The tool to create the movement, Vogt thought, was Bird-Lore. Month after month, issue after issue, Vogt railed against destroying wetlands, polluting rivers, and overusing insecticides (“insist that poison be kept off the dinner table”). Later, all would become a focus of the green movement. But the magazine’s swerve from tales about spotting the elusive Eskimo curlew to jeremiads against real-estate tycoons dismayed subscribers. Readers, Vogt’s friend Roger Tory Peterson wrote later, “wanted to be diverted, instructed, and entertained—not preached to.” In a single month, he recalled, Bird-Lore featured an essay “about the suicidal tendencies of muskrats under population pressures; another described the difficulties of winter survival of quail; a third dealt with the ecological effects of poisons—the entire issue reeked of death and destruction.”
Unsurprisingly, Audubon president Baker told Vogt to change the tone. Vogt believed he was afraid of upsetting the society’s wealthy donors. But Baker may simply have been worried that Vogt was alienating members or annoyed that a subordinate was changing Bird-Lore’s focus without consulting him. Stressed from fighting mosquito control, running Bird-Lore, and clashing with Baker, Vogt was hospitalized for “nervous exhaustion.” While he recovered, Vogt—“stormy petrel that he was,” as Peterson said—came up with a scheme. Profiting from staffers’ dislike of Baker’s rigid style, Vogt planned to lead them in a strike, which he believed would induce the board of directors to force Baker to resign. Baker caught word of the plot and took the conflict to the board in late 1938. Vogt was fired at once. Four months later he was in Peru.
Don Guano
As a new employee of the Compañía Administradora del Guano, Vogt based his operations on the Chincha Islands, three granitic outposts thirteen miles off the southwest coast of Peru. Named, unexcitingly, North, South, and Central Chincha, they were each less than a mile across, ringed by hundred-foot cliffs, and completely covered in heaps of bird excrement—treeless, gray-white barrens of guano. Atop the guano, shrieking and flapping, were millions of Guanay cormorants, packed together three nests to the square yard, sharp beaks guarding eggs that sat in small guano craters lined by molted feathers. The birds’ wings rustled and thrummed; multiplied by the million, the sound was a vibration in the skull. Fleas, ticks, and biting flies were everywhere. So was the stench of guano. By noon the light was so bright that Vogt’s photographic light meter “often could not measure it.” Vogt’s head and neck were constantly sunburned; later his ears developed precancerous growths.
Vogt worked, ate, and slept in the bird guardians’ barracks on North Chincha, remaining offshore for weeks on end (he was also given an apartment in the nearby shore town of Pisco). His quarters on the island were almost without furniture, covered with guano dust, alive with flies and roaches. Birds mated, fought, and raised their offspring on the roof overhead, leaving so much guano that the building had to be shoveled off periodically to avoid collapse. Vogt’s “laboratory,” a bare room with a battered table, had no electricity or running water. There was no scientific equipment other than a thermometer, binoculars, and a camera, all of which he had brought from New York. (Later he lost even these, and spent weeks waiting for replacements to arrive from the United States.) “I’m doubtless one of the few men who ever spent three years on a manure pile in the interest of science,” he said.
Vogt loved it. He was delighted by the staff, who cooked, cleaned, arranged transport, assisted in research, and gave free Spanish lessons to the man they called “Doctor Pájaro”—Dr. Bird. (His American friends had another nickname: Don Guano.) Twice a week the barracks manager roasted coffee beans in a cast-iron pan. As the beans’ smell filled the room, he gently coated them with sugar and clarified butter, Vietnamese-style. To Vogt’s joy, on North Chincha he became the proprietor “of a luxury I am not likely to have again—a private scallop bed.” Night after night, the cook prepared ceviche, parihuela (the Peruvian answer to bouillabaisse), sea-turtle stew, avocados stuffed with prawns, and other Peruvian marine delights, transforming Vogt into that most forgivable of annoyances, a food snob.
