Wild Again. David S. Jachowski
dog eradication.
I wonder if he ever realized, or possibly regretted, his role in forever shifting public opinion of prairie dogs as a symbol of the West to that of a pest. Even the founder of modern wildlife management, Aldo Leopold, originally subscribed to the eradication view for a time, shooting wolves on sight in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico where he was a forest ranger. Yet one day while staring down at a wolf he shot and seeing the “green fire” extinguishing from its eyes, he had a vision for the future that would forever change the way we view and manage wildlife. Leopold’s feelings of sentimentality and mourning brought about the birth of a land ethic and greatly advanced the conservation movement. Unfortunately, C. Hart Merriam did not have a similar vision for wildlife. History now remembers him as a man after whom several wildlife species were named, many now extinct, with the most notable exception being a subspecies of turkey.
Today, natural selection seems to favor the generalist: the raccoon or dandelion that persists in the city, suburbs, and national park; the grub that can feed on multiple backyard plants rather than be restricted to one, thereby minimizing its vulnerability to the plight of a single bush. As the human footprint expands and homogenizes the landscape, specialists are often those rare holdovers we both marvel at and want to conserve—species like the panda of the bamboo forests in Asia, desert pupfish of small pools in the deserts of the southwestern United States, and the oyster mussel of clear Appalachian streams, that are at the top of many conservation priority lists as the species at greatest risk of extinction.
Just as ecological theory would predict, the decline of prairie dogs has been accompanied by the decline of their specialist predator. Black-footed ferrets have always been cryptic and difficult to find, but by the mid-1900s they were becoming exceedingly rare. In the span of less than a hundred years, the black-footed ferret would go from the high status of being the most effective specialist in North America to one of the most critically endangered animals in the world. By the late 1960s and early 1970s ferrets would become known not as the “most relentless and terrible enemy” of the prairie dog, but—thanks to legal protection afforded them under the Endangered Species Act—as the saving grace for their prey species. Endangered predators relying on declining prey, the ferrets became the bellwether of healthy, large prairie dog colonies on the handful of sites where they still existed.
I look out the truck windshield past the prairie dog colony I had just left. In the distance I see a series of other small colonies on benches leading down toward the Missouri River. They are just patches of bare ground and burrows on the flat tops of hills separated by narrow draws, where I know that at least a handful of prairie dogs would be coming above ground for the day. Through government protection and proactive restoration, prairie dogs have persisted here over time. It is a small victory in the long-term battle to save the few last pieces of intact native prairie. I hope that someday, in my lifetime, we might be able to restore ferrets back here. To have the rarest eat the rare. It would take me hours to get anywhere with a name on the map, but I am in the middle of everything.
CHAPTER 2
Decline toward Extinction
During summers when I was young boy, I would go with my father to his office. In the early morning, the building was filled with scientists crossing paths as they either headed into the field or started their day of typing on computers. Barely knowing how to type, I volunteered to work in the field with Rob Hinz. Rob was a pastor at a local church on the weekends and trapped meadow voles for scientist James Nichols during the week. Fifty years old, with a round belly and balding hair, Rob always wore three layers of heavy cotton shirts, even on the hottest of days.
“Sweat keeps you cool,” Rob would say. Water kept against skin. I found no reason to doubt him; his logic seemed sound.
We began checking traps at dawn so that we would be done before the heat of the day, working our way up and down a grid of trap lines in the tall, humid fields of Maryland. We checked to see whether the door was shut on each small, shiny, aluminum box trap that was placed under a neatly cut, rectangular square of plywood to keep it from baking in the sun. Each trap location was marked by a four-foot wooden post planted into the ground, painted white on the top so we could find it in the thick grass.
As we walked through the grid, checking and closing traps, Rob would chain-smoke cigarettes. Finishing one, Rob would kill the ember on the top of a white post, pinch off the quarter-inch of tobacco from the filter and neatly leave the white tuft on top of the post. “Something for the deer” he would say as he placed the used filter in his canvas shirt pocket before pulling out another stick. He wheezed as he walked in the heat, fifty feet between traps, pouring sweat from his brow that dripped down into the folds of his neck and was absorbed in his faded cotton layers. Yet when he had an animal in hand, his round plump fingers were dexterous and gentle. He held the small brown vole barehanded, gripping it by the scruff of its neck, knowing the intent of its sharp incisor teeth but avoiding little nips, reading me data to record on the clipboard. Trap 5M, female, VP, medium nipples . . . 230 grams.
Finishing our grids for the day and resetting traps, we drove back to the office, passing ponds and mowed fields that served as study plots for other scientists. Groves of mixed hardwood trees covered with little metal tags and brightly colored flagging, signs of scientists at work. On the forest floor, metal cages and trays lay at set intervals, collecting falling leaf litter. I wondered who had that job, who found something of interest in what I thought was ordinary. Taking the route past ponds filled with cricket frogs and painted turtles, just before the gravel road gave way to pavement, we passed by a dirt road between two ponds that was blocked off with a sawhorse and a sign that said “Restricted Area—Whooping Crane Staff Only.” On quiet days in the surrounding fields, I could hear the sounds of cranes coming from across the motes of ponds. Goose-like calls that were more awkward and guttural. Having seen pictures in my bird field guide, I envisioned the vibrations starting far down the cranes’ long white necks, emerging from their beaks opened slightly ajar and serving like the flare of a trumpet. I could only imagine what existed beyond that sign. Compared to the common field mice and frogs I was used to, the cranes were mysterious, critically endangered dog-sized birds from the Great Plains. They were a first taste of the sentimental and at the same time selfless exhilaration of rarity, knowing something so rare was being carefully hand-raised in Patuxent, Maryland—a protected oasis surrounded by freeways, city parks, and subdivisions.
• • •
In the afternoons I would sit with my father in his office, eating my lunch and watching him eat without stopping work. A field biologist turned administrator, he would awkwardly hunt and peck for keys on a computer while slowly eating Fig Newtons and an apple. It was the same small lunch every day, washed down with four or five cups of coffee. Being otherwise surrounded by field biologists, I couldn’t yet understand how he found contentment in a thirteen-hour-a-day indoor work routine that included trips in on weekends to “catch up.”
It was only that summer that I learned that to a former field biologist, “catching up” meant getting away from the computer and phone he was tied to during the workweek. Because of a recent change in leadership at the research center, the historic Merriam Laboratory was being put through a cleaning frenzy. As with any political regime change, the new director wanted to make a gesture of renewal. Out with the old and in with the new by way of dumping an attic full of old note cards and field notes to make room for the current and next generation of biologists who needed room for their old laptop computers and floppy disks. On Saturdays my father would make the one-hour drive to Patuxent from our home to comb through the old file boxes stacked by the Dumpster, beating the Monday morning trash pickup and squirreling away boxes of unpublished, original reports from Aldo Leopold, letters from C. Hart Merriam, and other irreplaceable historical documents from an era before compact discs and hard drives.
“Last weekend I found a box of ferret pictures you might like to see,” he said, knowing I had been pestering him lately about getting a pet ferret, a European polecat from the local pet store just like my neighbor, Brian Peel, had.
“Wild ferrets?”
“Yes, very rare black-footed ferrets from out West. Much neater than the ones at the pet store.”