There's a photograph by Kevin Carter I can't shake from memory, part of the traveling Pulitzer
Prize-winning exhibit from a few years ago. The scene is drought-stricken Africa, Sudan, 1994.
A young child, robbed of any specific age by emaciation, can no longer hold up her -- or his --
heavy head and lies folded on the ground, face down. Her legs are tiny, bent twigs. She seems to
wear a white necklace of some sort, but nothing else. The viewer can tell that the child is near
death; so, too, can a vulture that is standing nearby, waiting for a meal it knows cannot be long
off. By its posture, the vulture appears ready to take another hop closer, then another.
This image comes to mind when I think the word vulture. It gives the imagination a
terrible shiver, the premonition of personal disappearance. It is the sublime, therefore, in its most
terrible form, without a single hint of beauty mixed in. But there are less horrifying thoughts of
vultures. I've seen them roost together in Appalachia, in winter, far, far from the world of
drought or famine, where they fill a leafless oak tree with their dark, companionable forms.
Where I live in Kansas, the birds leave for the winter, and their return to the skies each spring
makes nearly visible the air's thermals lifting from the sun-warmed earth. They soar effortlessly,
gracefully, searching for opportunity.
I'm thinking of vultures because I'm thinking of condors. And I'm thinking of condors
because I'm thinking of teratorns, enormous birds of the Americas that, like so many of the
larger animals of the Pleistocene, did not survive that geologic era to join us in the current age.
The remains of more than a hundred individuals have been found in the archival La Brea Tar Pits
in California. Several subspecies must have ranged throughout the Miocene and Pleistocene;
perhaps the largest of these was one found in Argentina, with a wingspan of about 23 feet.
Others have been found from Brazil to Oregon; the leg bone of one found in the Willamette
Valley was reportedly mistaken at first for that of an elk. The most commonly found subspecies, Teratornis merriami, wasn't quite such a giant, but its wingspan of 11-12 feet is still an
amazement. The shadow it must have cast as it landed to feed, or the flap and swoosh as it lifted,
heavily, into flight! It must have been a thunderous bird, a Thunderbird.
Teratorns were close relatives of storks and vultures, and are sometimes considered the
ancestors of condors. They presumably disappeared from the skies over the Americas some
8,000 to 10,000 years ago, though some researchers speculate that, like the 20th-century
California condor, isolated populations might have held on in Mexico and the Southwest into
even more recent times. The Jicarilla Apache, in the late 19th century, told ethnographers of
Giant Eagle, a fearsome bird that came from the sky to carry people away to its bone-strewn
nest; a young boy managed to kill it through archery skill and careful cunning.
To the north, the Navajo spoke of Giant Vulture, who proclaimed "Whenever Monsters
are killed and decay, we . . . will be present as scavengers." The great creatures of the last era
were plenty large to cast their shadows deep, deep within the psyche, to feather forth in cultural
tale and image, figure and form.
* * *
I remember as a child, hiking in a small group of family and close friends, how complete was the
invasion of a storm in the Alpine tundra of stonecrop and granite boulders. As the thunder cleft
open the world around us, we hurried to get down below the tree line. I knew the danger of being
taller than the surrounding features of the landscape, a little mammalian lightning rod attracting
destruction from above. While the adults walked briskly, I trotted ahead, crouching beside each
glacially placed boulder until they caught up, then raced ahead to my next defensive position.
Two decades later, I once sat awake, the tent leaking around its small perimeter, while all
around me the tall pines of New Mexico's Frijoles Canyon were sheeted in downpour and rocked
by wind. The staccato thunder rocked my heart beneath my ribs, and not far away a tree crashed
down in a branch-ripping spasm of cosmogonic power. I sat wrapped in my sleeping bag and
suffused in near-panic, waiting for daylight.
