Fuzz, page 22
What about a predator, say, a coyote, that kills a person’s pet? Is it ethical for the person to kill the predator? When the predator acts by instinct, to survive?
Father Carlo aligns a stapler on his desktop. “You have to keep in mind the emotional impact for the people.”
“But how do you weigh these things, Father Carlo? The feelings of the person versus the life of the predator?”
There is a knock on the office door, and a man steps in carrying a tray of traditional Italian Easter cake and a carafe of water. “Ah, Sandro, grazie!” Father Carlo seems delighted by the refreshments or maybe just the break in the conversation. Sandro sets down the water glasses. Mine has a bit of brown gumpy on the rim. Father Carlo quietly swaps his for mine.
While we take a break to have our cake, I mention that I watched Pope Francis zipping around after Easter Mass on an electric scooter, shaking people’s hands, utterly exposed to the crowd.
“Yes, and it drives the security people crazy.” Father Carlo shares a story about the time Pope Francis needed to fill a new glasses prescription. Without telling security, he paid a visit to the optical shop. The optician was delighted but ultimately a bit disappointed. “Francis said to him, ‘I want only the lens, no frames. Because I already have the frames.’ He really said, ‘I have the frames. I just need the lens.’ ” Father Carlo shakes his head, amused by the memory. “Can you believe?” His smile reveals a gap between his two front teeth. Because of the plain clothing and the regulation haircut—the absence of any indicators of personal style—the gap has the effect of an accidental intimacy, like bitten fingernails, or a bra strap that has slipped into view.
Presently Sandro returns with his tray to collect the plates and glasses. Father Carlo watches him retreat, then turns back to his guest. “Animals act according to their instinct, as you say about the coyote.” He pronounces it co-dee-oh-tay, a most lyrical word. “Human beings, on the other side, have free will. They are responsible for the stewardship of creation. Their role is to help nature. Because we can study the system, and the animals cannot.” He cites an example of reintroducing wolves into regions of Italy where deer and wild pigs were overpopulated, rather than culling the pigs and deer. “They asked the wolves to balance the ecosystem.” He smiles. The gap again! I live for it.
I share the story of the Indian mongooses that were brought to Hawaii to kill rats in the sugarcane fields. What someone overlooked is that the rats are nocturnal, and the mongoose is diurnal. The mongooses ate a few rats and lots and lots of sea turtle eggs.
“Yes. Well.” Father Carlo reaches for his briefcase. He has a train to catch. “In the complex systems of the world, we cannot predict the effect of all our actions. So? We have to act according to the principal of prudence.”
Amen to that. Regarding the Italian wolves, I read later that they did indeed help lower the population of deer and wild pigs. They were fruitful and multiplied and began turning to ranchers’ livestock for food. And then the ranchers began agitating for a cull. It is ever thus. In the words of National Wildlife Research Center public affairs specialist Gail Keirn, “When it comes to wildlife issues, seems like we’ve created a lot of our own problems.”
Perhaps no place better knows the challenges and grand doh! moments of animal stewardship than my next stop, the lovely island nation of New Zealand.
* Pope Francis rides around in a Focus, too. What’s up with the Vatican and the Ford Focus? Nothing, says Erich Merkle, of Ford’s marketing department. Coincidence. Merkle drives a Mustang, but he defended the lowly Focus. “Visually, the lines are actually pretty handsome.” He added that in Europe, Ford sells a turbo-charged 252-horsepower Focus called the ST. “That thing’s a monster. Once you option it up? Put a spoiler on it, some Recaro bucket seats in the front? It’s really hot.” Was the pope’s ride in fact a Focus ST? It was not. The pope opted for the “more rudimentary” model.
† A few high-ranking members of the Swiss Guard live with their families inside the Vatican City State, but no baby has ever been born inside the nation. When journalist Carol Glatz was nine months pregnant and working in the Vatican press hall, a nun working alongside her hoped the baby would be born right there. Because it would have been the first birth ever registered in the Holy See. What splendorous benefits might befall a Vatican anchor baby? Zippo. Vatican citizenship is granted by administrative decision, not birth.
