Outdoing Rest of the World in Creature Comforts : Endangered Wild Animals Find a Good Friend in Uncle Sam

Ducks don’t vote, eagles don’t return a profit, whales can’t bring short-term capital gains, manatees never have to meet a payroll, hairy-nosed wombats are underachievers, Kirtland’s warblers are ineffective against high interest rates and no pearly-eyed thrasher of record ever licked a communist.

By all the usual American standards of what is holy or useful, the rest of the animal kingdom ranks lower than a poor relative.

And yet, here in the capital of capitalist materialism and out there among the busy capitalists, wildlife creatures command a unique constituency of formidable power and compelling mystique.

At Ft. Sill, Okla., artillery ceased firing while a family of three whooping cranes soared safely toward their winter quarters in Texas. Later, the cranes stopped traffic over the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, the country’s biggest. Huge commercial jets circled in holding patterns above while mamma, papa and baby whooper flew south.

At San Francisco, a wayward whale called Humphrey wandered in inland waters for more than three weeks before it was led and lured back to the safety of salt water.

It was shepherded by a flotilla of military and civilian boats and seduced by huge, catered hors d’oeuvres of squid and shrimp, by recorded flute-like sounds of whales under water, by people banging on pipes and playing “Born to Be Wild.” And, finally, in a delicious moment in the family of living creatures, it passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific while hundreds of people applauded and shouted and waved goodby.

The fact is that, while social and military needs clash in the fight for the federal dollar, while “progress” demands and developers pant and road builders push, Uncle Sam still manages to do more for wildlife than all the rest of the world combined.

Nobody else comes close in money, effort or scope.

Other countries, including the Soviet Union, send their wildlife specialists here for training, and American techniques are widely imitated abroad. Even in the distant Himalayas, the tigers and the greater one-horned rhinos in the Royal Chitwan Park of Nepal are cared for by people who learned in the United States.

“The science of wildlife conservation is a remarkable American contribution to world culture,” said Russell Train, chairman of the World Wildlife Fund. “It leads to the most positive kind of international cooperation, and it costs relatively little.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spends $600 million a year and employs 6,000 people. It guards the lives of 828 species of plants and animals thought to be in danger of disappearing forever from the Earth and man’s ken. Extinct, they would tell us nothing. Extant, they might tell us much more about the life process, theirs and ours.

The service manages the world’s largest collection of lands set aside for wild animals, nearly 90 million acres, from frozen tundra to subtropical marsh, from island peaks to verdant valleys, from Maine to Samoa. It protects them where they live and multiply and where they rest on their awesome travels.

It tracks polar bears and eagles and caribou over thousands of remote miles by satellite 530 miles above the Earth. Flying low over treetops, its biologists cover more than 70,000 miles every spring to spot-check the numbers of migratory birds in their nesting areas. Its banders band more than a million birds every year to monitor their movements.

Wildlife being global and apolitical, the United States and the Soviet Union find themselves sharing polar bears that lumber through the Iron Curtain and snow geese that fly over it.

The bears commute on the snow and ice between Alaska and Siberia. The geese breed in Siberia and winter in California. By treaty, the two nations cooperate in the protection of both species and share information.

They have also jointly surveyed and exchanged data on bowhead whales, sea otters, brown bears, beavers and caribou. In all, through treaties and agreements, they share at least a dozen conservation projects, which suggests that the protagonists of the Cold War cooperate more easily in the matter of endangered animals than endangered people.

The anomalies of man and animals trying to survive together are many. At Patuxent, Md., the Fish and Wildlife Service maintains a large laboratory to study ways to save animals. A few miles offshore, the U.S. Navy maintains a missile range to practice ways to kill people.

In many places, in lab and field, the wildlife service studies the effects of man on the rest of the animal kingdom. Six ships prowl the Great Lakes to learn what pesticides do to lake trout, smelt, alewives, sculpin and perch. In Hawaii, biologists with machetes hack their way through jungle trying to find out what is killing the forest birds.

In Alaska, the service seeks to learn whether caribou can jump over or squeeze under the pipeline or be mortally frustrated. In Missouri, it wants to know whether gates would keep people out of the caves of endangered bat species without killing the bats.

