The Human Age (15 page)
To cope with urban life, some animals have even begun redesigning their bodies at a pace fast enough for biologists to track. On a flat, horizonless Nebraskan highway, Charles Brown will often pull over to inspect a fresh piece of roadkill, provided it’s a cliff swallow. Chestnut-brown-throated, with white forehead, pale breast, and long pointy wings, cliff swallows favor cliffs, their ancestral roosts. I’ve enjoyed watching aerobatic crowds of them barnstorming the cliffs of Big Sur, where their calls—banshees quarreling in high, squeaky twitters—mix with crashing surf.
But cliff swallows do need cliffs. These days, faced with city sprawl, they’re plastering their gourd-shaped mud nests onto buildings, beneath highway overpasses, and tucked into railway trusses and trestles, building up colonies of thousands on our concrete cliffs.
A behavioral ecologist at the University of Tulsa, Brown has been observing their gregarious social life for thirty years, traveling from colony to colony, and often passing birds killed in the maelstrom of traffic. He’ll stop and check for a leg band and perhaps collect the bird for research.
“Over time,” he says, “we began to notice that we were seeing fewer dead birds on the roads.”
A bigger surprise was the length of their wings. The roadkill birds had longer wings than the swallows he’d caught in mist nets. These two changes—fewer birds dying in accidents, and a difference in the wing length of dead versus living birds—led him to a startling conclusion. To cross the road safely, cliff swallows had to weave and dodge at speed, favoring those with the short wings of dogfighting jets. The unlucky swallows with long wings more suited to pastoral life died in accidents, leaving the short-winged swallows to breed and become dominant. All in just a few decades.
“Longer-winged swallows sitting on a roadside probably can’t take off as quickly, or gain altitude as quickly, as shorter-winged birds, and thus the former are more likely to collide with an oncoming vehicle,” Brown suggests. “These animals can adapt very rapidly to these urban environments.”
How should we regard the blackbirds, cliff swallows, and other animals that are evolving in such a snap because of our technology? Will they become new species? Or are they just new citizens of our age?
What makes nature natural? It’s a quintessentially Anthropocene question. Nature thrived long before cities did, long before we coated the Earth with an immensity of humans. Wild animals live among us. Our toil and our machines are entwined in their fate. Even our densest city is a permeable space, although we try hard to live a world apart. We decide the limits of the wild and where a city begins and ends. Suburban sprawl has replaced the overgrown buffers we used to have, transitional land between the two worlds. Now wild and urban animals encounter one another daily.
We cherish a strong sense of place, rich with memories. But other animals abide by a sense of place, too. Banding studies show that ruby-throated hummingbirds travel the same route every year, zigzagging to their favorite yard. A familiar pair of mallards comes to canoodle behind my house every spring. Countless other critters return to a special mating or nesting spot, and will continue trying, even if we fragment their world on a grand scale by installing the materials, plants, and animals we prefer. When we claim a patch of real estate, scent-marking it with our stuff, and purging it of wild animals, we presume the animals will bow out graciously. As sensitive tyrants, it rattles us when they don’t and try to resettle their once-cherished digs.
Citywise animals are mainly invisible to us, hunting at night or creeping in shadows, and if we do encounter them, they surprise us by being out of place. We forget that the animal kingdom is a circle of neighbors who often drop by unannounced. Even if the previous residents have skedaddled, or rerigged their schedules, new species may begin showing up like furtive relatives from who knows where. By the time you realize they’re not just visiting, they’ve shot down roots, claimed a little fiefdom, disturbed some of your neighbors, and added a tiny codicil to daily life. Not always a welcome one.