‡ After I got home, I went on the web to see if I could find out which pest control firm the Vatican uses. A search brought me to a computer-generated web page for what had to be a nonexistent company, Derattizzazione Roma. Under the heading “Our greatest services for Vatican deratting” was a crazed two-page list that, were it real, suggested a fabulously pestilent Vatican where deratization was underway day and night and even on Sunday, in every room of every building, where even the mice had rats. Urgent Vatican Deratization, Night Vatican Deratization, Deratization of Vatican Canteens, Sunday Vatican Deratization, Deratization of the Vatican Shopping Centers, Deratization of Vatican Technical Rooms, Deratization of Vatican Elevator Lifts, Deratization of Vatican Mice. The exuberant translation software had even created a drinking establishment for exhausted deratizers to repair to when their shift was done: Rodent Pub Vatican.
§ I almost wrote “Prada,” and then I read Dieter Philippi’s exhaustive treatise on campagi, papal shoes, replete with more than 100 photographs of custom-made red papal footwear. Pope Benedict’s official shoemaker was Adriano Stefanelli. He made the red loafers that earned Benedict the Esquire honorific “accessorizer of the year,” as well as “the special slippers which the pope wears around his apartment.” Gammarelli, a papal and clerical tailor shop near the Vatican, has a shoemaker who by tradition makes the ceremonial red loafers worn by newly elected popes when they first appear on the St. Peter’s balcony. And anyone else, sniffs Philippi throughout his 119-page commentary, is lying. Silvano Lattanzi’s claim that Benedict wore a pair of his velvet slippers? “I am quite certain this is a false assertion.” The mules made for him by Raymond Massaro? “I do not think the Pope has ever worn this kind of shoe.” Ferragamo’s wine red loafers in “the papal style”? “The Pope has never worn these shoes.” The slip-ons imprinted with the Vatican coat of arms? “The Pope would certainly never wear a design of this kind.” Those Prada red loafers with the ornamental seams? “A fallacy. The Pope renounces ornamental stitching.” According to Philippi, only one commercial shoe company can rightly claim to have shod Pope Benedict. While hiking during his summer 2009 holiday, Benedict wore Camper Pelotas leather sneakers.
¶ Sister Death—it’s a woman. Also the title of the seventh album by Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores. Signal to Noise magazine describes Sister Death as “a gorgeous amalgam of 20th Century Americana, cabaret … Eastern European folk, noise rock and minimalism.” You never know where a footnote will take you.
# But not as heavily as the internet would have you believe. Goose Busters has them extruding 3 to 4 pounds a day. The Geese Police superintendent at the National Mall in Washington, DC, claims 2 to 3 pounds a day. A Boston city councillor: “as much as 3 pounds a day.” The Canada goose fecal smear campaign appears to have hit its zenith in New Jersey’s Montclair Local: “An adult Canada goose can weigh up to 20 pounds and defecates more than twice its weight daily.” That would be 40 pounds a day, coming out of a single goose. That’s how much a horse makes. The reporter cited the USDA; a contact at their NWRC public affairs office steered me to the USDA “Geese, Ducks and Coots” fact sheet, which gives a daily total of 1.5 pounds. The author of the USDA fact sheet got his information from a Virginia Tech University Cooperative Extension goose fact sheet. That fact sheet says “studies have shown” but does not cite any studies. A Google Scholar search brings up just one researcher, B. A. Manny, who actually went out and weighed some turds. Manny’s findings: the average total (wet) weight of a Canada goose’s daily droppings was just a third of a pound. Where did Virginia Tech get the 1.5 pounds per day figure? The author did not reply to multiple emails, so it remains a mystery.
Poundage aside, the Canada goose is a frequent crapper. Twenty-eight times a day, on average, Manny found. In related research, a Canadian team reports that “sleeping geese sometimes produce small piles of droppings.”
14
KILLING WITH KINDNESS
Who Cares About a Pest?
