Matthiessen, Peter. The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. New York: North Point Press, 2001.
Peter Matthiessen is our finest living nature writer, a visionary whose cool, elegant revelations of the multitudinous harms we inflict on our living world serve as stark witnesses to folly. In The Birds of Heaven, the author condenses decades of world travel into a running monologue of his encounters with the planet’s fifteen species of Family Gruidae, and along the way illumines the dangers to human beings that would inevitably accrue with the birds’ demise.
A passionate and learned environmental activist, Matthiessen confirms his leanings early on in the book’s introduction. When asked at a dinner party why he’d bothered spending the summer researching cranes in Siberia and Inner Mongolia instead of relaxing in Long Island’s glamorous Hamptons, he thinks “Who cares about cranes?—and tigers and songbirds and sparkling streams and hoary ancient forests and traditional earth peoples clinging to old quiet ways of their language and culture—or cares enough to defend and protect what remains of the old world of unbroken and unpolluted nature on our ever more disrupted mother earth.” As in his previous books of nonfiction (most recently Tigers in the Snow, New York: North Point Press, 2000), Matthiessen is not afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve.
Comprising some of the heaviest flying birds on earth, standing up to five feet tall and possessed of mighty wings capable of spanning eight feet, cranes with their iconic coloring and trumpeting call are emblematic animals of myth and religious import, as well as indicators of their native ecosystem’s health and resilience. “Perhaps more than any other living creatures, they evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species—and ours, too, though we learn it very late—must ultimately depend for survival.”
Cranes are “umbrella species” in that measures to protect their populations invariably benefit diverse other species that depend upon bountiful fresh water and open space to survive; intact flood plains and wetlands, scarce commodities throughout the world, are essential for crane reproduction and sustenance. To gauge the chances of these species, everywhere facing the despoliation of human numbers run amok, Matthiessen, members of America’s International Crane Foundation, and biologists from seven countries assess the integrity of habitats and crane populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and North America.
Some countries provide Matthiessen with little reason for hope. In China, where the world’s largest human population shows few signs of diminishing, and whose recent economic emergence guarantees higher levels of resource extraction and landscape development, the fate of white-naped, hooded, demoiselle and red-crowned cranes is an open question. A friend of the author’s, intimate with the country’s worldview, opines that “the Chinese like the idea of nature as an abstraction, as a metaphor, which is why it is prominent in their art, but the reality makes them uneasy. The new generations have no experience of wilderness, far less wild creatures.” Massive hydroelectric dam projects, the draining of wetlands to feed a tirelessly fecund population, an unleashed industrial juggernaut not seen since the most ghastly phases of Stalinism—as the Chinese sacrifice all in another bid to dominate the continent, their magnificent wildlife heritage is relegated to the ragged fringes of a landscape devoted entirely to human aggrandizement.
An “accidental paradise” created by the landmines and border guards on both sides of the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea is the only refuge left for the peninsula’s native white-naped and red-crowned cranes, two of the rarest of crane species. The 1950s war had devastated the countryside and annihilated the wildlife; ironically the DMZ, “most bitterly contested during the war—had emerged as the best crane habitat left in Korea.” But even this ribbon of safety is being threatened by the Koreas’ rapid population growth and development: “Koreans on both sides were aware that from an economic point of view (the near unanimous point of view in the new Asia), a valuable resource was being ‘wasted.’”
In Nigeria and South Africa, two countries that consider crane species (the black crowned and blue, respectively) their national birds, the outlook is equally bleak. In the former country, “a trade in live cranes is the main reason that the national bird, once common in the north sahel, is nearing extinction…‘one is continuously being reminded by Nigerians that theirs is the most densely populated country in Africa, and that perhaps, therefore, there is no place for wildlife.’” In the new South Africa, “in mandated land distributions after the 1994 elections, many of the larger [white-owned] farms were split up among [black] African farmers, and fast-spreading settlement and new agriculture drove out the cranes. None, in fact, are found around [black-owned] farms....” Doubtless this barren assessment holds true for most species of declining South African wildlife.
