El otro día se dio cierta situación con algunas águilas calvas en Internet. El drama tiene lugar en un gran nido abrupto en algún lugar de Minnesota,
en frente de una cámara que lleva mostrando la vida de esas aves on line durante los últimos dos años.Tal vez ustedes lo estaban viendo. O
tal vez han hecho clic sobre uno de los cientos de cámaras establecidas
en todo el mundo para canalizar las actividades en tiempo real de varios
animales salvajes en línea: osos polares, colibríes, lobos marinos,
lobos, medusas, grullas, patos ...
Estas cámaras de vida silvestre no están ofreciendo la clase de vídeo animal viral descarado por los que Internet es famosa sino un género raro de documental no narrado sobre la naturaleza inédita que exige mucho más de su audiencia. Todo lo que ofrecen es una corriente sostenida de lo que los animales hacen, que, seamos honestos, a menudo no se parece mucho a su vida cotidiana. Bisontes en pie alrededor de Saskatchewan. Un castor duerme en su presa. Cada interrupción de la acción -cada golpetazo que un oso pardo acomete sobre un salmón en Alaska- tiende a ser compensado por horas de moping y holgazanería. A menudo, se hace clic en una de estas cámaras y ni tan sólo hay animales en el campo del objetivo.
A partir de una versión del artículo que apareció impreso el 22/06/2014, en la página SR1 de la edición NewYork con el titular: "Transmisión de Águilas", Jon Mooallem hace una reflexión acerca de la cambiante relación que establecemos con los animales en función de la visión que tenemos de ellos a través de una relación de proximidad que los medios de difusión de imágenes han ido cambiando con los tiempos, y, en particular las extremas posibilidades que Internet ofrece: desde las selecciones de imágenes de acciones sorprendentes o cruentas al seguimiento de las cámaras de observación ante las que no pasa nada "destacable" la mayor parte del tiempo. En el caso descrito, la preocupación generada por el estado de salud de un polluelo de águila calva, especie que simboliza la fragilidad digna de ser protegida después de haber sido objeto de persecución como alimaña, pone de manifiesto lo voluble de nuestros criterios para con la biodiversidad en estrecha relación con la simbología legendaria asignada a cada especie concreta.
Sobre la demonización de ciertas especies animales ya hemos hablado en otras ocasiones, y de forma particular respecto a las aves de rapiña, pero está claro que las aves rapaces constituyen un claro ejemplo del cambio de paradigma acerca de lo que es una alimaña o un tesoro de la biodiversidad más digna de protección.
Ping Zhu
Ping Zhu
Estas cámaras de vida silvestre no están ofreciendo la clase de vídeo animal viral descarado por los que Internet es famosa sino un género raro de documental no narrado sobre la naturaleza inédita que exige mucho más de su audiencia. Todo lo que ofrecen es una corriente sostenida de lo que los animales hacen, que, seamos honestos, a menudo no se parece mucho a su vida cotidiana. Bisontes en pie alrededor de Saskatchewan. Un castor duerme en su presa. Cada interrupción de la acción -cada golpetazo que un oso pardo acomete sobre un salmón en Alaska- tiende a ser compensado por horas de moping y holgazanería. A menudo, se hace clic en una de estas cámaras y ni tan sólo hay animales en el campo del objetivo.
A partir de una versión del artículo que apareció impreso el 22/06/2014, en la página SR1 de la edición NewYork con el titular: "Transmisión de Águilas", Jon Mooallem hace una reflexión acerca de la cambiante relación que establecemos con los animales en función de la visión que tenemos de ellos a través de una relación de proximidad que los medios de difusión de imágenes han ido cambiando con los tiempos, y, en particular las extremas posibilidades que Internet ofrece: desde las selecciones de imágenes de acciones sorprendentes o cruentas al seguimiento de las cámaras de observación ante las que no pasa nada "destacable" la mayor parte del tiempo. En el caso descrito, la preocupación generada por el estado de salud de un polluelo de águila calva, especie que simboliza la fragilidad digna de ser protegida después de haber sido objeto de persecución como alimaña, pone de manifiesto lo voluble de nuestros criterios para con la biodiversidad en estrecha relación con la simbología legendaria asignada a cada especie concreta.