In the Northwest, the question is how young Pacific salmon on their way to the sea get around nine dams without being ground up by turbines. And if the answer is by truck or barge, will they then remember how to return to their spawning grounds?

In his guilt over past sins, big, bumbling Uncle Sam finds himself trying to be more godlike than God. In his refuges for migratory birds and endangered species, he trims trees so that sunlight reaches the forest floor to stimulate the plants that browsing deer eat.

In the Nevada desert, he permits hunters to shoot a few over-age rams to enable younger, more virile rams to take over harems of bighorn sheep. In California, he sets aside $9 million to buy a 14,000-acre ranch for six tenants, the last of the California condors.

At Dulles Airport near Washington, he picks up southbound Canada geese that have been waddling over roads and runways and gently transports them to South Carolina. In the Midwest, he pays farmers not to drain, fill or burn wetlands on their property where ducks breed. In the West, seeking painless ways to stop coyotes from killing sheep, he tries padding the teeth of traps.

From northern Canada to Maryland, he sees to it that a single egg of a whooping crane to be hatched in captivity is carried ever so carefully for 2,600 miles in a special case occupying its own airplane seat next to its escort.

In Michigan and Minnesota, he tells farmers they cannot shoot timber wolves killing their sheep; only authorized officials can legally execute them. And in the tall trees in a variety of places where American bald eagles nest, he insists on a buffer zone against visitors. Eagles like peace and quiet.

In the United States, little living things can stop big projects. A three-inch fish, the snail darter, temporarily halted construction of a dam in Tennessee. In Missouri and Maine, the Indiana bat and a plant called the Furbish lousewort stopped the construction of dams permanently.

All this in the same United States where the march from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate was attended by an urge to come and get it, use it up and move on, where man was supreme and the land was to be taken and living things in the way were to be rolled over.

Vast herds of buffalo were decimated on the plains by hide hunters. Passenger pigeons, the most populous of birds, were shot out of the sky completely, never more to be seen. Herons, egrets and terns were massacred by the millions every year for the plumes in ladies’ hats. Alligators died to be reincarnated as handbags, shoes and belts.

Land was cut up for farms and factories and schools. Whole forests vanished, marshes were drained, streams were polluted and man in his relentless push west profoundly altered the world for other living things.

What he didn’t take for his sustenance or profit he often took for his “sport.” From trains chugging west, people shot buffalo just for the hell of it. In Florida, tourists lined the rails of excursion boats firing rifles, shotguns and revolvers at alligators and pelicans and other moving creatures it amused them to kill.

Finally, late in the 19th Century, when the magnificent continent had been crossed and the young nation was beginning to catch its breath, something like a national conscience about the place began to stir.

The first national park in the country (and the world) was opened at Yellowstone in 1872. For the first time, Uncle Sam was saying to a country of rugged, unbridled individualists: Here you will stop, here you will not build or plow or dam or hunt or hew. We will keep this the way we found it.

The Audubon Society came into being, the first private group to work for wildlife sanctuaries. It inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to set aside, in 1903, the first national wildlife refuge, Pelican Island, a rookery for brown pelicans off Florida. Publicly and privately there was now a growing movement to control man’s war on the environment.

Congress made the protection of migratory birds a federal responsibility and Washington set the rules for hunters. Roosevelt and his successors created a total of 424 wildlife refuges in 49 states. In 1962, a graduate of the Fish and Wildlife Service named Rachel Carson chilled the nation with a picture of a “Silent Spring” made lifeless by insecticides.

The conservation movement surged with unprecedented strength and in the crest Congress passed the most comprehensive set of environmental laws in the world. Among other things, it made it a federal crime to export, import or “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect” proscribed species of animals and plants judged to be in danger of extinction.

It is also a violation of federal law to hunt or pursue any animals from the air. (Four Texans were fined $5,000 each for hunting white-tailed deer from a helicopter.) It is illegal to snare migratory birds or use records or tapes of birdcalls in hunting them. It is illegal to fish too close to or speed near manatees. (A sea-weary Columbus mistook manatees for mermaids, which said more about his condition than theirs; they weigh up to 3,500 pounds.)

By law, only Alaskan Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts may hunt walrus and bowhead whales, and that for their own sustenance, not trade. The Fish and Wildlife Service supplies Indians with feathers of bald and golden eagles for religious purposes, but the law prevents them from obtaining the feathers themselves.

