The Lost Language of Cranes

At the end of “The Birds of Heaven,” the author stands in a savanna, “staring at the first wild whooping crane born in the United States in sixty years....” The moment represents the culmination of five years of travel across four continents in pursuit of “the greatest of the earth’s flying birds,” but it is a curiously subdued, even ironic, triumph. The “wild” whooper chick is, in fact, the offspring of pen-raised birds that are part of a nonmigratory flock artificially and arduously established on the Florida peninsula, which was never part of their natural range. Three weeks after the sighting of this precarious symbol of ecological restoration, the chick’s decapitated and mangled body was found, the victim of a bobcat.

This scene encapsulates many of the sensibilities that inform this latest book from Peter Matthiessen, whose body of work in the last four decades is among the most impressive by any living American writer. “The Birds of Heaven,” like many of his best-known “nature books” (“The Tree Where Man Was Born,” “The Snow Leopard”), is essentially a travel journal, chronicling his encounters with the ever-shrinking remnants of Earth’s wild places and pre-industrial societies. His aim here was to see all 15 of the world’s crane species in the wild, birds that Matthiessen considers to be “umbrella species,” whose status is indicative of broad environmental health and whose fate is thus linked to ours.

In his work, Matthiessen has always been a romantic in impulse and a realist in assessment. Though he claims at the outset that “a curious optimism has opened in my heart like a strange blossom” for the fate of Earth’s wild creatures, the book as a whole does not bear it out. There is a pervasive sadness even in its modest success stories, a reluctant recognition of “the lengths to which man is driven to salvage the last wild survivors of his own heedless course on earth.”

Writing polemic and poetry at once is not an easy task, and Matthiessen is at his best when writing about the cranes themselves. His treatment of Japan’s famous red-crowned cranes, for instance, contains superb, luminous description that both demonstrates his considerable literary powers and helps us understand why indigenous cultures worldwide have made cranes symbols and heralds of the more transcendent aspects of the human spirit:

“Farther upriver, three red-black-white heads come up over a snowbank on a bend. The heads turn in the shining light against a dark background of steep wooded hillside already overtaken by afternoon shadow. We are able to get closer, though not close. Sun-silvered creatures, moving gracefully without haste and yet swiftly in the black diamond shimmer of the Muri River--a hallucinatory vision, a revelation, although what is revealed beyond this silver moment of my life I do not know.”

In such passages, Matthiessen’s prose rises to the lyric level of Robert Bateman’s exquisite and evocative paintings that accompany the text. It also demonstrates nature writing’s peculiar power to capture and convey such “silver moments” of apprehension and identification without explaining them, and thus to link our fate to that of Earth’s wild creatures with a persuasive power that no mere environmental argument ever could.

His optimism for preserving the world’s cranes is guarded at best, and the examples he offers are often problematical themselves. Of all the Third World countries he visits, the small mountainous isolated country of Bhutan best represents an oasis of ecological balance. But this is largely the result of a government that he says “exercises stiff control and keeps progress at bay to protect its people,” a political price that Matthiessen refuses to accept, even for the sake of his beloved cranes. And though he takes heart from the tenacity by which the more remote native cultures hang on to their traditional land-based ways of life, it is clear that the most effective preservation and restoration efforts have taken place in the Western industrialized economies.

In North America, for instance, conservation efforts in the last century have brought the endangered sandhill crane’s numbers back to about 650,000 birds, making it by far the largest crane species. But such progress takes an enormous amount of time, effort, money and human meddling. Despite his love of unfettered wildness, Matthiessen realizes that “the time is past when large rare creatures can recover their numbers without man’s strenuous intervention.”

If nothing else, one stands in awe of the author’s stamina and temerity in his global quest, but the book also contains many of Matthiessen’s characteristic virtues. As always, he has an impeccable eye for recording the subtleties of landscape and weather, an informed understanding of the broad cultural, historical and political context of the places and people he encounters and an extraordinary talent for serendipitous adventure. His novelistic eye can capture the essence of a community’s existence in a single stark image, as when he describes the plight of overworked and ill-housed sand miners in eastern China living in “a humble tent camp where burned rice has turned cold in a black pot on a dead fire.”

Unfortunately, “The Birds of Heaven” also exhibits some of the pitfalls of a book that tries to cover so much ground and impart so much information. After a while the surfeit of details begins to obscure the narrative; the dozens of characters--biologists and ornithologists, government representatives, local conservationists--begin to blur in the reader’s mind, and the minutely delineated itinerary sometimes reads more like a roadmap than a travel book.

