Phantoms and Prey

It's the middle of the night in central Idaho. Twenty miles from my house, hunters wait on wolves for the first time in decades. My two little sons sleep upstairs; I fill a mug at the kitchen sink. Outside, in the moonlight, the driveway pines seem tenuous, unrooted, as if they might start striding quietly past one another, swapping places in the night.

Today a friend drove me to the World Center for Birds of Prey outside Boise without telling me why. He showed me a female gyrfalcon, a Swainson's hawk, a harpy eagle; we watched a trained American crow take dollar bills from the outstretched hands of a half-dozen visitors and stuff them into a donation box. Then we crossed the parking lot to the collections building, where thousands of brown-speckled peregrine falcon eggs sit in drawers, each egg in its own box, each numbered and dated. Shards of eggs in nearby jars stand for the many nestlings that have been hatched and reintroduced into the wild.

Before we left, my friend opened a steel cabinet, slid out the top drawer, and showed me a passenger pigeon. It lay breast up on its wooden tray, a paper tag tied around its left ankle: "Chicago Market, 1886." Here was a species driven from the earth in a matter of decades, a species once so numerous it migrated in flocks a hundred miles long, a species we now believe constituted more than a quarter of the bird population of pre-Columbian North America.

Billions of individuals, all gone. And yet here was this one: a male with plenty of rosy cinnamon color still in his breast, his feet red, his eyeholes white with taxidermist's cotton. Even in the flat, fluorescent light he looked as if he might sit up and flap off over the bookshelves. I blinked back tears.

We count salmon at dams; we count hawks at migration bottlenecks; we conduct infrared camera surveys to count passing deer. But estimating populations of animals is brutally difficult, especially in the seas, where we aren't sure how many species might exist, let alone how many individuals there are. Lately ecologists have been fond of writing about the "shifting baseline syndrome," a theory that argues that we measure the current state of things -- the number of starlings in a town, say, or the coldness of winters -- against what we remember from when we were young. What we think is baseline wilderness, runs the argument, is the wildest place we saw when we were kids. In truth, what we experienced was only a degraded version of what our grandparents experienced, which in turn was a degraded version of their grandparents' baseline.

Earth eats the bones; present swallows past; the baseline shifts.

To know what is still here is difficult enough. To know what was once here is basically impossible. Who is left who can envision the United States with its original populations of bison, salmon, and whales? Who can imagine the Atlantic with the great auk, or the South with the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Midwest with its billions of passenger pigeons? How many oysters filtered the waters of preindustrial New York Harbor? How many beavers stitched together the ancient wetlands of Connecticut?

And how many Rocky Mountain wolves once loped through the Idaho midnight? Now there are about 850. Tomorrow there may be a couple fewer.

Ours is a landscape aswarm with ghosts. We live in an afterworld, struggling to imagine what we've already lost, while we peer into a greenhouse future in which our grandchildren may have to prepare for cataclysmic droughts, massive human migrations from the coasts, and worldwide conflicts over freshwater.

What is sustainability? What is hope? Here is J. J. Audubon, in 1842, writing about the passenger pigeon: "When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone."

I think of my sons asleep upstairs. I think of that passenger pigeon, leaching his last colors into a wooden drawer. I think of the hunters, two valleys away, drowsing beside their guns, waiting for the howl.