Sobre la demonización de ciertas especies animales ya hemos hablado en otras ocasiones, y de forma particular respecto a las aves de rapiña, pero está claro que las aves rapaces constituyen un claro ejemplo del cambio de paradigma acerca de lo que es una alimaña o un tesoro de la biodiversidad más digna de protección.
Streaming Eagles
Ping Zhu
Menagerie: Just between us species.
THERE was a situation with some bald eagles
on the Internet the other day. The drama played out in a large,
disheveled nest somewhere in Minnesota, in front of a camera that had
been streaming the lives of those birds onto the Internet for the last
two years.
Maybe you were watching. Or maybe you’d
clicked over to one of the hundreds of other cameras set up around the
world to funnel the real-time activities of various wild animals online:
polar bears, hummingbirds, sea lions, wolves, jellyfish, whooping cranes, wood ducks. These wildlife cams aren’t delivering the kind of cheeky, viral animal video that the Internet is famous for — the tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos; Buttermilk the goat jumping over other goats
— but a weird genre of non-narrated, unedited nature documentary that
demands a lot more of its audience. All they offer is a sustained stream
of animals doing whatever they happen to be doing, which, let’s be
honest, often doesn’t look like that much. Bison stand around in
Saskatchewan. A beaver sleeps in its dam. Every blip of action — every
swipe a grizzly takes at a salmon in Alaska — tends to be offset by
hours of moping and loafing. Often, you click on one of these cameras
and there aren’t even any animals standing in the shot.
We spend our days racing around an Internet
of BuzzFeed quizzes and Upworthy headlines and umbrage and porn — this
churning, digital machine, increasingly optimized to dole out quick
bursts of dopamine and wring all the clicks from our fingers. And still,
loads of us also apparently like to keep a bunch of puffins open in
another browser tab, just doing their thing. Last year, people spent
more than a million hours watching the Audubon Society’s three seabird
cameras alone. The Decorah eagle cam
— set up at a bald eagle nest in Iowa in 2007, and generally credited,
like a kind of avian “Sopranos,” with giving birth to this entirely new
genre of slow-paced, binge-watched prestige drama — gets about a hundred
million views a year.
Watching a wildlife cam dials down the
loneliness of office life, maybe. Or it fills those last, hauntingly
quiet hours before the kids come home from school. Or it’s a way to Zen
out. Or it’s voyeurism. I’m not sure; until recently, I’d never given
the appeal of these things much thought. All I know is, as I type this, I
am, according to the counter at the bottom of the screen, one of
556,749 global Internet users watching a family of great horned owls sit
in a tree in Texas. All the owls are asleep.
In any case, the bald eagle incident in Minnesota started like this: One Thursday night in early May, people watching the “EagleCam”
run by the Nongame Wildlife Program of the state’s Department of
Natural Resources noticed that one of the three eagle chicks in the nest
was immobile. It appeared to be suffering. Bald eagle chicks are
endearing, but not, in any traditional sense, cute: Their unwieldy,
disproportionate wings and legs wind up contorting into all kinds of
crazy tangles when they lie around the nest. (Go online and look for
yourself, but to my eye, they look like coils of uncooked sausage coated
in dryer lint.) The EagleCam audience had grown intensely attached to
these young birds, though; after all, many had been following them since
their eggs were laid back in February. The Nongame Wildlife Program
makes a point of not naming the birds. But on Facebook, fans had taken
to calling the chicks “Snap,” “Crackle” and “Pop.” Snap was the one
having trouble. The little bird couldn’t get up to eat. Clearly, it
wouldn’t survive much longer.
Live Video: EagleCam
By the next morning, the Nongame Wildlife
Program was bombarded by emails, phone calls and notes on social media,
pleading with it to step in and get Snap some medical attention. Many
people speculated — or at least hoped — that Snap was merely stuck in
the muddy floor of the nest, and would need only a little jiggle to get
free. (There was a good basis for this theory: Apparently, some EagleCam
viewers also watch another bald eagle cam, set up elsewhere in
Minnesota, and two years ago a chick there named Harmon had a similar
problem.)
