Another movie found me in a Hollywood motel in 1971 when the 6.5–6.7 San Fernando quake destroyed many buildings in the valley and took the lives of sixty-five people. I was awakened at 6 a.m. by a vase falling from a shelf and the continuous roll of the room. If I was to die I did not want to be alone, so I ventured outside to the pool, where the pool man and I watched the water careen back and forth like a teeter-totter, soaking the shrubs as it left the edges each time. The pool man never uttered a word and seemed more concerned about cracks in the cement than he was about his life, so I relaxed and began to experience the marvel of the Earth in motion. The birds that usually greeted the morning with song were nowhere to be seen, and I wondered where they rode out the aftershocks, which continued for the next thirty-six hours.
A massive earthquake is overdue on several faults, California is running out of water, and the temperature is rising. Its aquifers are being drained by indiscriminate wells, its mountains are losing snowpack, and fires will increase, straining the capacity to smother them. These might be insurmountable problems in any time prior to ours, but technology and new energy systems make it possible to mitigate damage and adapt to new conditions. Reduction of water use, new regulations on wells, and desalinization plants to pipe water from the ocean are all mitigation techniques that are workable with a commitment to protect wildlife and the environment.
California has never lacked for innovative thinkers, from technology’s Steve Jobs to the champion of wilderness John Muir. When William Mulholland made Los Angeles what it is today by engineering the transfer of water through 233 miles of aqueduct from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra to the “city of angels” in 1913, the population jumped from 100,000 to almost 600,000 in a few years. Farmers planted almonds and lettuce with the irrigation of the Sacramento and Central valleys and began to feed the nation.
An era of dam building was ushered in to hold water and agencies were created to regulate its release. The first national debate on the environment began when John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, voiced opposition to the Hetch Hetchy dam being built in Yosemite Park for San Francisco’s burgeoning water needs. The citizens of the city, who billed themselves as “conservationists,” declared that parks and their resources must serve the needs of people as well as nature. John Muir, a “preservationist,” lost the battle in 1912, crying, “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks, the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple [than Yosemite] has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”
David Brower was born that same year and took up the preservationist’s damnation of dams throughout his life. He too lost. The Bureau of Reclamation today maintains 475 dams and 348 reservoirs in the USA, supplying water to 30 million people and 1 in 5 western farms, which grow 60 percent of our vegetables. In addition, the hydropower serves three and a half million people. Dams have made life possible in the western desert.
Little care was given, however, to the complex systems of rivers and the wildlife within them. We made a mess of it. Most salmon in California, Oregon, and Washington will never recover from the blockage of spawning sites, the siltation from logging, and the pollution from development. The domino effect of this apex species’ decline on other species continues. When salmon go upriver to die, the nutrients from their carcasses keep entire ecosystems alive, from tiny aquatic insects to Brown Bears. The only healthy wild salmon populations today are in Alaska, where Bald Eagles can be seen lining the banks during the annual fish migration in an extraordinary gastronomic orgy.
Brower may have lost the dam war, but he was instrumental in getting the Wilderness Act passed in 1964 designating certain areas where “man is a visitor who does not remain,” the preservationist’s dream. He is exquisitely profiled in one of my favorite books, Encounters with the Archdruid, by John McPhee.
The Wilderness Act was needed to mitigate the impact of human beings on wildlife—animals and plants invariably lose when people are allowed to occupy and exploit the natural resources of a protected area—but Congress can still seize water, oil, gas, logging, and mineral rights with the stroke of a pen. The environmental debate remains more charged than ever as the population increases and undeveloped land is appropriated. While more than half the globe is sparsely populated only 7 percent is protected. The war for pure wilderness is never over. The fight is worth it.
I was driving a lonely stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway one foggy morning from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara when hovering over the Ventura Mountains was a soaring giant, a huge black ghost of a bird riding the thermals. I thought it was a small plane, it was so big. The California Condor’s comeback is a thrilling success story. The largest bird in North America, with a wingspan of ten feet, it can live for sixty years and mates for life. In 1987 the U.S. government rounded up the last twenty-two in existence and captive-bred them in California. Today there are more than two hundred flying free in several western states and another two hundred still in captivity.
Condor, tagged #56, over the California coast
Lead shot in the carcass of deer and other wounded animals was continuing to poison these rare Condors. California led the nation with its ban on lead shot in 2014, taking on hunting groups, which had approved it only for waterfowl and did not want to switch to steel. California also passed legislation to protect Cougars from hunters and sharks from finning.
All roads lead to California in this twenty-first century. The state already generates about a third of its energy from wind and water and is jacking up solar. Along with her sister coastal states of Oregon and Washington, and Canada’s British Columbia, California is formulating systems for mitigation and adaptation to drought, rising tides, and expanding populations. British Columbia claims it has already made a profit from new energy alternatives. These coastal leaders are forward-thinking men and women who see solutions for both people and the environment. If the funds are forthcoming from federal, state, and local governments, anything is possible.