To live in a penguin colony is to know no modesty. Anything you do—mate, preen, throw up fish for your young to eat—you do in plain view of the neighbors. The yellow-eyed penguin will have none of this. It builds a nest in the coastal tussock, out of sight from other yellow-eyed pairs. As with human suburbanites, the quest for space and privacy brings with it a longer commute. Every evening, yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula return from their labors at sea, crossing the beach, picking their way through the scrub, and trekking partway up a steep bluff to get home.
You can watch yellow-eyed penguin rush hour from a hide in a private reserve held by Elm Wildlife Tours. Shaun Templeton, Elm’s dry-witted operations manager, leads today’s outing. Shaun is youngish, with a shaved and well-tanned head. He has large brown eyes that remind me of a seal’s, though maybe only in the context of this afternoon. Some beaches here have pinnipeds the way Coney Island once had humans.
Just past 5:00 p.m. the first penguin appears in the backwash of broken waves, bodysurfing. It lets the water carry it as far as possible and then, beached, it stands and crosses the strand in the deliberate plod that is a yellow-eyed penguin in a hurry. At the base of the bluff that rings the cove, it begins a series of considered uphill jumps, bending forward, pausing to cock the knees, then springing upward, its whole being applied to the task of moving one inch higher up the slope.
This is why, or partly why, the yellow-eyed is the world’s most endangered penguin. The isolated nests and the long, exposed trek to reach them provide shopping and dining opportunities for predators: seals and sea lions, as always, but also newcomers—stoats (known in the United States as short-tailed weasels), rats, and feral cats. Only around four thousand yellow-eyed penguins remain in the world, forty-three of them currently at this bay. Stoats are known to have killed three chicks here already this season. Shaun keeps track, because he’s here most weeks and because Elm contributes to the conservation efforts of the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust.
It’s dusk, the commute mostly over. We’re watching the fur seals now.
“Have a look.” Shaun indicates a loose scatter of bones: heads and spines of two barracuda, and some kind of octopus scaffolding. “A most impressive sea lion vomit.” Sea lions eat their prey bones-and-all and then regurgitate what’s undigestible, as owls do but less tidily. We happily note the absence of penguin solids.
Shaun makes his living from tourism but is by avocation closer to a naturalist. I don’t know the precise parameters of that calling, but I think that if you find yourself applying the word impressive to any variety of animal vomit, you may be one. It has been a disastrous two decades for the yellow-eyed penguin. Shaun explains: On top of losing habitat to humans and getting tangled in their fishing gear, the birds have lately been killed off by disease—avian malaria and avian diphtheria—and starvation. As the sea has warmed, the bottom-dwelling fish that these birds eat have begun to move farther out into colder water that is also deeper. Yellow-eyed penguins can dive deep, but not as deep as some of these fish are now living. Perhaps more than anything else, though, it’s the unnatural predators: stoat and company.
If the present rate of decline continues, the yellow-eyed penguin will likely be gone from the planet in ten or twenty years. It is difficult to be here watching them and not feel somewhat slammed by this information. What a thing to lose! Go look them up. The candy red beak, the pink go-go boots, the yellow mask angling back from the eyes. They’re the Flash, they’re 1970s Bowie! I don’t mean to imply that adorable, showy species are of more value or somehow deserving of more concern. It’s just … damn.
Up on the bluff, a pair is greeting each other. You can tell by the ruckus. The Maori name for the yellow-eyed penguin, hoiho, means “noise shouter.” Shhhhh, you want to say. The stoats will hear you! They’ll wait until you leave and come for your children.
It is not just the yellow-eyed penguin that is in trouble here. It’s any flightless New Zealand species (and many that still have wings). For tens of millions of years, these islands had no native land predators, so birds who arrived here no longer had need for swift escape. Evolution gradually discontinued some species’ wings, applying the energy to something more contributive to survival. Then the predators showed up—stowaways and introductions from other land masses. Each year, invasive species kill around 25 million native New Zealand birds: kiwis, most famously, but also kakapos, blue ducks, blue penguins, and keas (the carrion-eating mountain parrots we met in chapter 11). Stoats are efficient killers and ready tree climbers. They like eggs very much, but they will also kill and eat young birds. Each year 40 percent of all North Island brown kiwi chicks, for instance, are killed by stoats.
