Nature's Ghosts

Coming to terms with the new challenges of conservation success

by Jared Lloyd

Mornings like this find themselves permanently etched into our memories, teetering on the edge of reality and dreamscape. Though it seemed as if I might drown in humidity, the stillness of the atmosphere was arresting. And the result? Sea and sky were one as heaven and earth joined at the horizon in perfect mirrored reflection. Clouds above, clouds below.

Such was the set and setting I remember when a few years back I found myself plying the shallow waters around a place called Middle Marsh inside an estuary along the coast of North Carolina. The whole of the place is tangle of spartina and oysters and mud and periwinkle snails, with a small egret rookery thrown in for good measure. This saltmarsh sits at the mouth of the North River near the historic community of Beaufort, one of those towns that claims to be a small drinking village with a fishing problem. From the air, Middle Marsh looks like some sort of cubist painting by Pablo Picasso that has begun to wash away. Strange lines, strange angles, and strange patterns make up this estuarine labyrinth. The whole thing is laced with various tidal creeks and a proper dusting of stilted duck blinds. Upon my approach, the tide was high, and the place was thoroughly flooded thanks to the new moon. I was looking for tailing redfish, but what I found was something altogether very different.

Sunning itself in the lime green chord grass that so dominates these saltmarshes was a dinosaur the early Spanish in North America referred to simply as the lizard: El Lagarto. The Spanish were, of course, the first Europeans to explore the southeastern parts of the continent and so they got to name these guys first before the rest of the horde of people came spilling in from across the ocean. Naturally, few Europeans really cared what the people who had been making a living here for 20,000 years called these animals and only a handful of the names for the lizard have survived. Thanks to John Lawson, however, we do at least know what the Tuscarora, a member of the Iroquois nation that also spent considerable time in in this area, called these animals: ustererauh.

Shortly after recording this for posterity, however, the Tuscarora helped separate Lawson from his head; which may be why ustererauh never really took off.

But then along comes the rest of the English, with their lazy way of speaking, always rounding off the edges of words, lumping commonly used ones together, combining things that probably shouldn’t be combined, and generally misunderstanding what other cultures are trying to say to them. Now add heat and humidity and a New World frontier into the mix with a little bit of time, and El Lagarto was slowly bastardized and Anglicized into alligator. Something that by all accounts shouldn’t have been hanging out here in Middle Marsh.

With my outboard raised high on its hydraulic jack plate, I eased my way in for a closer look. This wasn’t my first Carolina crocodilian. I have spent countless hours kayaking and photographing these ancient creatures along the blackwater recesses of the great estuaries that make up this coastline. I knew they showed up in unexpected places from time to time, even occasionally being spotted on the beach, but this was my first chance encounter with one in the salt. Bottlenose dolphins worked their trade in the channel just beyond this marsh, and I had stirred up a green sea turtle, with tell-tale sunburst pattern on its shell in a bed of eel grass as I first began to ease across the flats. Now here I was, leaning over the side of my skiff peering into the prehistoric eyes of an alligator where oyster beds and sting rays should be.

This could be considered a chance encounter, a fluke if you will. Up and down the southeast coast, whenever an alligator shows up on the saltier side of things, we generally assume they were flushed out of rivers from heavy rains or the ebb of king tides. Many even argue it’s because they are overpopulated. And we have century’s worth of biology to go by which has told us this is not where alligators are supposed to be.

But we humans are a funny lot, big brained and all tangled up in the stories we tell ourselves. We try to catalogue and classifying everything under the sun and then hand it all off, neatly packaged with a plastic wrapper and good marketing, to the future. Wading through this collective knowledge, we scrutinize the past and craft euphemisms like “change is the only constant.” But knowledge and belief are two very different things. And so, we become resolute in our assumptions, operating as if everything has always been, and always will be, exactly like it is right now.

In the realm of life sciences, we have come to call this shifting baseline syndrome.

Sound scary?

You probably should be afraid.

It’s contagious, life threatening, and reached pandemic levels a very long time ago.

