A Love of Large Critters...

And now, another small tome from Art:

Mr D.

I’ve taken it upon myself to express some thoughts for those who can’t speak for themselves – don’t worry this isn’t a cheap shot at coma patients or the mentally handicap ward, or even Republican voters – it is a little something about our shared interest and admiration of wild critters and wild places that has not yet been expressed on the blog to my knowledge, so…

I’ve had the opportunity over the last two summers to see large wild critters living as they should live and have lived for millions of years up in interior Alaska’s Denali National Park. Grizzly bears, wolves, caribou and moose were fairly common sites for a guide taking guests on hiking tours in the park. The more I have experienced seeing these animals directly the more they have become infused in my psyche. My respect and admiration for these critters has lead to a need to be around such places where they exist. I dream of these critters. Call it ‘Call of the Wild’, ‘Born Free’ or ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Call it whatever corny damn thing you want to, fact is big wild critters are more then cool, they are contagious.

For the time being, I’ve chosen to remain in Tucson which for me, now, is a good thing but as beautiful as the desert is there is a considerable lack of large critters roaming about – not that the black bear, cougars mule deer and a cool selection of birds and reptiles don’t intrigue me but I’m spoiled and miss regular sightings of mega-fauna.

In an attempt to reconcile my loss I am a regular at the Sonora Desert Museum where Cougars, coyotes, bears and even a few Mexican wolves are held in captivity. These are wild animals and yet, are not living wild when they are on public display. There is an aura of neurosis around these critters in this captive situation that is easily observable to those who have seen the wild equivalents. I’m elated to be near yet saddened by the situation that allows my proximity.

In North America there are a few places still to view the complete caste of large critter species that came with the pre-settled landscape. To experience this one must go far north to were the land was just to damn inhospitable for most of the year to be reasonable productive and / or fully exploitable. In addition, some progressive thinkers (Teddy, Muir and Sheldon, etc,) had the foresight to set aside tracks to be ‘untrammeled by man’ with the wise realization that someone in the future might appreciate having a bit of pristine ground left to them. Yet, even here in our national parks I can’t help feeling that there is a zoo mentality inundating the management efforts. People want to see the wildlife and wildlife must be provided through accessible routes for viewing. This has lead to, in the case of Denali (the park I default to out of familiarity), strong proposals to build new roads that provide more access for more people to see the fairly scare wildlife populations that naturally exist in a far northern extreme environmental conditions.

For example, in a space of 6 million acres (or about the size of Massachusetts for familiar size comparison) that constitutes the size of the sub arctic parcel that Denali National Park is, there is a total of approximately 100 wolves. This is a healthy population divided into some 15 packs that may claim a home territory of 800 or more square miles for each pack. They need this amount of area in order to secure enough prey in the form of large undulate mammals that comprise the vast majority of their diet. Populations of prey species in those same area are an approximate 2000 or so moose, about the same number of caribou and a more or less 2,500 Dall’s sheep. There are also in the range of 500 or so Grizzlies in the park. Now, compare these numbers to the going on 500,000 visitors that come to Denali each year and ask yourself if that ratio does not add up, to some extent, to a zoo phenomenon. To me it does. Don’t get me wrong, there is lots of space up there, you can walk for days and likely see no one or almost no one and you won’t come across a cotton candy stand. Yet, it terms of large mammal numbers, domesticated humans make up a vast majority in a place that was set aside for wild critters. I’m not sure of these statistics in places like Yellowstone or Glacier but I would be curious to know. More southern realms should support more wild critters per unit area but still, these are northern landscapes were scarcity is the rule.

I reflect on these facts after reading Barry Lopez’s ‘Of Wolves And Men’ a brilliant work which, among many other topics, discusses the holocaust performed by wolf eradication programs in the North America. Lopez’s descriptions of the pristine fecundity of the North American pre - settlement landscape led me to reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition in ‘Undaunted Courage’. These men, the first to glimpse and record for our country, the lands west of the Mississippi left records of natural productivity in wilderness that was very soon after never to be seen again. We had arguably the most diverse and numerous group of wildlife ever on the planet in the breadbasket of our nation eradicated within a couple human generations. Seventy million bison can’t be wrong.

Now about 60 million domestic dogs have replaced the 70 million bison with a mere 300 million people fill in the remaining gaps. I don’t have much of a usable point here except to say we lost a lot in a short amount of time. Our parks and wilderness areas, where we are lucky enough to even have them support large mammal populations, are not more but glorified zoos. Oh, and if you read into history too much you are bound to find yourself a bit depressed by the facts. Yet, today, excepting the world as is, when I go to the Sonora Desert Museum and watch the Mexican wolves run about their little yard I feel better. Not because they are trapped in a confined space where I can view them but because they still exist at all. To me that leaves just a bit of hope. Someone cared at least that much, to leave a few for a hopeful future.