Panic is a Western name for a universal sensation, drawn from the mythological figure of
Pan, that god of inner and exterior wildness. "Pan was thought to frequent mountains, caves, and
lonely places, and sounds heard or fears experienced in such places came to be attributed to
him," the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, calmly. Pan is also universal. Panic can suggest
the sudden rise of visceral fear from deep within the psyche, or it can suggest the staggering
realization of one's infinitely vulnerable and fragile position in the vastness of unruled being.
* * *
One accounting for the swift, widespread extinctions that marked the opening of our present-day
Holocene epoch is Paul Martin's view that Clovis people, flourishing across the Americas some
11,500 years ago, were expert hunters dedicated to the pursuit of big game. Resolutely and
skillfully, they targeted the large beasts of the age, who animated a landscape that held only non-humans as predators. When the hunters came, Martin argues, they cut through the unprepared
populations like a knife through butter, decimating and fracturing the breeding communities. In a
matter of a few centuries the favored prey was wiped out through "overkill." Other species
dependent upon the grazers and browsers followed quickly into disappearance.
For a time, scavengers (those teratorns, I think, those condors and giant vultures) would
have become familiars of the human hunters, vying for the downed prey, as eagles and ospreys
will tussle over one another's catch. In the overkill mode of that time, the ground must been
littered with kill sites, with carrion waiting for the great birds from above. Feast would soon have
turned to famine, and the other large animals -- predators as well as scavengers -- would leave
nothing but their bones behind.
It's easy to see the parallels between that world and this one; the cusp between ice age
and what author Brian Fagan has called "the long summer" of the Holocene. Researchers have
pointed out that Martin offered his hypothesis in 1967 -- just half a decade after Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring and three years before the first Earth Day, so the collective imagination
was primed to believe that we -- or our Clovis-age ancestors -- were likely to have decimated
the animal community of the Americas; we were still doing the same thing. In an irony unfolding
today, the vigilant attempt to bring California condors back from the microblade-edge of
extinction is fraught with today's hunters in the desert Southwest, not far from the important
Clovis sites.
The dramatic attempt to pluck the condors from the jaws of death took place in the
1980s: By 1982, only 22 individuals were left in the world. In the arid, isolated cliff-and-canyon
country where a few still lived wild in southern California, the birds were methodically trapped
and removed from their last hold. Following several years of an intense captive breeding
program, releases to the wild began, first in Arizona in 1996, and then, symbolically,
marvelously, to the Grand Canyon in 2003.
One spring morning in 2005, I joined a large party assembled in northern Arizona, along
the base of the Vermillion Cliffs, to watch the release of the latest group of fledglings -- five of
them. Their arrival clearly elicited some interest among the resident adult community, and high,
high above us, as we peered through high-powered spotting scopes and binoculars, the birds flew
about, welcoming or examining the new arrivals.
Four wild-hatched chicks now reside in the area. And of the five who were released to
bright, clear skies that morning on the first of March, all but one are reported to be "doing fine in
the wild." One has died; the researchers attribute the cause of death to starvation, a fact I find
deeply poignant, given the cultural image of scavenger birds and human famine.
This is all high-level management, 21st century life-support efforts to save not only the
life of the individual -- a California condor may live for up to 60 years -- but, obviously, to
resuscitate the species, the collectivity of its evolutionary presence on this earth. Up from that
almost-impossibly tiny band of 22, the world condor population is currently 273 birds, with the
wild birds now living in four distinct regions in southern California, Baja California and northern
Arizona. Their imprint on the Southwest is delicate, tenuous, still uncertain. But there they are.
The overkill hypothesis for the Pleistocene extinctions in the Americas is under attack
these days. Donald Grayson and David Meltzer have painstakingly analyzed all the known
archaeological sites where evidence of both people and now-extinct Pleistocene mammals have
been found in conjunction; there are only 76 of these, they report. The researchers conclude that
the physical evidence simply cannot support the kind of blitzkrieg pattern of concentrated
hunting that would have been necessary to fold all those giant beasts into the dust of extinction.
