenario as we continue down the path we are on. None of us today will be alive to see the end hundreds or thousands of years from now. Extinction takes time. It is a process of loss until the last of a species blinks out. No one really knows who shot the last Passenger Pigeon more than a hundred years ago; it took a while for everyone to conclude that they hadn’t seen one anywhere for many years. No one has seen an Ivory-billed Woodpecker for decades, but there is still a glimmer of hope that it may roam the swamps of Arkansas or Florida. Until then it is not formally “extinct.”

  The most promising scenario is that we wake up and fix the amount of carbon we’re emitting, which threatens to trap atmospheric heat, that we remove the particulates of plastic and chemicals that are killing plants and animals, ourselves included, and that we enter into a nurturing relationship with our planet, not an abusive one. It’s like beginning a twelve-step program, changing ourselves for ourselves and others we depend on. Because this is always, and in the end, about people. About saving humans. Not animals or plants or water or land or air. The earth will take care of them if we take care of the earth.

  —

  When you fall hard for something, really fall in love, as I did with birds, the desire to protect it comes naturally. My involvement with the Wildlife Conservation Society began in the mid-1980s when Alan Rabinowitz introduced me
to William Conway, its director, believing that my passion for animals translated well to conservation work. Dr. Conway agreed, appointing me readily to the Conservation Committee. My prior nonprofit experience had been with arts organizations and social-welfare groups, always lively meetings of people reflecting their constituency.

  The Bronx Zoo was a special place for me. Whenever my family motored to New York from our suburban Boston home, my siblings and I were taken to the zoo. It was the biggest, the grandest, and the most beautiful of all. It was here that I first encountered a Galápagos Tortoise, an Orangutan from distant Borneo, and, best of all, the odd Duck-billed Platypus from Australia, an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet, which delighted my medical father no end. To be named to the Conservation Committee of the prestigious New York Zoological Society, as it was still called then, was humbling.

  I nervously attended my first meeting in the stately administration building across from the Sea Lion pool. A dozen of us sat around a huge mahogany table, sunlight spilling through mullioned windows onto the polished surface. It was a quiet group. My fellow committee members were from New York’s founding families; their grandfathers created the great cultural institutions of the city—the families Phipps, Haupt, Astor, Rockefeller, Pierrepont, and Frick.

  George Schaller, on staff since 1959 for his seminal work on Mountain Gorillas in the Congo, gave a presentation. Dr. Schaller showed us slides of his current work with Pandas in China and of the glorious forests of bamboo where the Pandas lived. He spoke softly and told of the trials these creatures faced as their habitats were encroached upon. I was overcome by the story, by the stunning photos, and by the dedication of this extraordinary man. When he finished I burst into applause as I might for a brilliant Broadway actor. There was utter silence at the table, as if I had breached an unspoken rule of conduct. Dr. Schaller nodded slightly toward me and quietly left the room. The committee meeting continued with little discussion and then was adjourned, leaving me dazed and confused.

  I felt like an outlier in the inner sanctum of New York. As the first actress on an NYZS committee, I was clearly of a different cut. It reminded me of the time in Ireland when a fellow actress and I tried to rent a car and were told in no uncertain terms, “We don’t rent to theatricals.”

  Bill Conway put me at ease. He is the most genteel of all gentlemen, but I think he liked my rowdy enthusiasm and the ideas I subsequently brought to the table. Several years later I was appointed a trustee of the great institution.

  The Wildlife Conservation Society was the spiritual home I had always dreamed of, giving larger meaning to my life. A thousand scientists in the field in more than fifty countries researched animals, finding ways to save them. I spent countless hours in WCS’s zoos in Queens, Brooklyn, and Central Park, and in the Coney Island aquarium, becoming acquainted with the men and women who work behind the scenes as keepers and geneticists. I began to know the animals and was especially drawn to the new Bird House, which Conway helped create. I began to travel, first as a member of the Conservation Committee and later as a trustee, visiting biologists around the globe. I became friends with scientists whose stories surpassed the wildest scenarios of film and theater. My focus was shifting from the imaginary world to the wild and precious real one.

  10

  Peru

  They seemed to appear out of the sky, bodies cresting the ridge in bursts of fuchsia, reds, and pinks, the children tumbling ahead down the tussock grass, barefoot and joyful in their race to greet us. The air was chilly at fourteen thousand feet in the Andes. My breath was caught; my heart was beating fast as my three colleagues and I labored up the mountain slope. The children jumped to a halt and waited for their elders to reach us, their dark eyes intent and giddy. The men arrived, shook our hands, and nodded, smiling.

  Two of them in Western dress were the leaders of the community and of the project we came to realize. We were delivering five thousand polylepis trees to be planted by the community of Abra Malaga that day high in the Cordillera Vilcanota of southeastern Peru. This was a joint endeavor of the American Bird Conservancy, of which I was an early board member, and ECOAN, an ecological organization of the Andes. There were no trees to be seen at this altitude, only precipitous peaks in endless succession to the misty horizon and a small glacier nestled in a canyon high above. The village where these people lived was a sheer drop two thousand feet below, a cluster of tiny houses along a pale green river valley. It took them several hours to climb to where we were.