A hundred years ago, we had the world of American crocodilians neatly organized. Alligators belonged in freshwater swamps, while only the American crocodile could be found in the saltwater – though confined to the Gulf coast of south Florida. This makes since. It’s where they were found at the time, albeit after 300 years’ worth of persecution. We also thought they were both just dumb reptiles that were better off exterminated to make way for civilization.

At that time, nobody knew that alligators could drink from a lens of freshwater that can be found floating atop of saltwater. Nor did we know that both alligators and crocodiles collect sticks on their noses to lure in wading birds who are searching for nesting material – a little behavior we like to call tool use (those of you who frequent Stick Marsh to photograph rosette spoonbills in Florida should take note). And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that Robert Paine discovered the concept of keystone species through his work with sea stars on the coast of Washington, right when alligators were being placed on the Endangered Species List. 

Shifting baselines syndrome speaks to our perception of what is and what is not normal – at least as it pertains to the natural world. Our perception of reality is the baseline in which we judge the world. But each generation has a different version of this, of course. The world today looks different than it did for our grandparents, as it did for their grandparents as well. Our ancestors took the world as is and built their baseline around what they experienced. We do the same thing. Only, our world has far less nature in it.

This whole idea was first put forth by the fish biologist Daniel Pauly and was in reference to the state of fisheries. Granddad’s stories of the good old days of fishing were just that: stories. Nothing more. Hauls were never that big. Fish, never that numerous. At least that is what we believe based on our own personal experience, our own innate definition of reality, our shifted baseline. And thus, we fail to grasp what the population of fish once were, before our generation’s turn at catching them, and especially before commercial fisheries developed.

The world that we are born into is what we accept as reality and assume that on some fundamental level reflects the way things have always been: this isn’t exactly conscious, as most assumptions aren’t.

And it is by no means limited to granddad’s stories about fishing.

Take Massachusetts for instance. Today, more than 30,000 gray seals call the beaches of this state home. Yet Nantucket natives and the old salts of Cape Cod argue that this is unnatural, it’s a manmade problem, something created by ivory tower elites, that the seals are now over populated, that great white sharks shouldn’t be in those waters, and that a bounty should be established on the seals as the whole ecosystem (read: commercial fishing) is going to fall apart otherwise. Yet, we know from historical records that this is exactly what the place looked like when European fishermen first arrived, when they could literally fill a boat full of cod by simply dipping baskets into the water, when fishing was at its all-time best because abundance begets abundance.

So, what is to say that when science first began to level its gaze at alligators in the early part of the 20^th century, those biologists themselves weren’t already suffering from shifting baseline syndrome? By that point, Europeans and their descendants had spent about 300 years working on the wholesale destruction of all things predator in North America. Long before occupations like wildlife biologist and ecologist ever existed, our civilization had been hard at work remaking the world to its liking.

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Maybe it’s because I have been hanging out in a little house at the edge of the saltmarsh as I overwinter, escaping the darkness of Alaska. But it was exactly this memory and these questions that consumed my thoughts at 2am.

As is my habit, when confronted with insomnia, when pondering such ponderous things, I gave up on sleep and set down at my laptop to pull up JSTOR, that online database of all things academic journals. For most, this would probably be a faster way to fall asleep than popping an Ambien. But for me, it can be a bit like downing four shots of espresso.

Here, I began my foray into both current research and the historical ecology of alligators. And it just so happened that in the very same drinking village with a fishing problem, someone else had also been asking similar questions. Beaufort, North Carolina, also happens to be the largest epicenter of marine science in the world – which is the real reason I hang around the place and not for the rum.

Dr. Brian Silliman, of Duke University’s Marine Research Lab, had recently published a paper in the journal Current Biology, arguing that our understanding of alligator ecology was in fact built upon a proverbial Polaroid snapshot taken only after the animal was teetering on the edge of extinction.

And with that, the puzzle pieces in my mind began to fall into place.

