Wildlife
Spectacles
R.A. Mittermeier, P. Robles Gil. C.G. Mittermeier, T.
Brooks, M. Hoffman, W.R. Konstant, G.A.B. da Fonseca,
and R. B. Mast. 2003. CEMEX–Agrupación
Sierra Madre–Conservation International, Mexico.
324 pp., hardbound. $50
I had one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life while standing on a kopje on the Laikipia Plateau in Kenya. I was looking into a nearby woodland that at first glance appeared empty but for the trees. Then a tree began to move and before my eyes turned into an elephant. Then, like an optical illusion, more trees turned into elephants, and more and more until there were more elephants than trees—more than 500 huge elephants in all, moving just meters away through the woodland in surreal silence. The effect was hypnotic. Only when setting sun obscured the spectacle did I reluctantly relinquish my spot on the kopje. When I returned the next morning, the elephants were gone, as if yesterday’s immense herd had been a mirage.
It is experiences like this one that the conservationists who prepared Wildlife Spectacles seek to save. Not species or their habitats per se, but rather the phenomena of aggregations of animals so large that the sight of them takes our breath away. There is less and less room in our crowded world for these gatherings “that stir the emotions.” But rather surprisingly, as the stories and images in this book attest, many wildlife spectacles survive even if their future is precariously dependent on our ability to protect them.
We are accustomed to measuring the status of endangered species and habitats in numbers that everyone knows intuitively are too small. One thousand giant pandas, 6,000 tigers, even 30,000 Asian elephants are clearly too few. Mexican free-tailed bats, on the other hand, numbering more than 150 million in northern Mexico and the southern United States, sound far more secure. But there are only a few dozen “maternity” caves in which all of these bats raise their young. As a result, the species is at risk because the destruction of even one cave, such as Bracken Cave in Texas where 20 million bats roost, will have a significant affect on the species. And if it seems impossible for an animal existing in such numbers to go extinct, safety in numbers doesn’t necessarily apply. In fact, even an immense number of animals can often easily be dispatched—by firearms, pesticides, or pollution, for example—precisely because so many are in one place at one time.
A flock of as many as 3.7 billion passenger pigeons migrated over Ontario, Canada, in 1866, and the last individual of this species died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Shot in massive numbers and suffering from the loss of eastern deciduous forest, passenger pigeon numbers declined to a low point from which they could not recover. Similarly, western North American bison herds estimated as comprising from 30 to 200 million animals before 1870 were reduced by hunters to a thousand or so individuals by the turn of the 20th century. The bison species survives thanks to conservation efforts, but the spectacular migratory herds that once thundered across the Great Plains are no more.
In 26 chapters by 63 specialists from around the world and dramatic images from 78 world-renowned photographers, Wildlife Spectacles documents spectacular congregations of animals, many resulting from mass migrations to feeding or breeding grounds, that create “some of our most vivid and enduring images of the natural world.”
Most of the spectacles covered here involve huge numbers of animals: 1.6 million caribou crossing the tundra of the North American Arctic; hundreds of thousands of gloriously pink flamingos crowded into a single African Rift Valley lake; 62 million monarch butterflies blanketing the trees in a few acres of Mexican mountain forest. Others involve lesser numbers—a troop of 300 squirrel monkeys climbing trees in Colombia, or 20 blue whales off the coast of Baja California—but these are spectacles too, sights almost anyone would thrill to see.
Included as well are some terrifying spectacles: large swarms of desert locusts, for instance, that eat as much food in a day as 20 million people do, devastating crops along their migratory pathways and leading to human starvation. Rallying people to save this spectacle will be a profound challenge. But this example does remind us that the 500 elephants I found so enchanting would enrage a farmer whose fields they were munching.
Wildlife Spectacles is a beautiful book, with
lively and authoritative text, and the first to focus
on making spectacles an integral part of global conservation
strategies, while acknowledging how difficult this will
be. As William G. Conway wrote in the foreword, “Wildlife
Spectacles, with its powerful pageant of mesmerizing
pictures, is an inspiring inauguration for the hard
work that lies ahead, an effort that deserves the support
of everyone who cares about nature.”
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer
33(2) 2004. Copyright 2004 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