  The existence of these indigenous Peruvians is precarious. Something drove them centuries ago into this inaccessible mountain terrain. They are descended from the original Incas who built Machu Picchu and other great citadels close by, and war must have been a constant for their ancestors. Today they barely thrive on the crops they cultivate: barley, oats, and tubers—mostly potatoes, of which there are more than a hundred varieties. But the winters are cold and they have denuded the hills of all burnable growth, especially the stunted, scraggly polylepis, the only tree that dares attempt colonization on this montane barren.

  Although it is great to be credited with altruism for presenting this bountiful gift of baby trees for future firewood, we had an ulterior motive. The Royal Cinclodes, a rare bird of the Andes, faces an even more precarious existence than the people. There are only about 250 of them left in the world and they choose to live here and in another equally bleak region of Bolivia. They depend on the polylepis tree for shelter, for nesting, and even for the insects on the bark. With no trees they are doomed to extinction. We were riding in like the Lone Ranger to save the day.

  A light rain began to fall, just a brief shower from a passing cloud. Bright blue plastic ponchos appeared and covered the people for the twenty minutes it took the wind to push the mist along and expose the sun again. Against the ocher of the grass the women and children looked like exotic tropical birds in their reds, pinks, and russets. These Peruvian women are master weavers, some of the greatest in the world, entwining tribal patterns in their knee-length skirts, shawls, and blankets, weaving symbols and codes into the fabric.

  Babies bobbed safely on their mothers’ backs, wrapped in intricately woven mantas. Every mature woman had a hat, a disc of cloth perched jauntily on her head, decorated with little red balls and buttons and safety pins of different sizes, and held tautly by a chin strap. It was cold, but some feet were bare or in flip-flops, since they preferred climbing this way. They were beautiful to look at, these women with their long black braids.

  Two packhorses made the twenty-minute trip back and forth to the road all afternoon transporting the seedlings. The men scattered over the hillside digging holes while the women and older boys followed behind planting the tiny trees. I plunked myself down on a blanket next to one of the little girls given the chore of minding their younger siblings. We smiled at each other and giggled with the toddlers in universal play. I could not bring myself to lie down at the edge of the precipitous cliff, dangling my arms, as most of the girls were doing. One wrong move would mean sure death—a lack of confidence they clearly did not share.

  Tino Aucca was heading the operation for ECOAN and Venezuelan Hugo Arnal for the American Bird Conservancy, as well as George Fenwick, ABC’s president. It was Tino’s idea to deliver the polylepis seedlings to these high mountains. He was born and raised in Cusco, the historic capital of Peru and the Incan Empire. With his strong aquiline nose and high forehead Tino could have stepped out of a gold medallion forged by his ancestors. As a boy he was drawn to animals and took the unusual step for his indigenous people of going to university, where he excelled in biology. At one point he thought his future would be more assured if he changed his name to Gonzalez, but his grandfather told him that their name, Aucca Chutas, was a very old Incan name meaning the “family of warriors” who protected the Inca, or king. Tino now keeps all things Indian dear to him.

  He had taken us to Machu Picchu by train from Cusco, a breathtaking ride through steep mountainsides
along a tumultuous river. I saw a male Torrent Duck in the rushing water, its striking black and white head and red bill bobbing through the foam. This is my favorite duck in the world; I am in awe of its skill, even courage, in navigating the weight and power of the torrent. Like a fish it streamlines through the water, stopping at eddies, where it feeds on mollusks, snails, and aquatic insects. Then it pops out onto a rock and preens and shakes before the next dive into the maelstrom. Competition for invertebrates from introduced trout and the damming of mountain rivers in the Andes is causing a steady slow decline of the Torrent Duck.

  We die by bits. Things are taken away from us one by one until there is a failure to thrive. So it is with all species. Extinction is the natural order of things as new species evolve, and others like human beings dominate. But it is also the nature of human beings to arrest beauty, to hold on to it if only for a moment, a year, or a lifetime longer. We seek to preserve things of beauty if we can, for as long as we can, and, in the case of artists, for millennia.

  How does one describe Machu Picchu? This isn’t just a fortress, or a temple to the moon, the sun, or the soaring Andean Condor; this is a work of art on such an elaborate and massive scale that most other world architecture pales in comparison. One enters from the valley below or from above via the Incan trail at eight thousand feet; either way the reveal is astonishing. If you find yourself there on a cloudless day, as we did, the citadel is etched against the sky and held in the saddle between two sacred peaks that spear the blue. It is the stones that inspire us. As huge as those the Etruscans hauled into place, these Incan boulders by contrast have been molded with corners and curves into trapezoids and rectangles of different sizes, then hoisted snugly together with no mortar. The granite can look very hard and somehow soft as a pillow with gently beveled edges. Aqueducts proceed one on top of another in a zigzag of seventeen baths splishing down the mountain. There are stones that mark solstices and stones that act as a maquette for the sacred mountain in the distance. There is no part of Machu Picchu that has not been created with an artist’s eye. To mark the day, a sleek Aplomado Falcon pierced the sky above us with a sharp wail, as his kind always has.