The End of the End of the Earth Read online

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  To prevent the extinction of a species, you first have to know that it exists. You need ocular proof, and seabirds are especially adept at withholding it. Consider the story of the Magenta Petrel. In 1867, an Italian research vessel, the Magenta, shot a single specimen of a large gray-and-white petrel in the South Pacific. For more than a century, this remained the only scientific evidence of the species. But invisibility is enticing, and in 1969 an amateur ornithologist named David Crockett went to New Zealand’s Chatham Islands to search for the bird. Although much of the Chathams’ main island had been cleared for pasture by European and Maori farmers, its southwest corner was still forested, and there were piles of unidentified petrel bones in the middens of a Polynesian people, the Moriori, who had settled the islands centuries earlier. Crockett had read accounts of latter-day Moriori collecting and eating a large petrel, known locally as taiko, as late as 1908. He suspected that the taiko was the Magenta Petrel, and that it might still be nesting in burrows in the forest.

  The tract of forest where the Moriori had collected taiko was owned by a sheep farmer of Maori descent, Manuel Tuanui. Inspired by the prospect of discovering a lost native bird on their land, Tuanui and his teenage son, Bruce, helped Crockett conduct a series of arduous searches for the taiko, scouring the forest for burrows and setting up spotlights to attract seabirds flying in at night. To Bruce, Crockett was “this strange guy who was chasing a taipo [a Maori word for ghost].” When Bruce married a young woman from a neighboring island, Liz Gregory-Hunt, she was swept up in his family’s quest for the taiko. “You get sucked into the vortex,” she told me, “and it becomes your life.”

  On the night of January 3, 1973, Crockett was rewarded with a spotlighted look at four birds that matched the description of the Magenta Petrel: ocular proof. But he also wanted to capture taiko and find where they nested, and this was even harder than seeing them. It was another five years before Bruce and Liz, driving into town from the farm, were stopped on the road by an uncle of Bruce’s who gave them the news: “They’ve just caught two taiko.” It was a further ten years before Crockett and a team of scientists were able to locate two active taiko burrows in the forest, by radio-tracking captured birds.

  For the Tuanuis, this was still only the beginning. The taiko’s single known breeding site was on their land, and the bird needed to be protected from the threats that had already nearly driven it extinct. Lines of traps were set around the burrows for nonnative cats and opossums, and Manuel Tuanui, in a move considered “mental” by his neighbors, donated 2,900 acres of bush to the New Zealand government, which fenced most of the land against sheep and cattle. Within a few years, because of the family’s efforts, the number of pairs of taiko known to breed in the forest began to rise; today it stands at more than twenty.

  On a hot day in January, I joined a British seabird specialist, Dave Boyle, and a British volunteer worker, Giselle Eagle, on a long trek to the burrow of a female taiko known to them as S64. She was incubating an egg fertilized by a male taiko that had lived in the area for eighteen seasons before finally attracting a mate. Boyle wanted to examine S64 before her egg hatched and she began to spend more time foraging at sea. “There’s no way of knowing how old she is,” he said. “She could have been breeding somewhere else with a different partner, or she could be very young.”

  The terrain was rugged, the forest dense and intermittently boggy. S64’s burrow was tucked into a steep hillside covered thickly with ferns and tree litter. Boyle kneeled down and removed the lid of an underground wooden nest box previously installed at the back end of the burrow. Peering in, he shook his head sadly. “It looks like the chick got stuck hatching.”

  Chick death is not uncommon, especially if the mother is young and inexperienced, but every breeding failure is a setback for a species whose total population is still only about two hundred. Boyle reached into the box and lifted out S64. She was big for a petrel but seemed small in his hands, and she had no idea of how rare and precious she was; she squirmed and tried to bite Boyle until he slipped her into a cloth bag. To discourage her from hanging around the burrow any longer, he removed the dead chick and the crumpled shell that had trapped its legs. Working with Eagle, he then fastened a band to S64’s leg, stuck her with a needle to draw a DNA sample, and shot a microchip under the skin on her back.

