[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumurad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast. And here's what I want to do today. You know we just did the hour-long show about the Galapagos?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And in the middle of the show, we hit on this idea that there are so many of us on the planet now doing so many different things which affect the air and the water, that the creatures on the planet can no longer really be uninfluenced by our presence. They can't be truly wild. And that made me wonder well, if you want to give the other creatures on Earth a little more room to be wild and independent, then what do we have to give up? In fact, how much are we willing to give up to make that happen?

JON MOOALLEM: I don't know. These are tough questions. I mean, you know I'm not good at the answer part, right? [laughs]

ROBERT: So this is Jon Mooallem.

JON MOOALLEM: I'm Jon Mooallem. I wrote a book called Wild Ones, and I'm a writer with the New York Times Magazine.

ROBERT: And being a writer, he told me a story. Now this is a story which sheds some light on this question, but I think you'd have to say it's a difficult light.

JON MOOALLEM: So there was a family of whooping cranes that had been part of this ...

ROBERT: The story revolves around a project to create a wild flock of whooping cranes.

JOE DUFF: One of the most spectacular birds in the world. It's five foot tall, it's pitch white, you know, with black wingtips. Got a seven foot wingspan. Beautiful flier.

ROBERT: This is Joe Duff.

JOE DUFF: I'm the cofounder of Operation Migration, the current CEO.

ROBERT: Now we've done that story on Operation Migration before on Radiolab, but here's the gist: at one point, the whooping crane population in North America was down to, like, 15 birds, just one flock. So Joe and a bunch of other folks decided to see if they could start a new flock of cranes. So they raised some cranes in Wisconsin, and then they teach them a new migration route to Florida by leading them there in an ultralight airplane.

JOE DUFF: Yeah.

ROBERT: Joe, in addition to being founder and CEO, is also the lead pilot.

JOE DUFF: Right.

ROBERT: And how long have you—you've been doing this for awhile, right?

JOE DUFF: I started flying with birds in '93. Twenty years.

ROBERT: And the key to this whole project, Joe says, is ...

JOE DUFF: To eliminate all things human. These are wild creatures. You know, we do this whole thing in full costume, so the birds don't hear voices. They don't—they don't see buildings or any other human paraphernalia in order to maintain their wildness.

ROBERT: Joe even wears an all-white crane-like costume when he's up there in the ultralight, leading the birds down to Florida. And when they get to Florida ...

JON MOOALLEM: The cranes are supposed to—you know, they're brought to this Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge.

JOE DUFF: It's a coastal wetland. It's all salt marsh.

JON MOOALLEM: In the Tampa area.

ROBERT: And the birds are put into—it's called a release pen.

JOE DUFF: It has 12-foot-high fences protected by electric wire, but the whole complex is not top netted. And so after a while, the birds realize they can fly out.

JON MOOALLEM: Then they go seek out their own territories.

JOE DUFF: It's called a gentle release into the wild.

ROBERT: Or the not so wild. And here's where the problem starts. It's the winter of 2007, and we've got a particular bunch of cranes.

JON MOOALLEM: This family, they were called the first family because they were the first cranes in the population to have a chick that they led south.

JOE DUFF: The first wild hatch migratory whooping crane in the US since the last nest was reported in 1878.

JON MOOALLEM: And these cranes had wound up in this little subdivision.

JOE DUFF: A wetland complex that was surrounded by houses.

JON MOOALLEM: It was perfect crane habitat. It was basically a marsh. Just so happened that it was in this woman's backyard. And so the birds, which had been the product of this very intensive effort and tons of money ...

JOE DUFF: Hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour.

JON MOOALLEM: ... to be wild whooping cranes, were now just in her backyard. And there was free food there. She had all these bird feeders, this whole array of different bird feeders up around her yard.

JOE DUFF: And that's not a good sign.

ROBERT: Why is this a problem?

JOE DUFF: Well, the problem is we're worried that the birds are gonna become acclimated to people.

ROBERT: To be really safe, Joe says, these birds should be afraid of people.