More important, the stark coastal environment enraptured him. He was thrilled by the brilliantly clear night skies, the endlessly variable ocean, the muted browns and yellows of the arid, foggy shore, and, above all, the profusion of living creatures in this apparently inhospitable zone. “It is worth traveling thousands of miles to see but it is the sort of place only a naturalist would entirely appreciate,” he wrote.
As I watched the flocks, day after day, against gray skies, against blue skies and blue sea or, more often, the dark green sea rich in plant food, or against the varied, muted colors of the desert and coastal range that edge the Humboldt Current, I could feel myself part of that cosmos. The stuff of my bones was the stuff of their bones. Through their metabolic system coursed primeval molecules, perhaps used over and over again; they were transported to the ancient, irrigated field of the coast, and through plants and flesh back to our table on the island.
It was a place where he could create a new life for himself. He didn’t mind the smell.
The guano company had hired Vogt to solve the riddle of the birds’ shrinking numbers. Its goal, as an ornithologist friend put it, was “to augment the increment of excrement.” Vogt was not interested in whether the company’s profits rose or fell, an attitude that would soon create friction with his supervisors. But to understand the population decline he would need to investigate a host of scientific questions that did interest him: What are the maximum and minimum ages at which Guanays can reproduce? Are Guanays monogamous? What factors limit their reproduction? Do the islands have a maximum capacity? And, of course, he wanted to use the answers to safeguard the birds.
To study the cormorants without disturbing them, Vogt and the guano guardians built a burlap blind on North Chincha. From its shelter he spied on the “love life” of “11,000,000 guano birds”—courting, fighting, mating, nesting, and feeding offspring. To avoid having to kill and autopsy birds to inventory their insect parasites, he settled for counting the bugs that tried to feast on him in the blind. (He dressed in white so the insects would be visible.) With the help of island guards and local fishing families, he banded tens of thousands of birds—thirty-nine thousand in 1940 alone. He measured air and water temperatures. He counted eggs. He weighed baby birds, live and dead. He sampled plankton and anchovetas. When he returned from the boat to the barracks, Vogt with his bad legs sometimes had to be hauled up the cliffs in a basket.
Masked and goggled against the stench of millions of cormorants, Juana Vogt stands on the dock at the entrance to North Chincha; the “craters” by her feet are old nests. Credit 8
On the other side of the island was Vogt’s bird blind, in which he spent countless hours in the baking sun. Credit 9
Because access to the guano islands was restricted, Vogt had to carry a special permit identifying him as an employee of the guano company. Credit 10
The firm had near-absolute control of Peru’s thirty-nine guano islands. Credit 11
Vogt tore himself away from the work in June 1939 to attend Juana’s graduation from Columbia. Traveling with her husband to South America the next month, she was initially dismayed. Peru, she thought,
is the dirtiest place I have ever seen. The adobe is a dirty color, the ground is the same, the trees and the plants are covered in the adobe colored dust, and the legs and arms and faces of the people are encrusted with dirt. The tablecloth [at a restaurant] was filthy. The shirt of the construction foreman was filthier. They all pick their teeth.
Soon, though, she came to love the “pure good luck” of being able to live where sea-lion families “sleep and breed and carry on riotous family feuds.” Like Vogt, she ended up liking the harsh plenitude of North Chincha. “You seem to get close to the secret places of the universe in such a spot,” she wrote.
By chance, the Vogts had come to North Chincha near the beginning of what Vogt called an “ecological depression on the Peru
vian coast.” Andean peoples had long known that every few years the coastal climate shifted dramatically, with warm downpours inundating the cold, dry coast. Because the rains usually began around Christmas, Peruvians referred to them as El Niño, a Spanish nickname for the Christ Child. In 1891 three Peruvians—an engineer, a geographer, and a naturalist—separately figured out how El Niños worked. During these times, the Humboldt Current abruptly weakens, allowing warm equatorial water to surge close to the coast; the warm water heats up the normally cold coastal air, which allows it to hold more moisture than usual, which, in turn, causes heavy rainfall on the desert shore. Few outside Peru learned of these findings until, by chance, Robert Cushman Murphy visited the country during the severe El Niño of 1925. Collecting his own and others’ observations, Murphy realized he was in the middle of a climatic system that extended across much of the Pacific and influenced the weather as far north as Canada. But the worst effects occurred in coastal Peru, where floods washed away railroads, wiped out farms, and destroyed power stations, blacking out cities. Thousands of “dead guano birds” were incidental damage. El Niño, Murphy said, “brings sickness and death to the population of the Humboldt Current.”
