The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds by Diane Ackerman, Random House, $23, 184 pages.
The News & Observer
December 10, 1995
Conserving vanishing animals
By Phillip manning
A few months ago, I was walking in a Florida park when two ospreys
shot into sight, flapping mightily to gain altitude. Chasing them
was a bald eagle. One of the ospreys disappeared behind a grove
of trees, but the other one caught a thermal and soared upward,
tailed closely by the eagle. Gradually, the distance between the
two birds increased as they spiraled higher into the blue sky.
Finally, the osprey seemed to know it was safe, and eagle and
osprey circled companionably around one another until I lost sight
of them.
Twenty years ago, eagles and ospreys were so rare that this sighting
would have warranted an article in the local newspaper. Today,
it isn't newsworthy; eagles are off the endangered species list
and ospreys are a dime a dozen. Their resurgence can be traced
to "Silent Spring," a book by Rachel Carson, which warned
that the pesticide DDT diminished these (and other) birds' capacity
to reproduce. When DDT was banned in this country, eagle and osprey
populations began to recover. In this book's six essays, Diane
Ackerman -- an award-winning poet, essayist, and naturalist --
attempts to do for the endangered Hawaiian monk seal, the short-tailed
albatross, and the golden lion tamarin what Rachel Carson did
for eagles and ospreys. Unfortunately, she has no magic bullet,
such as banning DDT, to save them. Instead, she accompanies the
scientists who are studying the animals and tells of the problems
facing them. She also explores vanishing ecosystems in the Amazon
rain forest, the Florida scrub, and the California wintering grounds
of the monarch butterfly. The theme of these essays is extinction,
but it is life they celebrate. Ackerman loves the animals she
encounters, and the scientists who are devoted to saving them.
Golden lion tamarins, she says, "are the most beautiful monkeys
in the world." They are tiny "sunset-and-cornsilk-colored"
creatures no bigger than a fist. They are fun loving, family oriented,
and monogamous, with an innocent "Where am I?" look
about them. They live along the Brazilian coast, in a narrow strip
of rain forest that is fast disappearing to bulldozers. Only 400
golden lion tamarins survive in the wild.
Ackerman joins Ben Beck, the scientist who heads the Golden Lion
Tamarin Reintroduction Project, in Brazil to release zoo-raised
tamarins into the wild. They deal with recalcitrant property owners,
a family feud among the monkeys, and an oversexed primatologist
with a "dental floss" bikini. They endure heat and rain
and voracious mosquitoes. When, at last, the release was complete,
I felt like cheering. There are now 410 golden lion tamarins in
the wild.
When she was 13, Ackerman says she wanted to be an "adventuress."
And though her essays have the serious purpose of saving species,
sometimes the teen-aged adventuress wannabe peeks out from behind
her middle-aged skirts. She snorkels with monk seals in Hawaii;
plays with bombardier beetles in New York; and warms monarch butterflies
in California with a kiss. She absolutely hates the idea of extinction,
but her enjoyment of animals and her lively way with words saves
her from preachiness. Occasionally, she pushes language too far,
and we get sentences like, "Then the sea foam becomes hooves
of panic horses." But this is a rare fault; most of her prose
is clear and flowing.
Nowhere does Ackerman the adventuress meld more gracefully into
Ackerman the serious conservationist than on her expedition to
Torishima, a tiny, rugged Japanese island where she goes to find
the last nesting site of the short-tailed albatross. With two
ornithologists, she braves the storm-tossed Pacific in a small
boat and gets violently seasick. A Zodiac drops them on the beach
at Torishima, leaving a mountain of supplies and ornithological
gear to be carried up 140 feet of nearly vertical volcanic rock.
From their camp, it is a long hike over lava beds and a heart-stopping
rock climb down sheer cliffs to the nesting grounds.
But the albatrosses make the trip worthwhile. They are huge birds,
with wingspans of 13 feet, nearly twice that of a bald eagle.
They are also beautiful: "Vibrant white, with radiant yellow
heads and coral-pink bills tipped in blue . . ." Entranced
by the birds, Ackerman and her companions watch the only nesting
short-tailed albatrosses in the world come and go until it is
nearly dark.
The short-tailed albatross was once the most abundant albatross
in the North Pacific. By the middle of this century, plume hunters
had slaughtered almost every one. The world population was estimated
at 10 birds. The Japanese government protected the birds in 1962,
and they began to slowly increase. Today, about 400 of them nest
on Torishima. They survived on the tiny island because the harsh
terrain makes it virtually inaccessible to humans. On her second
trip to the albatross nesting site, Ackerman learns about the
terrain the hard way; she falls and breaks three ribs. She leaves
the island the next day on a charter boat, feverish and aching
but dreaming "of blinding white albatrosses."
This book will not help the albatrosses or golden lion tamarins
(or the other animals she writes about) the way "Silent Spring"
helped the bald eagle. Their problems are more complex, the solutions
more difficult. But by telling their stories so beautifully, Ackerman
makes an important contribution toward saving them.
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