  “She’s not having a good day,” Eagle said.

  “Once she’s got a microchip in,” Boyle said, “we never have to handle her again.”

  The few taikos that survived centuries of predation and habitat loss nested deep in the forest because it was relatively safe, not because it was an optimal site. To get airborne, even adult taiko need to climb a tree, and it can take a new fledgling several days to fight its way out of the forest, a struggle that may leave it too weak to survive on the ocean. When the Tuanui family created a formal organization, the Chatham Island Taiko Trust, in 1998, one of its aims was to raise off-island money for a fully predator-proof enclosure much closer to the water. The enclosure, called Sweetwater, was completed in 2006, and many of the chicks now born in the forest are transferred to Sweetwater before fledging, to “imprint” the location on their memory and encourage them to return there to breed. The first Sweetwater-imprinted taiko returned in 2010; many more have returned since then.

  The Taiko Trust has also transferred chicks of the Chatham Petrel, a bird smaller and scarcely less endangered than the taiko, from a nearby island to Sweetwater, to create a secure alternate nesting site for the species. To bolster the population of the Chatham Albatross, a species whose only colony is on Te Tara Koi Koia, a constricting offshore cone of rock also known as the Pyramid, the Trust has ferried three hundred chicks to a second predator-proof enclosure on the main island, above the majestic sea cliffs on the Tuanui farm. “For the Trust to survive,” Liz Tuanui said, “we knew we had to diversify to other species.”

  Liz has now spent four decades in the vortex. She chairs the Taiko Trust, and she and Bruce have fenced thirteen tracts of forest altogether, seven of them entirely at their own expense. This has benefited both seabirds and the native flora and land birds—the splendid Chatham Pigeon, once close to extinction on the main island, now numbers more than a thousand—but Bruce prefers to emphasize the synergy between conservation and farming. Fencing the forest, he told me, also protects his waterways, provides shelter for his stock during storms, and makes it easier for him to muster his sheep. When I pressed him to account for why a sheep-farming family had shouldered the burden of saving three of the world’s rarest seabirds, at such a cost of labor and money, he demurred with a shrug. “If we didn’t do it,” he said, “no one else was going to do it. Finding the taiko was a huge effort. It was part of us but part of the Chathams, too—it created a lot of interest all over the island.”

  “It’s awesome,” Liz said. “We have tenfold the number of people protecting their bush than twenty-five years ago.”

  “If we don’t do it,” Bruce said, “it’s going to be even harder for the next generation.”

  The crucial difference between the Chatham Islands and the world in which most of us live, it seemed to me, is that islanders don’t need to struggle to imagine seabirds. From the Taiko Trust’s predator-proof cliffside enclosure, to which young Chatham Albatrosses will soon be returning to court their mates, it’s only a two-hour boat trip out to Te Tara Koi Koia. There, on vertiginous slopes, above blue ocean swells heaving against kelp-covered rocks, stern-browed albatross parents attend to their downy gray chicks. Overhead, in such numbers that they confuse your sense of scale and seem no bigger than seagulls, the albatrosses circle and ride the wind on their immense wings. Very few people will ever see them.

  9/13/01

  The one recurring nightmare I’ve had for many years is about the end of the world, and it goes like this. In a crowded, modern cityscape not unlike lower Manhattan, I’m flying a jetliner down an avenue where everything is wrong. It seems impossible that th
e buildings to either side of me won’t shear my wings off, impossible that I can keep the plane aloft while moving at such a low speed. The way is always blocked, but somehow I manage to turn a sharp corner or to pilot the plane beneath an overpass, only to confront a skyscraper so high that I would have to rise vertically to clear it. As I pull the plane into a dismayingly shallow climb, the skyscraper looms and rushes forward to meet me, and I wake up, with unspeakable relief, in my ordinary bed.

  On Tuesday there was no awakening. You found your way to a TV and watched. Unless you were a very good person indeed, you were probably, like me, experiencing the collision of several incompatible worlds inside your head. Besides the horror and sadness of what you were watching, you might also have felt a childish disappointment over the disruption of your day, or a selfish worry about the impact on your finances, or admiration for an attack so brilliantly conceived and so flawlessly executed, or, worst of all, an awed appreciation of the visual spectacle it produced.