The El Niño Vogt experienced had begun quietly, probably a month or two before his arrival. Slowly the water temperature, which typically hovered around 60°F, rose to 77°F. Temperatures on the islands themselves reached as high as 122°F. On June 2, 1939, the day before he left to attend Juana’s graduation, Vogt estimated that the eighty-six acres of nesting ground on North Chincha held an astonishing 5,250,000 birds—an entire Chicago’s worth of animals, packed into an area the size of a small-town fair. But when he returned with Juana later that month, he wrote, the adult cormorants “had all gone.” And their chicks—the offspring they devoted so much effort to feeding—had been left behind to die. The sight tore at Vogt’s heart; even decades later, he couldn’t forget walking among “the horde of downy babies” as they starved.
They would flap their unfledged wings, while they gave their hunger call, at the feet of this strange, uncormorant-like creature….There was not a thing one could do for them. Day by day there were fewer begging, more staggering about and listlessly drooping. And then more—hundreds of thousands more—of the pitiful, collapsed, downy clumps that were the dead….Somehow, ever since, it has been possible to understand more fully the famines of China and India.
Where were the adult birds? For weeks Vogt combed the coast, hunting for cormorants by plane, boat, and car. Taking advantage of the ornithological tradition of employing amateurs, he mobilized a network of birdwatchers to aid in the hunt. But nobody saw the Guanays.
On October 7 the cormorants abruptly came back, hundreds of thousands of them, only to disappear after a week. On the 20th the birds returned, then vanished on the 24th. By November 7 they were back—only to bolt a few days later.
In 1940 the warm waters came again. And in 1941. And they showed up earlier, at the beginning of nesting, so the birds then fled their nesting grounds and didn’t reproduce. Entire generations were not being born. Vogt was looking at a demographic collapse.
But why were the Guanays fleeing? The temperature was not enough to hurt them directly; if they got hot, they could always take a swim. Nor did the birds’ returns correlate with colder weather. They suffered from no obvious disease. What was going on?
The key to the puzzle, Vogt thought, was the condition of the few adults that didn’t leave the Chinchas: hungry. The remaining Guanays left every morning to hunt for fish. But they returned ever later in the day, and their crops were often empty, which meant they couldn’t feed their offspring. The lack of food, he concluded, was due to El Niño. Warmer water on the surface acted as a cap that blocked cold water from rising from the depths of the Humboldt Current, which set off a cascade of horribles: no upwelling meant no nutrients for plankton, which meant no plankton for anchovetas, which meant no anchovetas for Guanays.
Vogt was unable to test this hypothesis until late in 1940, when he persuaded the guano company to measure plankton abundance by dragging the sea at multiple locations with a fine silk net. He examined the samples with the sole tool available, a magnifying glass he had managed to acquire on a trip to Lima. Despite the crude equipment he was able to gather enough data to see what was happening. The “general tendency,” he wrote, was for “falling temperature to be accompanied by increasing plankton, and vice versa”—an inverse relationship. Abrupt water-temperature rises “resulted in wholesale destruction” of plankton. Desperately hungry, the Guanays had scattered in every direction to search for food.
What did this mean for the Peruvian government, which wanted to maximize the guano-bird population? Vogt spelled out his answers in a 130-page report in October 1941. Written while racing between island bird blind, offshore guano boat, and coastal observation post, his report today seems unexceptional. But at the time his ideas were at the forefront of a wave of theories about the human relationship with nature largely associated with Aldo Leopold, whom Vogt had known since he wrote for Bird-Lore at Audubon, and who would for Vogt become an important friend, inspiration, and intellectual sounding board.