So what was it?
As if there were ever one, clear answer. Simplicity is desirable, in both aesthetics and
practical life, but so often what we must negotiate is complexity, rich and dismaying. This
oppresses the psyche, sometimes, as the sleeping self tries to tease out what is the matter, what is
lurking over there in the shadows, like some large bird hopping about the margin of full
awareness.
Yes, there was climate change, the rapid and sustained warming that ushered in the
Holocene. But there had been periods of warming before. Oddly enough, the Holocene is marked
by far less variability, far less change, than the preceding hundreds of thousands of years.
Perhaps climate change, coupled with the arrival of hunters?
And what else arrived with the hunters?
* * *
From the Internet, I download a series of photographs: California condors at Big Sur, feeding on
a beached whale. The whale is a rusty-colored, mottled lump on the beach, looking like a
weathered boulder, the reddish-orange, rounded rock of the Colorado Plateau, the very landscape
to which many of the condors are now returning. In a close-up, you can see the birds have ripped
off the whale's skin along the lower jaw: they reach their bare, snaky necks into the animal's
mouth to feed. I think they're eating its tongue.
Also available on the Internet is a gluttonous offering of stories about avian flu. The
slaughter of poultry in Asia. The speculation (as yet unrealized) about transmission by migrating
birds. The specter of a pandemic; the social upheaval and death toll likely should the virus make
its leap to humans and sweep through the United States. We're reminded that the 1918 influenza
pandemic was a bird flu; it has been called the worst infectious disease outbreak in history. And
that was in an age before air travel, before the tightly woven tissue of globalization.
How keen these various ironies seem. The national press prints suggestions to prepare for
the coming plague: stockpile food and water; be ready to remove your children from school;
expect disruption of public services. It's true: An inopportune mutation could kill so many of us,
the devastation would be a cataclysmic firestorm, and the world would become, to the bereaved
and bewildered survivors, unrecognizable. Meanwhile, those 273 individual birds in the
Southwest hang on by little more than a claw, above the abyss of disappearance.
Ross MacPhee suggests something similar happened in those last few hundred years of
the Pleistocene. The hunters were brave and resourceful, but they were only human. They were
not some tidal wave of stone-tipped slaughter; they couldn't decimate several million animals in
just a few centuries, he argues. But what if they were hosts to something else that could? The
people, and their dogs, could easily have carried diseases from Europe to which the New World
mammals had no inherited immunity. A "hyperdisease" could move from its accustomed host
into the new horizons of a range of species. Such an epidemic, joined with the increasing
pressures of hunting and climate change, could have visited the very disruption and death we
now imagine for ourselves on the existent animal communities some 12,000 years ago.
* * *
How fragile we seem to feel, how vulnerable and endangered. In my town, local authorities are
preparing a planning strategy, shoud avian flu become a hyperdisease, an emerging virus that
brings us down like medieval Europeans before the Black Death, like the Arawak before
smallpox. Despite published reports to the contrary, the planning document repeats the fear that
migratory birds may spread the disease as an already-established fact, although to date the source
of outbreaks is not wild birds but industrial poultry farms. The authors use telling phrases like
"attack rate" rather than "infection rate," putting that fearsome number at 25 percent of the local
population.
It's difficult, even for men and women in suits meeting in air-conditioned rooms, to keep
the deep-seated viscerality of fear fenced within the domesticated landscape of data and
rationality. That fear is ancient stuff, far older than mammoth bones. It stood up with us long,
long ago, and moved with us across the edible, changeable landscape of the ice-gripped world; it
found ways to body forth in myth and image, in the rumble of symbol deep in the imagination.
Look out, it warns us sometimes, look out. Something dreadful and dangerous, and far larger
than you, is about to come winging in. Listen. Can you hear it, even now?
Elizabeth Dodd directs the creative writing program at Kansas State University. Her most recent
book is Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes, winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award for
nonfiction.
(October 2006)