As we march bravely forward toward the year 2100, we are doing so in a new era of conservation success that people are truly not ready for. The 18^th and 19^th centuries in North America were the age of unrestrained ecological destruction, the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, propelled by notions of Manifest Destiny and a perspective that it was something of our divine right to do whatever we pleased. The 20^th Century ushered in a time in which we desperately fought to undo the sins of our fathers on the land, bringing about the environmental movement, sweeping conservation initiatives, philosophies such as biocentrism and deep ecology. But the 21^st century is something altogether different, a time when we are finally beginning to witness real results from such legislation as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. And a lot of those animals we worked so hard to protect aren’t exactly behaving like we imagined they would – if we imagined anything at all.

Consider the bison.

After both the industrial revolution (bison skins were turned into belts to drive the gears of machines in factories) and the scorched earth campaigns against native cultures brought the wild bison population to below a hundred animals, we fought hard to rescue the species – especially in Yellowstone National Park. A ranch was built in the Lamar Valley for the purpose of raising and repopulating bison. The bison were obliging. Bulls and cows made new bison. The population rebounded. And now upwards of 2,000 bison are killed each year around Yellowstone for having the audacity to leave the park boundaries when the snow gets too deep in the winter.

Did you catch that?

We wanted bison back. But nobody was prepared for what that really meant, to actually have wild bison again, ones that were not simply confined to a postage-stamp sized square on a map like an open-air zoo. We saved bison from extinction, but we don’t know what to do with them now other than kill them when they walk across an invisible line.  

Likewise, those gray seals I mentioned above are no different. From 1888 to 1962, Massachusetts and Maine paid out $5 bounties for dead seals. Commercial fishermen claimed these seals were causing the collapse of the fisheries and demanded the state do something about it. Never mind the fact that commercial fishermen had been hauling fish from those waters without limitations since 1602. To them, it was the seals fault, and something needed to be done about. So, Massachusetts did what most states and territories did in the late 19^th century: they placed a bounty on animals that competed with humans for whatever scraps were left at the table by that time. And in short order, gray seals were predictably driven to the edge of extinction, leading to the creation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

Now, after 50 years of protection, those seals are back. Gray seals are hauling out onto beaches to sun themselves with all the glorious smell and noise that comes with any seal rookery. They are eating fish, and animals are once again reinhabiting the coastal waters who like to eat the seals. The result? It’s like 1888 all over again and people are demanding a bounty be placed on gray seals.

But here’s the catch: this is, in some part, a problem that the conservation movement created for itself.

It’s important that we accept some of the responsibility here. With all the emphasis of the last century being placed on protection, we made a big fuss about why we should save animals but we never prepared people for what that really meant. We never planned for the future. We never planned for success. And it’s these successes, and our lack of vision for that success, that is beginning to raise its head.

In Montana, the issue with bison is as politically explosive as wolves and water rights. No one alive today experienced bison living outside of the park boundaries. Bison wandering around Montana like giant elk? What would that do to farms and ranches and highways? In a landscape of people whose openness to change is as conservative as their politics, what did we expect? We had over a century to consider this, to plan for it, to adapt, to educate, to embrace, to prepare. But we didn’t. And now, we pour considerable money into killing bison to keep us from having to find out what wild bison would look like.

Back to the southeast, today we are watching as alligators become a regular fixture in salt laden estuaries from Texas to North Carolina. Studies are revealing that species like sharks and rays are regularly making up the diets of these reptiles presumed to be a strictly freshwater in nature. And seals, once thought to be a denizen of the north, are also showing up with clocklike regularity on the very same beaches of the Outer Banks where these alligators are.

It’s like Nature Gone Wild out there.

Dr. Brian Silliman refers to these species as the ghosts of nature’s past. His argument is not that alligators are a saltwater species, of course. Crocodiles have specialized glands for expelling salt, whereas alligators do not. Instead, he argues that maybe, just maybe, what we are seeing is not accidental at all, but could very well be a matter of species re-inhabiting old haunts that they were driven from long before we started paying attention.