Fifteen years older than Vogt, Leopold had been raised in Burlington, Iowa, in a big house on a bluff above the Mississippi River. A shy boy who became an avid hunter, he reveled in solitary tramps through field and forest with his gun. Leopold went to Yale, graduating in 1909 from its forestry school, the first in the nation. Like much of his class, he went into the U.S. Forestry Service, which sent him to New Mexico. After a bad infection, Leopold was forced to recuperate for a year and a half, a period in which he rethought his views. At Yale he had been taught that the goal of land management was to wring the maximum volume of some resource—timber or deer or fish—from a given piece of property. Now Leopold became skeptical of humankind’s ability to understand the complexities of nature well enough to guide them. He came to think that ecosystems needed more to be protected from humans than managed by them—a stance that complicated his move, in 1933, to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he directed the first U.S. academic program in wildlife management.
Aldo Leopold, Vogt’s mentor, friend, and sounding board, in the 1940s Credit 12
Leopold’s career coincided with the rise of a new scientific discipline: ecology. In 1905, Leopold’s first year at Yale, the first ecology textbook was published. The author was Frederic Clements, whose ideas heavily influenced Leopold—and then, through Leopold, William Vogt and the global environmental movement. Clements’s masterwork, Plant Succession (1916), contended that natural ecosystems developed in a predictable pattern over time. Much as a person begins as a baby, then passes through childhood to become a mature adult, Clements said that ecosystems also go through distinct growth stages, finishing with a mature “climax” state. Building on these ideas, many ecologists maintained that the climax represents an ultimate “balance of nature,” a community of species that endures with little change until it is disturbed, sometimes by natural events like floods or fires, often, destructively, by humans.
Each species in this community, Clementsian ecologists believed, had gradually adapted to fill a specific ecological niche—a role played by it, and it alone. The relations among these niches were governed by the available resources—the biotic potential, as Vogt later called it—and the constraints imposed by the physical setting—the environmental resistance, as he put it. Biotic potential and environmental resistance were in a constant tension, one lifting up, one pushing down. The climax community was like a network of forces that canceled each other out, allowing the whole complex, diverse structure to maintain itself in rough equilibrium.
In some ways this vision goes back to the ancient Greeks, who saw nature as a balance maintained by the gods. Putting these ideas in modern terms, Clements claimed that natural communities function as a kind of “superorganism,” with their different species standing in relation to them like the different organs of a sin
gle animal. When people killed off a species or destroyed its habitat, they were, in effect, attacking the vital organs of this superorganism. They were tipping the balance of nature, which could bring down the whole community.
Many of Clements’s colleagues attacked his ideas, but to little effect. “ ‘The balance of nature’ does not exist, and perhaps has never existed,” snarled the English ecologist Charles Elton. Because each rise or fall in the population of one species affects its fellows, Elton said, and because those species are also constantly changing in number, the result is that ecosystems do not form a stable climax community but exist in continuous turbulence—“the confusion is remarkable.” Elton pioneered the study of how energy flows through these chaotic assemblages. But despite Elton’s insistence that talk of “superorganisms” was mystical hogwash, Clements quickly incorporated his energy ideas into his theory. Energy moves through stable ecological communities, Clements said, the way blood circulates through an animal—its flow sustains the superorganism. Despite repeated, powerful critiques from Elton and his disciples, Clements’s vision of natural systems as self-contained and dynamically stable continued to govern the field.
In Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold in effect tried to reconcile Clements and Elton. Leopold initially believed, like Clements, that ecological communities are an organism-like “collective total” in which all the constituent species have “some utility.” Like Elton, though, he came to disagree that ecosystems are “normally static.” Instead, Leopold said, they constantly change over time. But—a fundamental idea for Leopold—the changes are usually limited in rate and scope, which allows ecosystems to maintain their fundamental qualities. Much as a human community can maintain its essential identity even as residents move in and out, ecological communities can preserve their basic character despite fluctuations in its species populations—provided that the changes aren’t too fast or radical. As a rule, Leopold said, humans act too quickly and clumsily, inadvertently destroying ecosystems’ basic identities and functions.