It is illegal for anybody to import or export jewelry or soup made from sea turtles or any product made from endangered species. (Vladimir Horowitz, en route to a royal concert in London, had to prove that his grand piano was older than the law outlawing trade in African elephant ivory.)

Walrus Radio Man

The Fish and Wildlife Service plays the central role in research and enforcement. It is a wildlife service man who sneaks up on a walrus sleeping on the ice with a long-handled tool that snaps a radio transmitter around its tusk before the beast can impale the intruder.

It is wildlife service agents, 200 of them, who guard the nesting sites of peregrine falcons, who stalk the poachers stalking grizzlies, who inspect shipments in ports of entry to enforce U.S. laws and treaties with 81 nations for the protection of animals.

Every American state now has a form of fish and wildlife service and, to increase their diversity, many states have begun trading species abundant in one but rare in another. Thus, Iowa agreed to give Kentucky 240 wild turkeys for 120 river otters. Idaho sent 50 chukar partridges to North Dakota, which sent 150 sharp-tailed grouse to Kansas, which sent 50 wild turkeys to Idaho.

‘Animal Lobby’

Outside of government, the “animal lobby” has burgeoned with the proliferation of militant groups ready to protest, sue or descend on Congress.

In addition to such large, broad-based conservation groups as the National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation and Sierra Club, the movement abounds in specialized partisans like the Friends of the Sea Otter, Ducks Unlimited, the Ruffed Grouse Society, Quail Unlimited, the Desert Tortoise Council, Trout Unlimited, the Society for the Preservation of Birds of Prey and the Hawk Migration Assn. of North America.

Why all the effort? Why the concern? For the answer, one could start with the flutter of wings.

With the stirring of terns on the Arctic ice as they ready for the journey to the Antarctic at the other end of the world. With the whooping cranes rising over the lakes and bogs of Canada to the sound of their own trumpets, heading for Texas. With the pintail ducks leaving the Yukon for the Yucatan. With the bobolinks up from the prairies of Canada, bound for the pampas of Argentina. With the common cranes turning south from Scandinavia and Siberia on their way to Africa, India and China.

Moment of Majesty

With many millions, perhaps billions, of birds all flying down the face of the Earth for the winter in a singular movement of majesty and mystery that defies poets to match and scientists to explain.

Round-trip, the Arctic tern flies 22,000 miles in two months. The ruby-throated hummingbird, weighing only one-eighth of an ounce, flies 500 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico. The greater shearwater flies over 8,000 miles of featureless ocean to find the tiny Tristan da Cunha islands in the South Atlantic.

Many migratory birds return to the same area, often to the same tree where they were raised the winter before. They are excellent weather forecasters. They usually wait for favorable winds and start south before the cold. Some can even detect the infinitesimally tiny differences in barometric pressure between the floor and ceiling of a room.

Still a Mystery

How do they do all this without compasses, sextants, barometers, charts or energy pills? Nobody knows, after centuries of trying to learn. Knowing, we would know more about them, our planet and probably ourselves.

“We do not understand the web of life sufficiently to risk unraveling it by sending species to oblivion.” This was said in a book about the Fish and Wildlife Service by Nathaniel P. Reed, its former head, and Dennis Drabelle, former counsel.

If mollusks disappeared from the Earth, would we ever learn why they didn’t get cancer? Conversely, it was the sick and dying peregrine falcon that first alerted researchers to the dangers of pesticides. Tropical plants produce alkaloids used in the treatment of heart disease and cancer. In all, 40% of our prescription drugs derive from wildlife.

Interlocking Parts

All this is reminder that life on Earth is shaped by a wondrous system of interlocking parts, and man endangers the parts at his own peril.

Reed and Drabelle:

“We evolved from lower orders of being. . . . Plants and animals, then, are not supplements to our lives. . . . They are our neighbors, our sustenance, our predecessors, in a sense our parents.”

Chief Sealth of the Duwamish Tribe, in a letter to President Franklin Pierce:

“Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the experience of my people. . . . All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the sons of the Earth.”

William Beebe, naturalist:

“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer. But when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another Earth must pass before such a one can be again.”