  Never mind whether certain Palestinians were or were not dancing in the streets. Somewhere—you can be absolutely sure of this—the death artists who planned the attack were rejoicing over the terrible beauty of the towers’ collapse. After years of dreaming and working and hoping, they were now experiencing a fulfillment as overwhelming as any they could have allowed themselves to pray for. Perhaps some of these glad artists were hiding in ruined Afghanistan, where the average life expectancy is barely forty. In that world, you can’t walk through a bazaar without seeing men and children who are missing limbs.

  In this world, where the Manhattan skyline has now been maimed and the scorched wreckage at the Pentagon is reminiscent of Kabul, I’m trying to imagine what I don’t want to imagine: the scene inside a plane one moment before impact. At the controls, a terrorist is raising a prayer of thanks to Allah in expectation of instant transport from this world to the next one, where houris will presently reward him for his glorious success. At the back of the cabin, huddled Americans are trembling and moaning and, no doubt, in many cases, praying to their God for a diametrically opposite outcome. And then, a moment later, for hijacker and hijacked alike, the world ends.

  On the street, after the impact, survivors spoke of being delivered from death by God’s guidance and grace. But even they, the survivors, were stumbling out of the smoke into a different world. Who would have guessed that everything could end so suddenly on a pretty Tuesday morning? In the space of two hours, we left behind a happy era of Game Boy economics and trophy houses and entered a world of fear and vengeance. Even if you’d been waiting for the nineties-ending crash throughout the nineties, even if you’d believed all along that further terrorism in New York was only a matter of when and not of whether, what you felt on Tuesday morning wasn’t intellectual satisfaction, or simply empathetic horror, but deep grief for the loss of daily life in prosperous, forgetful times: the traffic jammed by delivery trucks and unavailable cabs, Apocalypse Now Redux in local theaters, your date for drinks downtown on Wednesday, the sixty-three homers of Barry Bonds, the hourly AOL updates on J. Lo’s doings. On Monday morning, the front-page headline in the Daily News had been KIPS BAY TENANTS SAY: WE’VE GOT KILLER MOLD. This front page is (and will, for a while, remain) amazing.

  The challenge in the old world, the nineties world of Bill Clinton, was to remember that, behind the prosperity and complacency, death was waiting and entire countries hated us. The problem of the new world, the zeroes world of George Bush, will be to reassert the ordinary, the trivial, and even the ridiculous in the face of instability and dread: to mourn the dead and then try to awaken to our small humanities and our pleasurable daily nothing-much.

  POSTCARDS FROM EAST AFRICA

  When I was home and talking to my brother Bob, he asked me whether an East African safari was something a person had to do. Certain well-traveled friends of his—competitive vacationers; proponents of the Bucket List—had assured him that it was. Did I agree?

  I certainly share Bob’s irritation with the Bucket List thing. We’re put off by the blatancy of its consumerism, the glibness of its realism. If you were truly, depressively realistic, you’d recognize that checking boxes on a list won’t make death any less final or undesirable; that none of the experiences we’ve racked up in life will matter when we’ve kicked the bucket and returned to eternal nothingness. Bucket Listers seem to imagine that death can be cheated by strategic vacationing.

  “Some of the country is amazingly beautiful,” I said. “The Ngorongoro Crater is like no other place on earth.”

  “But you wouldn’t say it’s something I have to do,” Bob said.

  “Not at all. You should do whatever you want.”

  I was telling him what he wanted to hear. In fact, though, I had found it imperative to go to East Africa. Having gone there to see birds did set me apart from the Bucket Listers. But this only changed the terms of the question of why I travel. It didn’t answer it.