Before the 1990s, no one saw coyotes on the streets of Chicago. Now the city offers refuge to two thousand, which prefer parks, cemeteries, and ponds and generally flee from people. But some have been tracked crossing more than a hundred roads a day and moving into residential neighborhoods. Moose regularly pay house calls in Alaska, stomping into yards and onto porches, looking for grub. Giant antlers and all, they can leap chain-link fences. On many a golf course in Florida, alligators create an extra water hazard, and lakeside settlers know to keep their Chihuahuas indoors. Mountain lions forage in Montana cities; cougars stalk joggers in California; elk stroll through housing tracts in Colorado. When one Jacksonville woman lifted up her toilet seat, a water moccasin leapt out and
bit her; another woman, in Brooklyn this time, found a seven-foot-long python in her toilet. Leopards prowl the streets of New Delhi by night. In the Royal Botanic Gardens, in Melbourne, Australia, endangered gray-headed flying foxes built a colony of thirty thousand bats, drawn to the garden by all the cultivated native plants: eighty-seven healthy tree species with the fruit they preferred, a year-round oasis. Why risk the outback? And, maybe strangest of all, prairie dogs, those ground-dwellers of the open range, have begun digging their towns in our cities.
However, as it’s beginning to dawn on us that there’s no sharp line between the untamed and the built up, more people are trying to help wayward creatures find their way through our mazes.
When a lost eight-month-old coyote strayed into downtown Seattle, he became confused by the streets and buildings and grew frightened and disoriented. Dashing for what must have looked like a dark haven, he ran through the open door of the Federal Building, skidding on polished floors and around narrow hallways, bumping into glass, walls, and people in a panic. Then he spotted a cave to hide in—an open elevator—and darted inside, and the doors closed. For three hours, the poor creature paced that metal box until people from the state fish and wildlife department trapped him and set him loose outside of town.
It’s surprising how disruptive even a slow, lowly terrapin can be. One June day recently, more than 150 diamondback turtles scuttled across Runway 4 at JFK, delaying landings, halting takeoffs, foiling air traffic controllers, crippling timetables, and snarling air traffic for over three hours. Cold-blooded reptiles they may be, but also ardent and single-minded. Never mess with a female ready to give birth.
Graced by beautiful rings and ridges on their shells, diamondbacks look like a field of galaxies on the move. We think of the shell as a lifeless kind of armor, but it’s actually attached to their nervous system, not just a bulwark but an integral part of their inner world. They inhabit neither freshwater nor sea but the brackish slurry of coastal marshes. Mating in the spring, they need to lay their eggs on
land, so in June and July they migrate to the sandy dunes of Jamaica Bay. The shortest route leads straight across the busy tarmac.
Don’t the plucky turtles notice our jets? Probably not. Even with polka-dot necks stretched out, diamondbacks don’t peer up very high. And unlike, say, lions, they don’t have eyes that dart after fast-moving prey. Ploddingly slow, they abide by seasonal time, so the jets probably blur into background—more of a blowy weather system than a threat. But planes generate a lot of heat, and the turtles surely find the crossing stressful. Not to mention the roundup. After a little light banter between pilots and air traffic controllers, Port Authority crews descended, scooping turtles into pickup trucks and ferrying them to a nearby beach.
“We ceded to Mother Nature,” said Ron Marsico, a Port Authority spokesman. “We built on the area where they were nesting for generations, so we feel incumbent to help them along the way.”
Mounted on the shoreline of Jamaica Bay and a federally protected park, indeed almost surrounded by water, JFK occupies land where wildlife abounds, and it’s no surprise that planes have collided with gulls, hawks, swans, geese, osprey, and even milky-winged snowy owls (an influx from the Arctic). Or that every summer there’s another turtle stampede, sometimes creating lengthy delays. As a private pilot, I remember well how airports used to treat animal “hazards”—at gunpoint. It’s heartening these days to find other solutions, from relocation to relandscaping, with canny coexistence the preferred option.
In my town, we’re blessed by lots of wild animal visitors, from star-nosed moles and eagles to otters, wild turkeys, foxes, and skunks. White-tailed deer are so numerous that they qualify as residents. Last week I was shocked to see a coyote toe stealthily up to the bird feeder outside my kitchen window, below which sat a plump seed-gobbling rabbit. When I opened the window to address the coyote, he turned tail and trotted into the tall grasses lining the driveway. Yesterday evening I caught sight of him once more, this time as a streak of yellow dots and dashes weaving through the bushes in my
backyard. It took a moment for my brain to decode the pattern, and another moment to start worrying about the two baby rabbits eating clover on the lawn.