JOE DUFF: Six of them have been shot, you know, by vandals.

ROBERT: Six birds have been shot?

JOE DUFF: Six whooping cranes have been shot in this project by vandals. Yeah.

ROBERT: So what do you do?

JOE DUFF: We asked the people to stop feeding them.

ROBERT: Do you have, like, a reverse phone directory or do you have a ...

JOE DUFF: Well, we tracked the birds. They're all tracked.

JON MOOALLEM: And so they knew exactly where they were.

ROBERT: And they were able to figure out that the cranes were in the backyard of someone named Ms. Gibbs.

JON MOOALLEM: Clarice.

ROBERT: Clarice.

JON MOOALLEM: Yes. Clarice Gibbs. And, you know, they knocked on her door and explained, you know, the whole ins and outs of the project and would you please take your bird feeders down? And she said—she said no.

JAD: No?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Why would she say no?

ROBERT: Well, Jon talked to the people who went to see her, and ...

JON MOOALLEM: You know, they didn't say "crazy," but you got the sense that there was this, you know, crazy old bird lady who lived in this house who would not take her feeders down.

ROBERT: They told Jon that they thought she was acting kind of erratic, and that things just kept getting worse and worse.

JON MOOALLEM: And they had actually gone and put a plastic fence around one of her feeders at one point. They had thought she had given permission, but she had no memory of that. So it got bitter pretty fast.

ROBERT: And so Jon decided, "I'm gonna go talk to this woman."

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. So I was sort of girding myself for a, you know, crazy old bird lady who lived in this house, but I went to go see her and, you know, it was a—how do I even talk about it? It was a really emotional day for me. We sat at her dining room table, and she was having a lot of trouble remembering the exact chronology of what had happened when. She—you know, she said, "Excuse me, it's just hard for me to kind of piece things together around that—around that time." And basically this story emerged.

CLARICE GIBBS: At that time—oh, gosh, in fact ...

ROBERT: When we heard that story, we decided we needed to talk to Clarice ourselves. So we called her up out of kind of the blue and asked her if we could record the conversation.

ROBERT: If we could record, we would love to do it.

CLARICE GIBBS: Well, no. It wouldn't bother me at all. I wouldn't mind.

ROBERT: Okay, so you're about to say that you're ...

ROBERT: Clarice will tell us her—I gotta say it's a sort of surprising version of this tale, in just a second.

[LISTENER: My name is Zacarias Mull from Sarasota, Florida. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

ROBERT: We're back, and we've just called up Clarice Gibbs.

CLARICE GIBBS: No, it wouldn't bother me at all. I wouldn't mind.

ROBERT: Okay, so you're about to say that you're—first of all, the description. How many bird feeders did you have in the backyard, would you say roughly?

CLARICE GIBBS: At that time, I think I had two or three in an oak tree that's here in our backyard. And where we live is it's just—you know, it's a peaceful area and birds like things like that. They don't like to be around a lot of congestion and stuff. And we enjoy them. Well, I say "we." When my husband was alive, we—you know, we both enjoyed the birds and feed every day ...

ROBERT: This is where the story flipped for me, because when those conservationists were knocking at Clarice's door, her husband of more that 50 years ...

JON MOOALLEM: He had Alzheimer's, and they were sort of hunkered down at their house waiting for his life to end.

CLARICE GIBBS: Yeah, this was before the Alzheimer's took him really bad.

JON MOOALLEM: And what they were doing was spending a lot of time on their back porch looking at the birds.

CLARICE GIBBS: And we would come out here and sit with our tea or lemonade. He would just kind of watch. Our back porch, of course, faces the lake. We have a beautiful yard, we have oak trees. And as I'm sitting here talking to you, there's all kinds of birds around right now feeding.

ROBERT: Huh.

CLARICE GIBBS: We even have sandhill cranes that have two babies with them.

ROBERT: So Clarice and her husband would be there on the porch. And if you had this disease in your family, you know how painful it is, because here's her husband, and he is just disappearing a little bit and a little bit more, and then he's mostly not there. But when a bird or a bunch of birds come by the bird feeders from wherever he was, he's back.

