The New Yorker: Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” in the Age of Climate Change

In the autumn of 1973, the naturalist and writer Peter Matthiessen and the zoologist George Schaller set out on a gruelling trek into the Himalayas. They were headed toward the Dolpo region of the Tibetan plateau. Schaller wanted to study Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen hoped to see a snow leopard—a large, majestic cat with fur the color of smoke. Snow leopards, which belong to the genus Panthera, inhabit some of the highest mountain ranges in the world, and their camouflage is so perfectly tuned that they appear ethereal, as though made from storm clouds. Two of them feature on the Tibetan flag of independence, representing harmony between the temporal and spiritual planes.

For Matthiessen, a serious student of Zen Buddhism, the expedition wasn’t strictly scientific. It was also a pilgrimage during which he would seek to break “the burdensome armor of the ego,” perceiving his “true nature.” After it was published, in 1978—first, in part, in The New Yorker, then as a book—“The Snow Leopard,” his account of the trip, won two National Book Awards, becoming both a naturalist and a spiritual classic. It overflows with crystalline descriptions of animals and mountains: “The golden birds fall from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark,” Matthiessen writes. But it’s also an austere Buddhist memoir in which the snow leopard is as alluring and mysterious as enlightenment itself. Read the rest here

The New Yorker: A Compass in a Haystack

Birds, turtles, dragonflies, sharks and elephants. So many animals travel long distances, in many cases thousands of miles, year after year. How do they find their way? I went to London to attend the tri-annual conference on animal navigation held by the Royal Institute of Navigation in April. Here's the story about the search for the animal compass and the scientists racing to prove two very different theories about how many animals navigate with such awesome precision across the planet.

Read the rest at newyorker.com

The New Yorker: Finding the Way Back

A new piece at NewYorker.com about the stars, GPS, and a physicist: "As a species, humans lack many of the biological gifts that allow other animals to get around. A loggerhead turtle, for example, begins to take its bearings within a couple of hours of hatching, using magnetite crystals in its brain to sense Earth’s magnetic field. (Spiny lobsters, monarch butterflies, and termites have similar compasses.) Honeybees get from nectar to hive and back in part by judging the position of the sun, which they can sense, even on a cloudy day, from patterns in polarized light. Where biology has failed humans, we have substituted culture. Throughout our evolutionary history, we have created ad-hoc systems of knowledge that organize environmental information and make it transmissible to the next generation. Often, difficult and monotonous landscapes—desert, sea, ice—resulted in more intricate systems. Several thousand years before the magnetic compass was invented, Pacific Islanders had worked out how to navigate by star compasses and read ocean swells for information about nearby land." Read the rest... 

One of Seven (Now Five)

I travelled to Nanyuki, Kenya recently to sleep at Ol Pejeta Conservancy and visit Suni, one of seven Northern White rhinos alive today. There are three other NWR's at Ol Pejeta but Suni is the youngest and represents one of the best chances that the animals will mate and prolong the survival of the subspecies. Suni is in a large area with two female Southern White rhinos at the moment, which game keepers hope will pique his interest. 

RIP Peter Matthiessen, 1927-2014

"The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity. Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time. Species appear and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable." –Wildlife in America, 1959

Over the Okaloacoochee

In late February I went panther tracking in southern Florida, flying in a Cessna 182 with Darrell Land, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Service guy who has been working with the highly endangered population of Florida panthers for some 35 years. In addition to monitoring radio-collared panthers from the air, Land’s time is spent mitigating the interactions between the roughly 150 panthers alive today in southern Florida and humans. To date, there has never been a death or even an attack by a panther in the state. “We’re not a sought after food item, we’re completely off the list,” Land explained. But he likes to point to a photograph in his office of a vital, tawny colored panther sitting assertively next to a birdbath in a backyard. “That’s the future of panthers,” he said. “Most people love them. They watch Animal Planet and NatGeo on TV and think they’re neat and cool. If next to that birdbath there was a sandbox with their three-year-old in it, they would have a different view.” Panthers, Land believes, will only succeed if people can tolerate seeing them in their landscape. Recently, this tolerance has been in short supply. For five years in a row, a panther has been shot and killed, a felony offense in Florida. One hunter was fined and sentenced to jail-time for killing a panther with his bow and arrow in 2011. “I don’t like those damn things,” he said. “Down here, it’s been a begrudging acceptance,” said Land. “It was fine when there was twenty or thirty. But now there’s a lot more.” 

