Captivating Life: A Naturalist in the Age of Genetics

Natural History, Nov, 2001 by Steven N. Austad

Captivating Life: A Naturalist in the Age of Genetics, by John C. Arise (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001; $24.95)

During a particularly foul time in the bush--I'm not sure whether it was while I lay immobilized on a moldering sleeping bag because of a foot so swollen it looked like a lumpy red soccer ball or when I discovered that the pungent peanuts in the chicken casserole I had so lovingly prepared were really hundreds of overcooked beetles--I began to giggle a little deliriously at the thought that someday all this might sound like a whopping fine escapade. Field biology is, after all, nine parts tedium and trouble to one part insight and adventure. The accumulated evidence of these four field memoirs, each in its own way a gripping read, suggests that I was probably having a whopping fine escapade after all.

The most traditionally autobiographical book of the lot--and the only one in which scientific discovery plays a major role--is Captivating Life. John Avise pioneered the use of molecular biological techniques to address key questions of evolution and behavior: whether a regional particularity in bird plumage really deserves species status, whether sea turtles return year after year to the beach where they were born. I remember quite well that in my graduate student days we derisively referred to his ilk as cell smashers and gel jockeys, who, instead of laboring to observe animals week upon week with poised notebook, simply showed up one day, took a few snips of tissue, and disappeared back into the laboratory. But they were the ones getting the best answers to the big questions--something for which I am just now beginning to forgive them.

Beyond the Last Village is ostensibly about working to set up a conservation program in Myanmar (formerly Burma) but is in reality a highly personal account of Alan Rabinowitz's love affair with wild places and the people and animals that live there. Dominating the story is a trek into the Himalaya of northernmost Myanmar, where no Westerner has ventured for years and where exotic mammals with exotic names like muntjac, goral, serow, and takin still haunt the forest, one step ahead of local hunters. Rabinowitz hoped to find remaining pockets of additional charismatic fauna--elephants, tigers, and rhinoceroses--and to set up a biological reserve to protect them, but he soon learned that these large mammals had disappeared.

According to this finely observed account, he learned most about the animals by querying hunters and listening intently to what they had to say. This gift for listening led him to discover that the local economy is based largely on salt. The local people don't really need to hunt wildlife, because their gardens and livestock provide sufficient food. But salt, which both humans and livestock need to survive, is nonexistent in the area, so traders bring salt from China across mountain passes and exchange it for the organs of wild animals, used in traditional medicine. This knowledge allowed Rabinowitz to work out a strategy whereby he ensured regular supplies of salt and the people could stop hunting (see "The Price of Salt," September 2000).

For me, the most haunting accounts here are about the people: government officials whose personal quirks can make or break his project; the Taron "pygmies" all but extinct because of persecution, inbreeding, and despair; a mother so desperate to save her ill baby that she gives up the infant to Rabinowitz's Burmese colleague.

Bill Weber and Amy Vedder's In the Kingdom of Gorillas is an account of their work with mountain gorillas in Rwanda. In 1973, en route to their Peace Corps posting in eastern Congo, the newly married couple was detained in Uganda by troops under orders from the bloodthirsty tyrant Idi Amin. Despite this inauspicious beginning, they developed an appreciation for the people and cultures of Africa that led eventually to their decade-long involvement in a Wildlife Conservation Society project on gorillas in the subalpine forests of neighboring Rwanda.

At first, the most difficult 500-pound gorilla they had to contend with was Dian Fossey, international media star, who loved the gorillas and had suffered mightily to study them. By the time Weber and Vedder met her, she had dissolved into alcoholism and paranoia to such a degree that she was harming gorilla preservation efforts more than helping them. Offering Weber a gun as he set off to census the remaining gorillas for the first time, Fossey instructed him, "If you see anyone in the park, shoot them." A previous worker had taken her at her word, shooting and paralyzing a suspected poacher, which led his friends and family to kill five gorillas in retaliation.

Later, Weber and Vedder came up against AIDS and unparalleled ethnic violence, which devastated their project, their Rwandan friends, and the region itself. They provide a vivid portrait of a land desperately trying to put itself back together. The gorillas survive.

Mountain gorillas also fascinated Robert Sapolsky, but, as he writes in A Primate's Memoir, he joined a baboon troop in Kenya's Serengeti Plain instead. The year was 1978, when I, too, made my first trip to Africa and was fleeced on the streets of Nairobi by probably some of the same con artists (with their eye for American pigeons) whom he describes. Rarely have I encountered a scientist who became so attached to his study animals, giving them biblical names and roles and fleshing out descriptions of their individual personalities the way he might his childhood chums. Which makes it all the more horrifying when, after twenty years of increasingly intimate acquaintance, his baboon friends begin dying, one after another, for preventable reasons that he can do nothing about. A tale of deep humanity played out between two primate species, the book resonates with humor but also with the outsize emotions: sorrow and fear and joy.