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  Consider the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum—the idea that consumer capitalism has replaced reality with representations of reality. Unless you travel by helicopter or single-engine plane, it’s impossible to escape the contrast between East Africa’s clean and lushly vegetated parks, teeming with wildebeests and elephants, and the overgrazed, overpopulated, trash-strewn countrysides that separate them: the hegemony of Coca-Cola, the heavily guarded Del Monte pineapple plantations, the rail lines and highways that Chinese engineers are building to speed the extraction of soda ash and coal, the specters of AIDS and Islamic terrorism. The parks function as simulacra in which tourists, most of them white, all of them affluent, can “experience” an “Africa” whose representation is contingent on their money. The baobabs and the acacias are native, and at night the southern constellations are unfamiliar to northerners; this much is genuine. But, in the same way that people in a real blizzard now exclaim that it looks just like a blizzard in a movie, you may find yourself viewing zebras in the Serengeti and recalling the zebras in a safari park in Florida. Not only is the real thing not real, it strikes you as a copy of a copy. The Serengeti suffers further from having been the setting of so many nature films. The image of a lion bringing down a gazelle is a cliché to anyone who grew up watching National Geographic documentaries. Worse yet, the fact that it’s a cliché is also a cliché. What added value, exactly, does the tourist receive from distantly glimpsing dramatic scenes of life and death that he or she can see extremely well at home? Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes?

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  And then, for me, the problem of mammals. To secure the company of my other brother, Tom, and of a good college friend, also named Tom, I’d promised them that we’d see a ton of furry wildlife on the trip, not just birds. But in my communications with the trip’s organizers, Rockjumper Birding Tours, I’d emphasized that if I had to choose between looking at a cheetah and studying a dumpy little brown warbler, I’d choose the warbler.

  I’m told that most people prefer mammals to birds because we ourselves are mammals. This seems to me both reasonable and questionable. If the great attraction of nature is its Otherness, why do we need our close kindred to make it interesting? Isn’t this sort of embarrassingly self-infatuated? Birds, with their dinosaur lineage and their flight capabilities, are truly Other. And yet, being conspicuous bipeds like us, and responding, like us, primarily to sight and sound, they’re arguably more similar to us than other mammals, which tend to be furtive and four-legged and to live in a world defined by smell.

  For the mammal lover, a young elephant in a well-designed zoo is no less adorable than a young elephant in an African nature park; the only value added by the latter is that the elephant is plucking its own grass, that it behaves as if it’s at risk of attack by lions, and that the boundaries of the park are too far away to see. Caging a bird in an aviary, however, negates its very essence; an eagle is nothing if you can’t see it soar. To experience African birds,
you have to go to Africa.

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  If, as we’re told, the point of exotic travel is to “create memories,” and if, as I would insist, our memories consist fundamentally of good stories, and if what makes a story good is some element of unexpectedness, it follows that the point of traveling is to be surprised. My brother Tom was surprised to arrive in Nairobi and learn that his checked baggage was still at Dulles International Airport. His four-day wait to be reunited with his suitcase will be front and center in both his memory and his stories of our trip.

  One easy way to manufacture surprise is to not do your homework. I was surprised, for example, to discover that the tsetse fly is not an insidious, nocturnal, mosquito-like insect but a large and aggressive diurnal biting fly. My bad. But I’ll remember those flies, as well as the leather-handled ox tail that our Tanzanian driver and local bird expert, Geitan, used to shoo them off his back and out of our Land Cruiser.

  Another surprise was the number of hours we spent in that Land Cruiser. Most birding trips are brutal on the feet, requiring endless walking and standing. Because of the risk posed by African mammals, particularly elephants and buffalo, we were allowed out of the vehicle only at lodges and a few picnic areas. Even at the lodges where we could actually walk in forest, we had to bring along an armed guard and stick close together. This was hardest on my brother, who even as a two-year-old (you can see it in home movies) hated confinement and loved to wander by himself. Near the end of a hike at a small lodge near Ngorongoro, Tom was chafing so badly that I encouraged him to slip away and walk the last hundred yards by himself. For this, we received a severe lecture from our Rockjumper guide, David. Earlier in the trip, the other Tom had mentioned that his greatest fear was of being yelled at. After David’s lecture, my brother admitted that this was his greatest fear, too.