Studies dating back to the late 70s reveal that gators were readily found in saltmarshes even at a time when their population was at its lowest. In Florida, around Cape Canaveral, research shows that alligators are found in dense numbers across seagrass beds and in mangroves – places that we once assumed to be the exclusive domain of sharks, sea turtles, and American crocodiles. Other studies have identified alligators inhabiting full blown marine ecosystems for up to a week straight before returning to the slightly less salty waters of estuaries.

Is this accident, or ancestral?

But here’s one very interesting thing that ties these crocodilians back to bison and seals: when it comes to alligators and saltwater, there is a solid correlation with protected habitats.

Back in the early 1980s, in North Carolina, saltwater gators were three times more common in the protected saltmarshes of Cape Hatteras, America’s first National Seashore, than anywhere else. Likewise, alligators living in the Florida Keys today, do so only in those mangroves and creeks that fall within National Park lands. And all those seagrass beds at Cape Canaveral that alligators are making their living around, have been protected by the Kennedy Space Center. Simply put, alligators are likely just beginning to reoccupy saltwater environments where people do not. Even mysaltwater alligator falls into this category, as Middle Marsh is a part of the Rachel Carson Estuarine Reserve.

All of this begs a question about North Carolina then. When we find alligators hanging out where we like to tell ourselves they shouldn’t be, should we really assume that it’s all accidental? Again, is this accidental or ancestral? The official story is that they were probably just flushed down river from heavy rains. But what if that is not the case at all? What if we are beginning to witness the return of this species to its old estuarine haunts?

All of this could have very real consequences for the continued success of species that are beginning to make a comeback. When legislation is written to protect habitat for endangered species, then what does it mean when we begin to discover their habitat extends well beyond the boundary’s we once presumed they functioned within? We were OK with alligators in blackwater swamps where few people wanted to live. But on beaches?

In other words, what does it truly mean for a species to be recovered? Is it when a population reaches a magic number pulled out of antiquated models of rangeland science and fits nicely into the sterility of legislation? Is it once a species has re-occupied its home range as defined by our own shifting baselines? Or is it once an animal has resumed the ecological role it once played in those habitats?

So many questions yet to be answered.

I never did catch any fish. So taken by my discovery of that alligator laying up in the saltmarsh, I lost track of time. As anyone with much experience in tidal creeks knows, you are always working on borrowed time in there. Everything is planned according the ebb and flow of tides - when you can enter, when you should leave. As both time and tide slipped by under the hull of my boat, I found myself overtaken with that sickening feeling that occurs when you suddenly and unexpectedly feel the sharp jolt of solid ground beneath your boat. Hopping into what water that was left, I grabbed my bow line and took my boat for a walk on its leash back to deeper water. Glancing over my shoulder, I watched 6 feet of alligator slip out into the gin clear waters of the shallow channel and disappear into an estuary where it is probably supposed to be, but we are not yet ready to admit.   

As wildlife photographers, we are the beneficiaries of the tireless efforts, the blood-sweat-and-tears, of those who came before us. If not for the passions and hard work of conservationists of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, I can’t even imagine what or world would like today.

As I write this, my camera bags have still yet to be unpacked from my recent trip to Yellowstone where I led two winter workshops. While in the Lamar Valley on the last trip, we experienced something extraordinary. From beginning to end, we watched as the Wapiti pack of wolves hunted and killed a bison in the snow right in front of us. Two species, the gray wolf and the bison, intwined in that dance of predator and prey that’s older than time; each’s existence in this modern world the result of those who fought to save them from extinction, both now sitting in the crosshairs of public opinion. Can we learn to live with bison? How many wolves should be “allowed” to live across the West? Both of these animals are tremendous conservation success stories. Yet both are ticking timebombs that are as divisive as national politics.

Our century holds new challenges, new fights, and new obstacles to overcome. While this rant has asked many questions, offering few if any answers, questions are where it starts. If we don’t ask the questions, then we will never find the answers. And as wildlife photographers, this is something we should all be discussing.