CLARICE GIBBS: As soon as he would spot something, he'd say, "Babe, there it is. There's the hummingbird."

ROBERT: And when the whooping cranes showed up, big and white and wild ...

CLARICE GIBBS: That would really get his attention, because they are such big, beautiful birds. You know, I could see the—oh, gosh, like a happiness in his eyes, and he would smile. Oh, to me, it was like, you know, he came back to me for a little bit. When he would see things like this, it would just—it would make him so happy, and it would make me happy, too, to see how it affected him. I'm sorry, I just—I get kind of choked up when I talk about him. We were married for 56 years when that disease took him. And it was hard. Hard.

JON MOOALLEM: From her point of view, it was like a miracle to see a bird like that, and the way that her husband responded to them and just the way that they took his breath away, when really he wasn't responding to a lot else in the world.

CLARICE GIBBS: It's a blessing, you know, when they seem to recognize things and then you lose them again, you know?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ROBERT: So that's why when the crane people showed up at her door and said, "Please take the bird feeder down," she said no.

JON MOOALLEM: You know, I left that house just—you know, I just couldn't figure out how to make sense of it all once I'd left.

ROBERT: Have the people who visited her, having read your account, have they changed their minds at all about her or what they do? Because it's a toughie, this situation.

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, I'm sure they would still believe that the birds shouldn't have been fed, but I don't know if they would be any more sympathetic to her now.

ROBERT: ... to see her husband and these birds, oddly enough, are the trigger.

ROBERT: So I told Joe Clarissa's story.

ROBERT: So now what do you say?

JOE DUFF: Well, you know, my father died of Alzheimer's, so I can respect exactly what she's going through and how difficult it is. However, the cost of that is the demise of a bird that other people have spent a huge amount of time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for that entire bird's life until it was a year old, putting in the wild to help save a species.

ROBERT: But if you put yourself in her shoes, she says, she, by the way, was very careful.

CLARICE GIBBS: I was very, very emphatic that we didn't mess with the birds, because I knew they didn't want them being confronted with people, you know, because they are a wild thing, and it's—to me, it's—I don't know. We've always loved nature. We've just always loved nature, and the wildlife.

ROBERT: So she stayed where she felt you'd want her to stay. But it's a hard one to ask that she give up a glimpse at her husband for the sake of the birds.

JOE DUFF: I suppose. I'm a little more pragmatic than that, unfortunately.

JAD: Hmm. You would want—you would have him make an exception for her?

ROBERT: Well, at the very least, I would have him understand that she's in a unique place. That he's ...

JAD: No, I don't think it's unique. Well, maybe she is in her particulars, but that is precisely the problem he has to deal with are people like her. She means well. We all mean well. It's not a case of, like, people with guns shooting these birds. I mean, that does happen, but I don't think that's the big problem.

ROBERT: No. These are two people who both love the bird but can't agree on something about it.

JAD: Right. And he's saying in order to love the bird, you have to negate—you have to just—you have to disappear. And we can't—as human beings, we don't seem to be able to do that.

JOE DUFF: We all have our own personal requirements, and we put those over and above anything else, including wildlife. And that's why wildlife is in such peril.

ROBERT: He's asking her to say goodbye to her husband for the sake of a bird species.

JAD: I know. I just worry that if everybody is like her then those birds don't have a chance.

JOE DUFF: I would love it if these birds could just exist on their own somewhere in deepwater marshes where they don't ever encounter people. But that's never gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen.

JON MOOALLEM: And that's the struggle. It's never gonna go away. You know, no matter what—no matter what happens with any of these species conservation projects, we're not gonna strike some balance where we never have to think about the power that we're exerting in the world. This give and take, that's what it is. That's the end game. It's that forever.

ROBERT: Special thanks to Simon Adler, who ferried us through this whole project. And also to Jon Mooallem, whose book The Wild Ones is the source of this story. I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: We'll be back next time.

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