Stoats. Who invited them?
It began with rabbits. In 1863, homesick European settlers formed the Otago Acclimitisation Society, one of several such groups in New Zealand at the time, and released six rabbits into the Otago countryside. It was hoped, they explained, that “sportsmen and naturalists would be able to enjoy the activities that made the remembrance of their former home so dear.”
What followed is nicely if perhaps hyperbolically summed up by one landholder’s “rabbit arithmetic”: 2 × 3 = 9,000,000. Two rabbits in three years equals 9 million rabbits. By 1876 most of Otago was overrun. The rabbits had no natural land predators, and the mild climate lengthened the breeding season. Rabbits ate the sheep pastures bare. Flocks starved. More than a million acres of Otago landholds were abandoned.
By 1881, government officials were moved to take action. They passed a Rabbit Nuisance Act, hired rabbit inspectors and “rabbiters” to shoot and poison. Stoats and ferrets were shipped in from Europe; nearly eight thousand of these “enemies of the rabbit” were released into the New Zealand countryside and protected by law.
But rabbits were only one of the species that wound up on the stoats’ plate. The fierce tubular hunters quickly set to the avifauna: eggs, chicks, small adults. The march to genocide began. As of 2019, 79 percent of New Zealand’s land-dwelling vertebrate species were classed as either threatened with, or at risk of, extinction. That includes 78 bird species and 89 reptile species.
In 2012, the New Zealand government again stepped in. Where once it had imported and protected stoats, now it endeavors to be rid of them. Predator Free 2050 (PF2050) is a Department of Conservation (DOC) effort to protect native biodiversity by eradicating the three invasive predators that most threaten it: stoats, rats, and brushtail possums. (The year 2050 is when the DOC aims to have it done.) Citizens have been brought to the cause by energetic public outreach. Wander through any national park visitor center and you will see the Predator Free 2050 exhibit, with brochures and worrisome statistics and the requisite taxidermied stoat, needly teeth bared, one paw proprietarily placed on some savaged bird or violated egg.
Entire towns have taken the bait. Neighbors and farmers set out DOC traps by the hundreds. Success stories and tips are shared in a monthly newsletter that closes with the sign-off “Happy Trapping!”
Today has been a tour not just of Otago’s birds but of the various models of DOC traps used to protect them. Each predator has its own challenges. “Cats like fresh meat,” says Shaun, “so you need to rebait a lot.”
Most places on earth have some feral cats, but this is well beyond some feral cats. Because along with stoats and ferrets, cats galore were set loose in the countryside to kill rabbits. Were in fact farmed for the job. And when demand outstripped supply, Dunedin lads were conscripted to prowl the city, stealing housecats.
So now, alongside the leering stoats in visitor centers and museums, you’ll often see a taxidermied feral cat posed beside its stomach and the contents thereof: tiny paws, and feathers and bones, preserved in acrylic like some horrid paperweight that I kind of want on my desk.
On the walk back up the hill to the van, we pass a newer addition to the DOC arsenal, a self-resetting Goodnature A24. The bait sits at the end of a tube, behind a thin, flexible metal bar. When the head pushes the bar, it triggers the firing of a piston propelled by a carbon dioxide canister. Maybe you remember the unusual murder weapon used by Javier Bardem’s character in No Country for Old Men. It’s that sort of mechanism.
The stoat is famously hard to trap. “They don’t like to stick their heads in things,” Shaun says. Why then make a trap that’s baited at the end of a tube? Because that way the head—the brain, more specifically—is positioned for a lethal strike and an instantaneous passing.
New Zealand is committed to eliminating invasive predators, but it is also committed to doing it humanely. No one person has contributed more to this effort than Bruce Warburton, whom I’m driving up to Christchurch tomorrow to see. Warburton helps design more humane traps, drafts animal welfare standards for traps, and tests traps to see whether they meet those standards. He is certainly the only New Zealander to hold professional affiliations with both the National Pest Control Agencies and the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee.