Well, almost anything. We can play God only to a certain point. The little Spadefoot Toad took many millions of years to evolve into a successful desert dweller. We have just decades to implement the technology needed to rein in carbon emissions, mitigate drought and rising tides, and adapt to new living conditions. We can reduce carbon emissions, we can harness the sun to make us carbon free, but the huge weather systems that affect us are outside our control. They are global and spatial. El Niño, the jet stream, and sunspots may be predictable, but we cannot alter them…yet. I’m sure someone in California is working on it.
19
Killers
The Merlin shot out of the forest and nabbed the young Tree Swallow out of the air so quickly that all witnesses were caught off guard, including the chick’s parents and me. As the Falcon made for the woods, the fledgling tight in its talons, the adult swallows took after him, joined by two others. It didn’t matter; they would never catch up to one of the fastest birds in the world.
The Merlin pair was decimating the local population of Swallow and Warbler young. I ran along the trail weaving through spruces hoping to catch sight of the two Merlin nestlings as the Swallow was deposited before them. I was too late. The parents wheeled anxiously around the nest tree, screaming at my intrusion, and the chicks hunkered down out of sight.
Raptors such as Merlins are top carnivores in the bird world, just as canids and felines are among mammals—who would eat a Merlin if they could catch one.
Feral cats were wiping out ground-nesting birds in our woods one summer and grabbing those under the feeders as well. I counted three different feral cats over the course of the year. When a particularly large black one with fangs for incisors crossed the dirt road with four kittens in tow, I’d had enough. I pondered ways to do them all in. I prayed for Great Horned Owls and Coyotes to visit.
My mother used to say, “Beware of what you want, because you will probably get it.” Within forty-eight hours a pack of Coyotes woke me at midnight baying and yelpi
ng like hounds from hell. Across the pond they sounded like twenty animals but were probably about ten frantically barking juveniles summoned by the alpha female to the kill. Then there was dead silence.
Was it one of the big Snowshoe Hares that were so tame around us? Or the Ruffed Grouse and her chicks in the sphagnum moss? Or the Muskrat in her mounded den in the cattails?
The rampage lasted for hours. In the days that followed it became clear that the feral cats had disappeared, along with Hares, Otter pups, Muskrats, and just about anything else that couldn’t outrun or outwit the predators. There is something primeval, even frightening, in the howl of a pack as they come through the land.
I never feared Coyotes until the folksinger Taylor Mitchell was tragically killed by two of them while walking a trail in eastern Nova Scotia in 2009. It is highly unusual for Coyotes to attack human beings. I have spied them from California to New York and never gave them a thought except for the safety of my little dog Drama. Rangers soon shot the killer Coyotes, a third larger in Nova Scotia than those in the American West, but not part wolf as some believed. Why they attacked the young woman is unclear, but the Coyote is fairly new to the province, and in the wilderness of Cape Breton it may have developed no fear of human beings. Nova Scotia is such a benign place with regard to wildlife that it is a shock to think about Coyotes attacking. There are no poisonous snakes, or insects except for ticks, and no large mammals to fear except the occasional rogue bear if we happen to both be out getting blueberries in the same spot.
Although the Coyote is an effective predator, I know of no studies on the number of mammals and birds they kill annually. It is different with cats. A recent study by Smithsonian scientists surprised everyone when it reported that free-ranging house cats, strays, and feral cats kill a whopping 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds and as many as 20 billion small mammals a year in North America.
Cats are superbly designed for attack and can each take two hundred creatures a year. They don’t always eat them either, preferring sometimes to toy with them, as any house cat owner can tell you. The American Bird Conservancy’s “Cats Indoors” campaign has been urging the general public to keep cats inside, where they are protected from external diseases and not harming millions of birds. There are more cat owners today than at any time in our history and more people releasing them to the wild when they cannot care for them. While I would never endorse the annual trek to the river that my mother took with us children, cloth sack in hand full of newborn kittens to be drowned, it is irresponsible for cat owners to let their cats procreate with abandon or dump them in the woods as a problem for others. Neutering and spaying of feral cats, while well intentioned, does absolutely nothing to save the bird population and has not made much of a dent in the cat population, either; with as many as eighty million still roaming around, they can’t all be captured.
Cats are the number-one killer of birds, after habitat loss, with windows coming in third. Almost a billion birds are estimated to die in collisions with glass where they cannot distinguish between reflection and reality. It is a sobering sight to see dead birds like the Northern Shrike, clearly not city dwellers, at the base of skyscrapers in Chicago during migration, or in Toronto, where massive new high-rises have especially egregious glass panes. Architects and builders are just beginning to be aware of the problem, and although it costs more, some are installing bird-friendly glass and designing with avian species in mind. Homeowners can prevent collisions by pasting raptor-shaped decals on large windows or placing shades strategically.
Wind power is the fastest growing energy system in North America, but it can be deadly to birds when huge numbers of the turbines are erected in migratory paths. Curiously, it is bats that are killed most often. One would think with their superb echolocation they would automatically avoid the gigantic blades, but mysteriously they seem to be attracted to them. The sudden drop in air pressure close to the blades is enough to burst their lungs and they fall dead to the ground. In migration from Canada to Central America hundreds of dead bats can be found beneath the wind towers. However, when the blades revolve just a fraction more slowly the bats survive. Wind farms are starting to absorb the 1 percent production loss to keep bats alive.
