Radiolab - For the Birds

Episode Date: July 24, 2014

Today, a lady with a bird in her backyard upends our whole sense of what we may have to give up to keep a wild creature wild.

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C. P. Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Chad Abramrod. I'm Robert Krollowich. This is Radio Lab. The podcast.

And here's what I want to do today. You know what we just did the hour long show about the Galapagos? Yeah. And in the middle of that show, we hear you know, get on this idea that there are so many of us on the planet now, doing so many different things which affect the air and the water, that the creatures on the planet can no longer really be uninfluenced by our presence. They can't be truly wild. And that made me wonder, well, if you want to give the other creatures on Earth a little more room to be wild and

independent, then what do we have to give up? In fact, how much are we willing to give up to make that happen? I don't know. These are tough questions. I mean, you know I'm not good at the answer part, right? So this is John Mowalum. I'm John Mawalam. I wrote a book called Wild Ones,

and I'm a writer with the New York Times Magazine. And being a writer, he told me a story. Now, this is a story which shed some light on this question, but I think you'd have to say it's a difficult light. So there was a family of whooping cranes that had been part of

Story revolves around a project to create a wild flock of whooping cranes. One of the most spectacular birds in the world is five foot tall, is pitch white, you know, with black wingtips. It's got a seven-foot wingspan. Beautiful flyer. This is Joe Duff. I'm the co-founder of Operation Migration, the current CEO. Now, we've done a story on Operation Migration before on Radio Lab,

but here's the gist. At one point, the whooping crane population in North America was down to like 15 birds, just one flock. So Joe and a bunch of other folks decided to see if they could start a new flock of cranes. So they raised some cranes in Wisconsin and then they teach them a new migration route to Florida by leading them there in an ultra-light airplane. Joe, in addition to being founder and CEO, is also the lead pilot. Right. And how long have you been doing this for a while, right?

I started flying with birds in 93, 20 years. And the key to this whole project, Joe says, is to eliminate all things. human. These are wild creatures. You know, we do this whole thing in full costume so the birds don't hear voices. They don't see buildings or any other human paraphernalia in order to maintain their wildness.

Joe even wears an all-white, crane-like costume when he's up there in the ultralight, leading the birds down to Florida. And when they get to Florida... The cranes are supposed to, you know, they're brought to this Chazahooitska National Wildlife Refuge. It's a coastal wetland. It's all salt marsh. In the Tampa area.

And the birds are put into... It's called a release patent. It has 12-foot-high fences protected by electric wire, but the whole complex is not top-netted. And so after a while, the birds realize they can fly out. Then they go seek out their own territories. It's called a gentle release into the wild. Or the not-so-wild.

And here's where the problem starts. It's the winter of 2007, and we've got a particular bunch of cranes. This family, they were called the first family, because they were the first cranes in the population to have a churn. chick that they led south. The first wild hatch migratory whooping crane in the U.S. since the last nest was reported in 1878. These cranes had wound up in this little subdivision. A wetland complex that was surrounded by houses. It was perfect crane habitat. It was basically a marsh. It just so happened

that it was in this woman's backyard. And so the birds, which had been the product of this, you know, very intensive effort and tons of money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in hours. To be wild whooping cranes were now just in her backyard. And there was free food there. She had all these bird feeders, this whole array of different bird feeders up around her yard. That's not good sign. Why is this a problem?

Well, the problem is we're worried that the birds are going to become acclimated to people. To be really safe, Joe says these birds should be afraid of people. Six them have been shot, you know, by vandals. Six birds have been shot? Six whooping cranes have been shot. in this project by Vandals, yeah. So what do you do? We asked the people to stop feeding.

Do you have a reverse phone directory, or you have a... Well, we tracked the birds. They're all tracked. And so they knew exactly where they were. And they were able to figure out that the cranes were in the backyard of someone named Ms. Gibbs. Clarice. Clarice.

Yes. Clarice Gibbs. And, you know, they knocked on our door and explained, you know, the whole ins and out of the project, and would you please take your bird feeders down? and she said no. No. Yeah. Why would you say no?

Well, John, talked to the people who went to see her. They didn't say crazy, but you got the sense that there was this, you know, crazy old bird lady who lived in this house who would not take her feeders down. They told John that she thought she was acting kind of erratic and that things just kept getting worse and worse. And they had actually gone and put a plastic fence around one of her feeders at one point. They had thought she had given permission, but she had no memory of that. So it got bitter pretty fast. And so John decided, I'm going to go talk to this woman. Yeah, so I was sort of girding myself for a, you know, crazy old bird lady who lived in this house.

But I went to go see her. And, you know, it was a, how do I even talk about it? I mean, it was a really emotional day for me. We sat at her at her dining room table, and she was having a lot of trouble remembering the exact chronology of what had happened when. She, you know, she said, excuse me, I'm just hard for me to kind of piece things together around that time. and basically the story emerged. At that time, oh gosh, if I could... When we heard that story, we decided we needed to talk to Clarice ourselves.