Curiously, the cranes themselves are oddly sidelined in the book’s initial chapters, serving more as searchlights that throw our technological and anthropocentric global madness into stark relief. His most lengthy and searing indictment is reserved for China and its monumental Three Gorges Dam, “a grand folly of enormous cost,” that will destroy some of the most important remaining crane wintering grounds and leave “social and environmental ruin in its wake.” But lest we feel too environmentally superior, he reminds us that “China [is] the largest and most dangerous stepchild of the West’s unquestioning dream of progress as material consumption.”

In these passages, the book reads like a catalog of vanished and vanishing superlatives: The Amur River, separating Siberia from China, is “the largest free, wild, unbridged, undammed river left on earth”; the arats, or Mongolian horsemen, are “the last true artisans in an unlucky country”; even the cranes themselves are usually introduced in elegiac terms, as when Matthiessen notes that the Poyang lakes in eastern China contain “the last significant winter flock of Siberian cranes, in effect, 99 percent of all G. leucogeranus left on earth.”

So relentless are these litanies of disappearing, irreplaceable natural treasures, so saturated is Matthiessen’s book--in places--with the inevitable sorrow of last things going and our seemingly unstoppable rush to self-destruction that the reader is grateful when Matthiessen attends to the birds themselves.

The most powerful chapter in “The Birds of Heaven,” as good as anything Matthiessen has ever written, is “The Accidental Paradise,” set on the Korean peninsula. Here his political passion and lyrical powers combine to transcend the stated, or even the intended, aims of the book. It begins in 1953, with the armistice at Panmunjom and the establishment of the infamous DMZ, a heavily barricaded and fortified buffer zone between North and South Korea that inadvertently created “a no-man’s-land several miles across and 149 miles long ... with streams and springs that remained open all winter--the most fiercely protected wildlife sanctuary anywhere on earth, and an accidental paradise for the great cranes.” Protected from shooting and the encroaching development that has all but extirpated them elsewhere on the peninsula, the magnificent and endangered red-crowned cranes “know nothing of such man-made folly ... but they recognize a sanctuary when they see one.”

A lesser writer might have been satisfied merely to have stumbled on such a grand and stupefying irony, but Matthiessen is after something deeper. There follows a wrenching account of the senseless carnage of the Korean War, ending in a cry of despair: “In this murderous epic when the human animal is destroying its own kind almost everywhere on earth,” he asks, “what hope can there be for cranes and tigers?”

The answer Matthiessen fashions is neither easy nor simple. For once he ceases to castigate his own species and instead weeps for it. He comes to a Zen-like acceptance of the futility of human striving and a recognition that the great birds themselves are able to inspire in us the saving spirit of reconciliation and dedication:

“Watching these great and ancient birds flying the mists in a damp winter cold where so many young soldiers quaked in fear and wretchedness, watching them stalk silent fields laced with so much human blood, one is beset by somber, confused feelings.... In the dimming sun, we watched the birds drift down over the silent land. To protect these cranes as harbingers of peace and morning calm--how respectful that would be to the young soldiers on both sides who lost their lives so horribly to no sane purpose.”

This is not hope so much as an intimation of redemption. The profound and difficult lesson of “The Birds of Heaven” is to know that whatever one does is likely to make no difference and that that is the best reason of all to continue trying to do what is right.

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From ‘The Birds of Heaven’

On cloudless days in 1961, I rode atop the cargo of a truck bound south across the desert from Khartoum to the villages of the blue Nile, in the region of great swamps known as the Sudd. On the grassy north-south track, as the truck rumbled past a drying slough in the broad thornbush savanna, a wild two-note honking rose above the clatter of the engine. On the bank, a legion of mighty birds--at least two hundred--stood in sun-blazed ranks, bold white and gold and chestnut wings set off by the dark slaty-gray body and long neck topped by a red-black-and-white head crowned by a spray of elongated feathers on the nape, like spun gold in the bright sun of Equatoria--so vivid in their patterns, so astonishing, that even today, the image of those birds opens like a bright flower in my memory. (How wonderful it seems that even the boldest colors of creation are never garish or mismatched, as they are so often in the work of man.)

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Robert Finch is the co-editor of “The Norton Book of Nature Writing.” His most recent book is “Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays” (Counterpoint).