A leopard is a leopard when....

Between Aurora and Phinney Avenues just southwest of Green Lake in the heart of Seattle is the Woodland Park Zoo where from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. any day of the week you can pay $18.75 for the privilege of seeing one of the most enigmatic animals on the planet, Pantheria uncia, the snow leopard.

The Seattle zoo has had snow leopards since 1972 when a pair arrived from the Soviet Union and today it has two cats, Helen and Tom, as well as their one-year-old brood of three cubs. Over the last 12 months, these cubs have gone from frisky kittens to lackadaisical felines. When they aren’t pacing the confines of their fenced-in enclosure, they are sleeping with their charred-gray noses resting atop limp paws, majestic yet docile-looking as house cats. 

The same year that the zoo in Seattle got its first snow leopards, 45-year-old Peter Matthiessen, writer and co-founder of The Paris Review, met zoologist George Schaller in Kathmandu to begin a 250 mile journey into the Himalayas that resulted in Matthiessen's famous natural history book, The Snow Leopard. At their first introduction in 1969, Schaller had told the writer that he knew of only two Westerners in 25 years who had spotted the Himalayan snow leopard. Schaller, in fact, was the first person to film the leopard in the wild. 

“Not only is it rare…but it is wary and elusive to a magical degree, and so well camouflaged in the places it chooses to lie that one can stare straight at it from yards away and fail to see it. Even those who know the mountains rarely take it by surprise: most sightings have been made by hunters lying still near a wild herd when a snow leopard happened to be stalking.” 

For Matthiessen, a student of Buddhism, the opportunity to track the leopards and venture near the frontier of Tibet to where the “Crystal Monastery” is located was “a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart.”  When The Snow Leopard was published in 1979 it was not so much a plea for conservation of the cat as it is a rumination on the author’s physical and spiritual journey into the wild animal’s habitat and the nature of mind. 

The worldwide population of snow leopards today is somewhere between four and seven thousand but since Matthiessen journeyed to the Himalayas, the captive population has increased significantly from perhaps less than one hundred to over 600, about 10 percent of the world’s population. The contrast between 1972 and today in this regard is remarkable: back then leopards were rare and enigmatic in the wild and virtually unseen by visitors to zoos. Today, the species is common to over 70 zoos in North America. It’s impossible to say that this genetically and demographically stable captive population—accessible to over 100 million visitors each year–is somehow not good. But I am also reminded while reading Matthiessen’s journey into snow leopard country by something that Holmes Rolston, the grandfather of the field of environmental ethics, recently said to me in an interview. 

Visitors to the Woodland Park Zoo, 2013. 

"You’re talking with someone who likes to see animals wild. I’m not keen on tigers in zoos. I was in India in March and saw tigers in the wild. That sends chills up and down my spine. If I go down to the Denver Zoo, I kind of pity the thing. Maybe it has got habitat enrichment but it can’t roam around or hunt. A tiger in a zoo isn’t really a tiger anymore. It’s not doing its thing.”

Travellers' School of Mere Humanity

"A pleasure it is to listen to the cheerful musing Beduin talk, a lesson in the travellers' school of mere humanity,--and there is no land so perilous which by humanity he may not pass, for man is of one mind everywhere, ay, and in their kind, even the brute animals of the same foster earth--a timely vacancy of the busy-idle cares which cloud upon us that would live peaceably in the moral desolation of the world." -Travels in Arabia Deserta, 1888