The Nongame Wildlife Program, however, had a
policy to let nature play out and not intervene; it doesn’t want to
compromise the essential eagleness of the eagles on its EagleCam. In an
informational video about the EagleCam that the agency produced, a
public relations specialist, Lori Naumann, addresses this exact
situation hypothetically: “We’re not going to turn the camera off,” she
says. “We’re not going to climb in the nest to try and save any chicks.”
The agency had posted the video the previous day, only hours before
anyone noticed Snap struggling.
THE public outcry, Ms. Naumann later told me,
was “getting more hostile as the day went on.” It became hard to
ignore. At one point that Friday afternoon, she found herself on the
phone with a woman who simply couldn’t accept the agency’s refusal to
help Snap. “She was crying and crying and could not be consoled,” Ms.
Naumann said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Naumann was periodically
checking in on the eagles, via the EagleCam, and noticed that one of the
adult birds had brought a dead female pigeon into the nest to feed its
chicks. Ms. Naumann knows the pigeon was female because, once the eagles
ripped it open, they discovered an egg inside. And so they ripped the
pigeon’s egg open too and ate its contents. It must have made for great
television, frankly. And yet, Ms. Naumann told me, none of the people
criticizing the government for its willingness to let Snap die seemed to
mind watching their birds tear apart a mother pigeon and her unborn
chick. “So,” she ventured, “there was something contradictory about
that.”
The emails kept coming that day. They were
emphatic. Some were written in all caps. The Nongame Wildlife Program
doesn’t disclose the eagle nest’s location, but a few people threatened
to find it and rescue Snap themselves. Finally, late in the afternoon,
Ms. Naumann got a call from the governor’s office; they were getting
pummeled with phone calls, too, and wanted to know how the Nongame
Wildlife Program intended to play this. A decision was made: Within a
couple of hours, two utility workers got into a bucket truck and gently
lifted Snap out of the nest. The chick wasn’t stuck in mud. It was badly
injured — most likely trampled accidentally by one of its parents. It
had a severely fractured wing and a systemic infection. There was no
chance of recovery. Snap had to be euthanized.
“Fly high and fly free, little Snap — you
taught us humans so much,” one EagleCam viewer posted a few days later
on Facebook. The mood online was mournful, but grateful. There were
frowny face emoji and bulging pink hearts. Hundreds of people thanked
the Nongame Wildlife Program for listening to them and helping the
chick, if only helping him die a more comfortable death. The community
of EagleCam viewers felt it had been spared a lot of discomfort, too.
Thanks, one woman wrote, for “not making us suffer watching it die. I’m
not up for that learning experience.”
Ms. Naumann felt more conflicted. She
explained to me that wildlife advocates generally look at these cameras
as a way to deliver wildlife to people who don’t otherwise go out of
their way to notice it. A live-stream of bears or birds brings nature to
our tablets or phones with the long-term hope of eventually bringing us
back to nature. “But maybe it’s kind of backfiring on us,” Ms. Naumann
admitted. In Minnesota, the public had managed to turn the EagleCam into
just another app. Rather than appreciate what they were seeing on its
own terms, they saw something that didn’t feel right, swiped at it, and
changed what was happening on the screen.
In truth, that isn’t so different from how
we’ve always interacted with nature off-line, too. We manipulate and
manage the world’s wild things to reflect our ideas about what’s right
and wrong, about what belongs in nature and what’s an abomination.
Ping Zhu
THERE was a time when America’s relationship
with bald eagles was less mushy and sympathetic, more brutal. Around the
turn of the 20th century, eagles, like all kinds of other avian and
mammalian predators, were being eradicated. They were vilified as
murderers and vermin. They were imagined to be grave threats to sheep
and small livestock and competitors for fish and game birds.