On a rainy morning so gray a dappled mare could get lost in it, my village held a public hearing to decide the fate of our local deer. Over a hundred residents spoke out against the proposed amendment to the firearms law, which would invite wildlife exterminators to bait and shoot the deer as long as they were at least five hundred feet from houses, schools, and yards. Lured with corn, the deer would be killed by high-powered bows and rifles. Because ricocheting bullets and arrows are possible, the village plans to take out liability insurance in the multimillions. If this sounds like a dangerous and extreme solution to the deer problem, you’ll understand the passion of the protesters.
Homeowners defended shooting the deer, which they regard as vermin. For them, it’s either the deer or the landscaping. Several gardeners conceded that deer had eaten many of their plants, but argued in favor of deer fences, not gunfire. One man grew tearful as he implored the board to live in harmony with nature. A psychologist accused the board of “groupthink,” in which deer have become a new demonized minority. Mothers worried over the safety of children walking home from school or playing outside amid stray bullets—and also over the psychological damage of witnessing the death of wounded deer.
One little girl asked her mother: “If they shoot all the deer, how will Santa deliver the presents?”
Another mother said that in her child’s elementary school, peaceful arbitration was being taught. She asked: “How can I begin to explain the hypocrisy of grown-ups solving their deer problem by hiring killers to gun down the deer?”
“There are so many deer fences—it’s like living in a war zone!” a kill-the-deer man cried. To which a save-the-deer man replied: “And you think snipers firing bullets around the village for the next ten years will be
less
like a war zone?”
Most protesters pleaded with the board to give fences and sterilization a good chance. Others argued that the board was legally bound to follow majority rule and should start shooting. Some debunked long-held myths about deer and Lyme disease (the white-footed mouse carries the agent, and killing the deer won’t banish the Lyme tick, which feeds on twenty-seven species of mammals, including cats and dogs). Or the idea that deer cause the most traffic accidents (speeding and alcohol do). Or that birth control methods fail (immuno-contraception has worked in national parks). Contraception is expensive, but so is hiring sharpshooters every year and paying for liability insurance.
What struck me as some kill-the-deer people spoke was the tone of dread and loathing, a panic about being invaded by wildness and roughly overtaken by the chaotic forces of nature. It’s as if we weren’t talking about the deer at all, but about what Freud called the Id, that wild demon of the psyche we keep just barely in check, and which otherwise would be slobbering, rutting, and killing all the time. What if its sheer feral exuberance took charge? Soon, neighbors’ yards would teem with tall gangs of unruly weeds. Or they might stop raking the leaves, and then clots of color would smother everyone’s lawn. Four-legged predators inspire the most panic, but if wild turkeys and deer can find their way into suburbia, can fiercer animals be far behind, ones with fangs and teeth, whose red eyes pierce the night?
Yet, at the same time, something deep inside us remembers being accompanied by animals. There was a time not very long ago when cows, goats, horses, and other animals slept indoors beside us, or at least shared the same roof. In some parts of the world, they still do. But most humans have pitched their plaster-walled tents in cities and suburbs, crowding out animals, especially wild animals, and pushing them farther and farther away, to the perimeters of daily life.
In the mists of the mind, we’ve lost our time-honed knack for coexisting with other creatures. We erect walls to keep nature out and take pride in scrubbing dirt and dust from our homes. Then
we adorn our houses with bouquets of flowers, and scent absolutely everything that touches our lives. We seat windows in our walls, install seasons (air-conditioning and heat), and fasten at least one noonday sun in every room to shower us with light. Confusing, isn’t it?
Even indoors, we surround ourselves with pet companions who help bridge the apparent no-man’s-land between us and nature, between our ape-hood and civilization. A dog on a leash is not really tamed by its owner. It’s a two-way tether. The owner also extends himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, the part that just wants to eat, sleep, bark, mate, and wet the ground in joy. We’ve all felt it.
Nature is dynamic and haphazard, and so are we—not a serene combo. Maybe it’s one that’s best described in paradoxes such as
organized chaos
, but we’re not beings who feel comfortable with paradox. Paradox tugs the brain in opposite directions, confounds our quest for simple truths, and throws a monkey wrench into the delights of habit. Faced with paradox, our brain automatically slaves to solve or squash it. And so here we find ourselves, disorderly beings, blessed or cursed with order-craving minds, in a disorderly universe we’re fully capable of bringing increased order to—but not absolute order, and not forever.