In Britain the Eurasian crane population, after fifteen years of attempted re-colonization, has amounted to only six or seven individuals, sad testimony to a complete overthrow of suitable habitat by centuries of intensive farming and development. Indeed, one of the few optimistic appraisals in this wise book was to be found in Australia, where the brulga and an Australian subspecies of the Asiatic sarus cranes maintain healthy populations on the sodden Cape York Peninsula. Yet even here the forecast is troubling, as “politically, much of the suitable habitat is under Aboriginal control, and the political will is toward economic improvement of these areas. While some conservationists rhapsodize about the special caring relationship of native people with their environment, experience has shown that over time, Western goodies hold greater sway than traditional values.”
North America’s population of the sandhill crane (at nine million years “the oldest living bird species on earth”) stands at 650,000, “more than three times as many as the Eurasian crane and almost as numerous as the other fourteen species put together.” The other American species hasn’t been as fortunate. Protected for decades and the subject of years of dedicated efforts at bolstering its population, the imposing whooping crane is currently limited to remnant populations in Texas (migrating to Alberta) and Florida (migrating to Wisconsin). A carnivorous enthusiast of insects, small mammals, reptiles and fledgling birds, the whooper is one of the most aggressive of crane species, but its raging appetite for life ill disposes it to existence in the hyper-developed industrial absolutism of 21st century America.
Matthiessen lingers over the details of rearing and releasing wild whoopers in Florida in an attempt by biologists to initiate a second migratory route—necessarily sieved through the power lines, phone lines, cell towers and guy wires of urbanization—east of the main flock based in Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on southern Texas. From a camouflaged blind he is privileged to witness “the first wild whooping crane born in the United States in sixty years.” Although a bobcat eventually killed this chick, its successful fledging vindicates the expense and time involved in the Florida transplantation experiment, proving that despite the many obstacles whoopers may indeed be reared in a precarious environment. Matthiessen determinedly sees this as cause for hope.
Certainly one of the most beautiful natural history books to be published in years, The Birds of Heaven features two sets of magnificent paintings by the Canadian wildlife artist Robert Bateman, as well as meticulous line drawings throughout by the same artist. Note to bibliophiles: the North Point Press format, eloquent and durable as ever, features acid-free paper and sewn bindings; in this volume a taxonomic map of crane evolution, thorough endnotes, an index and bibliography, and beautifully detailed maps of each hemisphere on the endpapers add to the pleasure of the text.
The International Crane Foundation’s website is found at www.savingcranes.org.
Peter Matthiessen is our finest living nature writer, a visionary whose cool, elegant revelations of the multitudinous harms we inflict on our living world serve as stark witnesses to folly. In The Birds of Heaven, the author condenses decades of world travel into a running monologue of his encounters with the planet’s fifteen species of Family Gruidae, and along the way illumines the dangers to human beings that would inevitably accrue with the birds’ demise.
A passionate and learned environmental activist, Matthiessen confirms his leanings early on in the book’s introduction. When asked at a dinner party why he’d bothered spending the summer researching cranes in Siberia and Inner Mongolia instead of relaxing in Long Island’s glamorous Hamptons, he thinks “Who cares about cranes?—and tigers and songbirds and sparkling streams and hoary ancient forests and traditional earth peoples clinging to old quiet ways of their language and culture—or cares enough to defend and protect what remains of the old world of unbroken and unpolluted nature on our ever more disrupted mother earth.” As in his previous books of nonfiction (most recently Tigers in the Snow, New York: North Point Press, 2000), Matthiessen is not afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve.
Comprising some of the heaviest flying birds on earth, standing up to five feet tall and possessed of mighty wings capable of spanning eight feet, cranes with their iconic coloring and trumpeting call are emblematic animals of myth and religious import, as well as indicators of their native ecosystem’s health and resilience. “Perhaps more than any other living creatures, they evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species—and ours, too, though we learn it very late—must ultimately depend for survival.”
Cranes are “umbrella species” in that measures to protect their populations invariably benefit diverse other species that depend upon bountiful fresh water and open space to survive; intact flood plains and wetlands, scarce commodities throughout the world, are essential for crane reproduction and sustenance. To gauge the chances of these species, everywhere facing the despoliation of human numbers run amok, Matthiessen, members of America’s International Crane Foundation, and biologists from seven countries assess the integrity of habitats and crane populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and North America.