Newspapers printed exaggerated stories of
bald eagles attacking small children, blinding, disfiguring or even
carrying them away in their claws, like a 3-year-old girl named Nettie
in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 1896. (An older girl was said to have stopped
the attack by stabbing the bird in the head with her hatpin.) In 1901,
The Los Angeles Times described an eagle seizing a 6-month-old baby. The
child’s mother, Emma Goulding, reportedly chased the bird for eight
miles on mule-back, then climbed a rocky cliff toward its nest,
deflecting attacks from both the eagle and its mate as she ascended,
killing both. Eventually, Mrs. Goulding found her baby lying in the
eagles’ nest unharmed, then tore her skirt up, fashioned it into a rope,
and rappelled them both down to safety.
By the 1920s, all this vitriol and killing
was pushing the bald eagle toward extinction. Early conservationists,
trying to warn the public about the eagle’s predicament, found it
challenging to defuse all the hatred that had gathered around the bird.
Slowly, of course, public opinion turned in the bald eagle’s favor for a
variety of reasons, few of which had anything to do intrinsically with
bald eagles. The environmental historian Mark V. Barrow Jr. points out
that passage of the first national law to protect eagles, the Bald Eagle
Protection Act, in 1940, was partly a byproduct of newly booming
patriotism on the cusp of World War II. And in the ’60s, the bird became
a sympathetic poster child for the new, pernicious form of damage that
the pesticide DDT and other pollutants were leveling on the environment.
It was one of the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act
in 1973.
Even now, seven years after the species has
been declared recovered and taken off that list, it remains protected by
other state and federal statutes. We love bald eagles so much that
we’ve swaddled them in a big tangle of regulation. (How close you are
permitted to get to a bald eagle’s nest, under federal law, depends
partly on what sort of vegetation is growing in the vicinity.) And even
death can’t rip a bald eagle from that bureaucratic embrace: If you
happen to find a bald eagle carcass anywhere in the United States, you
are supposed to pack it up and ship it to the federal government’s
National Eagle Repository, outside Denver, which has been set up to
collect and distribute dead eagles to Native Americans for religious
use. The process is carefully controlled: those making requests from the
Eagle Repository must file the appropriate paperwork. On the request
form, there are boxes to check for “Pair of Wings Only,” “10 Quality
Loose Feathers [8 wing; 2 tail]” and so on.
That inventory now includes Snap. The chick’s body arrived last week, by FedEx.
“R.I.P. little one,” read one Facebook
tribute to Snap. “You are no longer suffering, so soar high with all the
eagles at the Rainbow Bridge.”
Well, I guess so. Our relationship with
animals must have felt so much more straightforward, and less mushy,
when we viewed them in more strictly utilitarian terms. A century ago,
we had no use for bald eagles, and we believed they were a threat to the
domestic animals and fish we did have a use for — and so it seemed
reasonable for us to kill them like crazy. Now, emotional and aesthetic
values have overpowered those pragmatic ones. When it comes to animals,
we deal mostly in feelings: feelings of tenderness, or empathy or fear
or awe; and in the bald eagle’s case, feelings of patriotism too. We
began to love bald eagles, and so it seemed reasonable to protect them
like crazy.
Those feelings about animals are so much
harder to articulate and defend than the old calculus of useful and not
useful. Even the name of Ms. Naumann’s department, the “Nongame Wildlife
Program,” basically throws up its hands at explaining what, exactly,
the kinds of animals it’s responsible for are actually for. All we know
is they aren’t game animals — not the ones we want to hunt.
But the paradoxical upshot of Snap’s story
may be that not killing certain animals is the way we use them now: The
need these creatures are satisfying is our need to protect them. We have
a destructive history when it comes to the natural world, and we all
know more damage is inevitable. Maybe we latch on to the species we’ve
willfully not destroyed as proof of our compassion, and as living props
with which to demonstrate that compassion again and again. Maybe it just
feels good to know they’re still out there, in some safe-seeming corner
of the wilderness. And maybe that’s why we’ve pointed a bunch of
webcams at them: so we can check in whenever we want and keep watch.
Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of “Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.”