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On a sylvan summer day in the mid-seventies I was driving a New York state highway in my little VW Rabbit with the top down, and ten-year-old Jon in the passenger seat, when a doe came out of the blue and leapt over the car, almost landing on Jon’s head. She was killed instantly, but the fawn in her womb struggled to survive, its tiny hooves beating against her dark chamber. I would have slit open her belly and birthed it had I had a knife. We watched helplessly for ten minutes before life was extinguished.
More than two hundred people in the United States die annually in car accidents involving deer, and many more of the animals succumb. Although attacks from bears, Cougars, snakes, and sharks are on the rise as our population expands into the animals’ habitats, the likelihood of death from these attacks is remote, less than a handful for each species every year. General car accidents in 2015 accounted for more than thirty-eight thousand people dying, while the murder of human beings by other human beings amounted to more than fourteen thousand. Human beings kill more of everything.
We are all killers. We may not acknowledge it, but it is not just the rapacious carnivore who kills. None of us gets a free pass. Every living thing on earth consumes some other living thing. There is even a fungus that grows only a millimeter every one hundred years, slowly digesting the rock it lives on…very slowly. Even rocks are living things if you believe, as Ovid did, that life is matter constantly undergoing metamorphoses—rocks break down over millions of years. We are all changing the equation of the earth with every footprint and every meal.
The glory of life is the incalculable variety of forms and functions that exist. No one knows how many species there are, but estimates put the number close to 8 million. Microbiologists point out, however, that in a single teaspoon of soil there can be as many as ten thousand bacteria. Only 1.5 million species of flora and fauna have been named and cataloged. The backlog for taxonomists is significant, and scientists keep reporting fifteen thousand new species annually. Most of the megafauna—the large animals over one hundred pounds, which include deer and human beings—have been cataloged and are the ones in danger of going extinct. It is no surprise the animals are dying; humans have been hunting them for 200,000 years.
After the mass extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago, a small, sweet-looking weaselly creature named Protungulatum donnae, our ancestor, evolved. Paleontologists conjecture that it ate insects, was arboreal, and had a furry beige coat and a white belly. (A white belly? How do they know?)
I relate to this mammal: two eyes, a nose, padded paws with five fingers, live birth, and so on. We humans actually share 95 percent of her DNA—but then, we share 75 percent with the nematode worm and 50 percent with the garden pea, so that doesn’t mean much, except that the template for all life is the same and only cements our connectedness.
In the ensuing sixty-five million years, the continents shifted, these little prosimian creatures evolved and radiated, and by the Eocene period, fifty-five million years ago, many survived on the isolated island of Madagascar to become lemurs or lorises in Southeast Asia. Elsewhere, around thirty-five million years ago, little monkeys appeared with larger brains and more forward-facing eyes. It is an exceedingly long time from thirty-five million years ago to around fifty thousand years ago, when “modern” human beings made their way out of Africa and began to disperse. Waves of hominids came and went as our ancestor was refined, creating complex tools, language, and art.
We were omnivores from the start, the more carnivorous among us living nearer the poles, subsisting on seal, other mammals, birds, and fish. Around twelve thousand years ago, some of us stopped wandering, tilled the soil, and planted seeds. A few animals were domesticated. Clearing the land also meant killing wild animals: deer and Wil
d Boars for food and wolves and Cougars out of fear. Food and fear are the two great motivating forces of human behavior; without either we would simply not survive. The rampant exploitation of animal skins became possible with guns. Without needing to meet the eye of our prey, we created another step removing us from our familial connection to animals. It is easier to kill when the “otherness” of your victim is emphasized, when he is an object, not a living being like yourself.
The wild animal fear factor is primal, and a healthy respect for them is necessary, but killing them as “nuisance” animals is warranted only when they are diseased or documented man-killers. Wildlife Services is a federal program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was called Animal Damage Control for more than a hundred years, initially providing rodent and pest control for crops. It has developed into a well-oiled killing machine for just about anyone who wishes the removal—death or otherwise—of an offending animal, and has the funds to pay for it, at least partially. The rest is borne by taxpayers, who have no idea they are bankrolling the deaths of as many as four million birds and other animals annually.
Twenty-two thousand and five hundred Beavers were killed by Wildlife Services in 2014 alone.
The Beaver is one of nature’s great creatures, clearing land indefatigably to build dams to house its young, safe from predators. Streams and lakes back up and create spawning areas for fish and amphibians, attracting birds and mammals of all kinds.
Beavers can certainly be annoying to human beings. In our case, a Beaver decided that the sluice of our pond, which drained overflow into the ocean, was a perfect spot to build a dam. Had he succeeded, the water would have backed up, eventually flooding the first floor of our house. The Beaver spent every night cutting saplings and strategically placing them over the sluice. Every morning friends and I would haul the night’s construction away. This did not deter the master builder. The game of patience became intense, neither of us giving up. Finally, after many weeks, he was sufficiently discouraged to move on to another pond. My admiration for his tenacity was immense. There is absolutely no good reason to annihilate 22,500 of these magnificent animals.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 21
