The Fawns

I live on the edge of a major metropolitan area, near a large urban park. Eagle Creek Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the U.S., with about 5,000 acres of land and water combined. The influence of the park can be felt all around it.

I spend a lot of time in the restored prairie habitats and wetlands near the park, some of which are situated next to a greenway that runs along the busy street abutting the park. I was knee-deep in the prairie flowers photographing butterflies the other evening, when I looked up and saw that two fawns had emerged from the forest to nibble on grass. This wasn’t a total surprise — Travis had seen one of the fawns the week before while driving alongside the greenway — but it was a pleasant one.

I crept up on the fawns to see if I could photograph them. I kept a respectable distance, because I didn’t want to frighten them into the busy street. Fortunately, the corridor of prairie vegetation offered me a bit of cover. 

I’ve seen the fawns a number of times since, and they are always alone, so it appears they may be orphans. I cringe a little when I see them nibbling grass so close to zooming traffic. I’m obviously not the only one; a police officer honked his horn at them as he drove by, perhaps in hopes that they would stick a little closer to the forest line. If one of the fawns runs into the street, it wouldn’t end well for anyone.

More and more I believe that if wildlife is to survive in the future, a lot of it will look like this: Wild animals living alongside people. Coyotes have already mastered life in large cities. Emerging when people are mostly asleep, they live off the byproducts of human civilization. Feral dogs in Moscow take the subway.

I was thinking a bit about this when I read this op-ed in the New York Times by a Zimbabwean graduate student, titled “In Zimbabwe, we don’t cry for lions.” There is a lot to take with a grain of salt in that piece, except the one truth that makes it worth reading in the first place: Any wildlife conservation effort cannot afford to dismiss the people who must live near the wildlife to be conserved. The interests of villagers in not being mauled by lions cannot be ignored by conservationists who don’t have those same worries. The linked piece seems to treat the interplay between human beings and lions as a zero sum game in which there is no room, ever, for reasonable human beings to “cry for lions.” I think many conservationists have shown this to be false. Successful conservation focuses on managing human-wildlife conflict, with a deep understanding that human beings can’t cry for lions while lions are still a danger to them or their livelihood.

The fawns don’t strike the kind of terror in the human heart that lions do — unless they decide to jump in front of someone’s car. But even in that event, the fawn is likely to lose more than the human. But still, it reminds me that a big task for people interested in biological diversity is going to be figuring out how human beings and wild animals can live together.

I’m going to keep an eye on the fawns.

(More photos of the fawns on The Trailhead’s facebook page. And I hope more in the coming days as well.)

Big cats and human complexity

This weekend I spent time at the Exotic Feline Rescue Center near Brazil, Indiana. Most of the cats at the Center are tigers, due in part to the popularity of tiger ownership as a status symbol, as well as the obsession with breeding white tigers. Such breeding inevitably produces many non-white tigers, which then require sanctuary.

White tiger.

There really are very few places that one can get so close to big cats; in the wild it’s unwise, and in zoos there always seem to be greater physical barriers, whether through glass or moats or just sheer distance. The EFRC keeps the cats in wooded, fenced habitats. Some of the cats are quite affectionate, and would come up and rub their faces against the fence when our guide called them, just like ordinary kitties.

Others, though, behaved very much like one would expect wild tigers and lions to behave. I stood in front of one tiger who was enjoying a deer bone, and was quite unperturbed by my presence as he gnawed gruesomely on the hoof. I admit, gruesome or not, I found this thrilling to watch. These tigers were enormous creatures, 500 pounds of pulsing muscle, and yet still graceful on the paw, leaping up on their boxes, and jumping back down again.

I watched in fascination as one tiger meticulously groomed his paw with a tongue that looked as big as a raw pot roast. There is no understating the gravitas of these beasts; I was left speechless, and could only thank God or the universe that something so great lives in the world.

One enclosure housed a lioness and a huge male tiger who had lived happily together since they were cubs. I liked these inter-species companions very much. Perhaps, I thought, we can live together after all.

I went back into the human world on Monday, and went about my business, still thrilled by these enormous wild cats with their own personalities and quirks. Facebook, as usual, was the purveyor of all manner of outrages, and I saw that one involved a lion that had been shot and decapitated in Zimbabwe. I couldn’t click on it just then, with the memory of these cats so fresh in my mind. But it was a viral story, and by the end of today I knew the details without ever having read an article. So I read one to make sure I had the facts, and yes, Cecil was a popular, friendly, human-oriented lion who’d been shot by an American trophy hunter. And all across my Newsfeed, I saw people united in horror and outrage. Left and right, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, all religions, all stripes — all were horrified by Cecil’s fate and the rapacious hunter who killed him.

For my part, I felt Cecil’s story in my gut, and it hurt. But intellectually, I knew that people were never so united in outrage when the habitat of these big cats was disappearing; when the numbers of tigers in the wild plummeted to dangerously low levels. Why now, with this one lion? In some ways, that’s just a function of how human beings are galvanized to action. We all respond to a story, and to personal acquaintance. And people got this story.

For me, Cecil’s death is like an avatar for what we’ve done to wildlife in the course of my lifetime. Around my birthday last year, the London Zoological Society reported in its Living Planet Index that since 1970 — the year of my birth — fully 40% of wildlife populations had been decimated. A life can be measured in so many ways, but that was the most sobering. In the time I’d been alive, so much of value had been extirpated. How many of these huge, muscled cats had drawn their last breath with each successive birthday?

Cecil’s story also reminded me, yet again, of the paradox of humanity.  Human beings killed this lion for fun. Other human beings dedicate their lives to offering sanctuary to them.

Outrage is a quick-burning fuel, so I hope that this one gets harnessed to blow up some greater truths in the larger human awareness. Killing these animals for pleasure and sport is repulsive, to be sure. But other wildlife is no less dead, just because it was collateral damage to human expansion.

Rest in peace, Cecil.

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