So we called her up out of kind of the blue and asked her if we could record the conversation. Record, we would love to do it. Well, no, it wouldn't bother me at all. I wouldn't mind. Okay. Clarice will tell us her, I got to say, it's a sort of surprising version of this tale in just a second.

My name is Zachary. from Sarasota, Florida. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. We're back, and we've just called up, Clarice Gibbs. No, it wouldn't bother me at all. I wouldn't mind.

Okay. So you're about to say that you're... First of all, the description, how many bird feeders did you have in the backyard, would you say roughly? At that time, I think I had two or three in an oak tree that's here in our backyard, and where we live is it's just, you know, it's a peaceful area, and birds like things like that. They don't like to be around a lot of congestion and stuff, and we enjoy them.

Well, I say we. When my husband was alive, we, you know, we both enjoyed the birds and feed everything. This is where the story flipped for me. because when those conservationists were knocking at Clarice's door, her husband of more than 50 years. He had Alzheimer's, and they were sort of hunkered down at their house waiting for his life to end. Yeah, this was before, you know, the Alzheimer's took him really bad.

And what they were doing was spending a lot of time on their back porch, looking at the birds. And we would come out here and sit with our tea or lemonade. He would just kind of walk. Our back porch, of course, faces the lake. We have a beautiful yard. We have oak trees. And as I'm sitting here talking to you, there's all kinds of birds around right now feeding.

We even have sandhill cranes that have two babies with them. So Clarice and her husband would be there on the porch. And if you've had this disease in your family, you know how painful it is because here's her husband, and he is just disappearing a little bit and a little bit more. And then he's mostly not there. But when a bird, or a bunch of birds come by the bird feeders, from wherever he was, he's back. As soon as he would spot something, he'd say, babe, there it is.

There's the hummingbird. And when the whooping cranes showed up big and white and wild, That would really get his attention because they are such big, beautiful birds. You know, I could see the, oh gosh, like a happiness in his eyes, and he would smile. Oh, to me it was like, you know, he came back to me for a little bit. When he would see things like this, it would just, it would make him so happy, and it would make me happy, too, to see how it affected him. I'm sorry

I just I get a kind of choked up when I talk about him we were married for 56 years when that disease took him and it was hard

hard from her point of view it was like a miracle to see a bird like that and the way that her husband responded to them and just the way that they took his breath away

when really you know he wasn't responding to a lot else in the world it's a blessing you know, when they seem to recognize things and then you lose them again, you know. Yeah. So that's why when the crane people showed up at her door

and said, please take the bird feeder down, she said, no. You know, I left that house, just, you know, I just couldn't figure out how to make sense of it all once I'd left. Have the people who visited her, having read your account, have they changed their minds at all about her or what they do? it's a toughie this situation. Yeah, I'm sure they would still believe that the birds shouldn't have been fed,

but I don't know if they would be any more sympathetic to her now. ... desire to see her husband, and these birds, oddly enough, are the trigger. So I told Joe, Clarice's story. So now what do you say? Well, you know, my father died of Alzheimer's so I can respect exactly what she's going through and how difficult it is.

However, the cost of that is the demise of a bird that other people have spent a huge amount of time in 24 hours a day, seven days a week for that entire bird's life until it was a year old, putting in the wild to help save a species. But if you put yourself in her shoes, she says she, by the way, was very careful. I was very, very emphatic that we didn't mess with the birds because I knew they didn't want them being confronted with people, you know. because they are a wild thing

and to me I don't know we've always loved nature we've just always loved nature and the wildlife So she stayed where she felt you'd want her to stay but it's a hard one

to ask that she give up a glimpse at her husband for the sake of the birds I suppose. I'm a little more pragmatic than that, unfortunately. You would have him make an exception for her? Well, at the very least, I would have him understand that she's in a unique place. No, I don't think it's unique.

Well, maybe she is in her particulars, but that is precisely the problem he has to deal with. Are people like her? She means well. We all mean well. It's not a case of like, people with guns shooting these birds. I mean, that does happen, but I don't think that's the big problem. No, these are two people who both love the bird but can't agree on something about it. Right, and he's saying, in order to love the bird, you have to negate,

you have to just, you have to disappear. And we can't, as human beings, we don't seem to be able to do that. We all have our own personal requirements, and we put those over and above anything else, including wildlife. And that's why wildlife is

in such peril. He's asking her to say goodbye to her husband for the sake of a bird species. I know. I just worry that if everybody in the world is like her, then those birds don't have a chance. I would love it if these birds could just exist on their own somewhere in deepwater marshes where they don't ever encounter people. But that's never going to happen. It's just not going to happen. And that's the struggle. It's never going to go away, you know, no matter what, no matter what, happens with any of these species conservation projects, we're not going to strike some balance where we never have to think about the power that we're exerting in the world. This give and

take, that's what it is. That's the end game. It's that forever. Special thanks to Simon Adler, who ferried us through this whole project and also to John Mowalum's book, The Wild Ones, is the source of the story. I am Robert Crulwich. Janabumran. We'll be back next time. time.