Some countries provide Matthiessen with little reason for hope. In China, where the world’s largest human population shows few signs of diminishing, and whose recent economic emergence guarantees higher levels of resource extraction and landscape development, the fate of white-naped, hooded, demoiselle and red-crowned cranes is an open question. A friend of the author’s, intimate with the country’s worldview, opines that “the Chinese like the idea of nature as an abstraction, as a metaphor, which is why it is prominent in their art, but the reality makes them uneasy. The new generations have no experience of wilderness, far less wild creatures.” Massive hydroelectric dam projects, the draining of wetlands to feed a tirelessly fecund population, an unleashed industrial juggernaut not seen since the most ghastly phases of Stalinism—as the Chinese sacrifice all in another bid to dominate the continent, their magnificent wildlife heritage is relegated to the ragged fringes of a landscape devoted entirely to human aggrandizement.
An “accidental paradise” created by the landmines and border guards on both sides of the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea is the only refuge left for the peninsula’s native white-naped and red-crowned cranes, two of the rarest of crane species. The 1950s war had devastated the countryside and annihilated the wildlife; ironically the DMZ, “most bitterly contested during the war—had emerged as the best crane habitat left in Korea.” But even this ribbon of safety is being threatened by the Koreas’ rapid population growth and development: “Koreans on both sides were aware that from an economic point of view (the near unanimous point of view in the new Asia), a valuable resource was being ‘wasted.’”
In Nigeria and South Africa, two countries that consider crane species (the black crowned and blue, respectively) their national birds, the outlook is equally bleak. In the former country, “a trade in live cranes is the main reason that the national bird, once common in the north sahel, is nearing extinction…‘one is continuously being reminded by Nigerians that theirs is the most densely populated country in Africa, and that perhaps, therefore, there is no place for wildlife.’” In the new South Africa, “in mandated land distributions after the 1994 elections, many of the larger [white-owned] farms were split up among [black] African farmers, and fast-spreading settlement and new agriculture drove out the cranes. None, in fact, are found around [black-owned] farms....” Doubtless this barren assessment holds true for most species of declining South African wildlife.
In Britain the Eurasian crane population, after fifteen years of attempted re-colonization, has amounted to only six or seven individuals, sad testimony to a complete overthrow of suitable habitat by centuries of intensive farming and development. Indeed, one of the few optimistic appraisals in this wise book was to be found in Australia, where the brulga and an Australian subspecies of the Asiatic sarus cranes maintain healthy populations on the sodden Cape York Peninsula. Yet even here the forecast is troubling, as “politically, much of the suitable habitat is under Aboriginal control, and the political will is toward economic improvement of these areas. While some conservationists rhapsodize about the special caring relationship of native people with their environment, experience has shown that over time, Western goodies hold greater sway than traditional values.”
North America’s population of the sandhill crane (at nine million years “the oldest living bird species on earth”) stands at 650,000, “more than three times as many as the Eurasian crane and almost as numerous as the other fourteen species put together.” The other American species hasn’t been as fortunate. Protected for decades and the subject of years of dedicated efforts at bolstering its population, the imposing whooping crane is currently limited to remnant populations in Texas (migrating to Alberta) and Florida (migrating to Wisconsin). A carnivorous enthusiast of insects, small mammals, reptiles and fledgling birds, the whooper is one of the most aggressive of crane species, but its raging appetite for life ill disposes it to existence in the hyper-developed industrial absolutism of 21st century America.
Matthiessen lingers over the details of rearing and releasing wild whoopers in Florida in an attempt by biologists to initiate a second migratory route—necessarily sieved through the power lines, phone lines, cell towers and guy wires of urbanization—east of the main flock based in Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on southern Texas. From a camouflaged blind he is privileged to witness “the first wild whooping crane born in the United States in sixty years.” Although a bobcat eventually killed this chick, its successful fledging vindicates the expense and time involved in the Florida transplantation experiment, proving that despite the many obstacles whoopers may indeed be reared in a precarious environment. Matthiessen determinedly sees this as cause for hope.
Certainly one of the most beautiful natural history books to be published in years, The Birds of Heaven features two sets of magnificent paintings by the Canadian wildlife artist Robert Bateman, as well as meticulous line drawings throughout by the same artist. Note to bibliophiles: the North Point Press format, eloquent and durable as ever, features acid-free paper and sewn bindings; in this volume a taxonomic map of crane evolution, thorough endnotes, an index and bibliography, and beautifully detailed maps of each hemisphere on the endpapers add to the pleasure of the text.
The International Crane Foundation’s website is found at www.savingcranes.org.
