Overview
Patagonia. The name connotes the exotic and a distance that seems nearly mythical. Tucked toward the toe of South America, this largely unsettled landscape is among the most varied and breathtaking in the world-aching in its beauty as it sweeps from the Andes through broad, arid steppes to pristine beaches and down to a famously violent sea. It is also home to a vast array of rare wildlife as diverse and fascinating as the region itself.
Act III in Patagonia is the first book to take an in-depth look at wildlife and human interaction in this spectacular area of the world. Written by William Conway, former president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the book is unique in its concentration on the long Patagonian shoreline--populated by colorful cormorants, penguins, elephant seals, dolphins, sea lions, and numerous species of whale--and an increasing number of human beings.
Threatened by overfishing, invasive species, artificially abundant predators, and overgrazing, the Southern Cone of Patagonia is now the scene of a little-known conservation drama distinguished by the efforts of a dedicated group of local and foreign scientists determined to save one of the Earth's least-inhabited places. From tracking elephant seals in the Atlantic to following flamingos in the Andes, Act III in Patagonia takes readers to the sites where real-life field science is taking place. It further illuminates the ecology of the region through a history that reaches from the time of the Tehuelche Indians known by Magellan, Drake, and Darwin to the present.
Conway has helped to establish more than a dozen wildlife reserves in South America and is thus able not only to tell Patagonia's history, but to address its future. He brings a wealth of knowledge about Patagonia and its wildlife and responds to the difficult questions of how the interests of humans and wildlife are best balanced. He tells of the exciting collaborations among the Wildlife Conservation Society and its national and provincial partners to develop region-wide programs to save wildlife in steppes, coast, and sea, demonstrating that, with public support, there is hope for this stunning corner of the world. Though singular in their details, the conservation efforts Conway spotlights are a microcosm of what is happening in dozens of sites around the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781597265898 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
William Conway is Senior Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, its former President and General Director, and the former director of the Bronx Zoo. He is the father of the American Zoo Association's Species Survival Plan, and has published widely on the preservation of vanishing species.
Read an Excerpt
Act III in Patagonia
People and Wildlife
By William Conway
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2005 William ConwayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-589-8
CHAPTER 1
ACT I
12,000 Years in Patagonia
WHILE Paleolithic artists were sketching mammoths and rhinos on the walls of French caves, the first people in the Southern Cone were hunting strange-looking horses, giant sloths, and ancient guanacos. Everywhere I hike, on seashore, steppe, and puna, I find arrowheads, spear points, and the beautifully finished boleadoras (stone balls, formerly encased in leather and connected by long thongs) of the earliest Indians and those who followed them. One cannot but wonder about the humans who originally found their way into these forbidding latitudes. What happened to them? What do we know of their association with wildlife? In Patagonia's long drama of human-wildlife relationships, theirs was the first.
Seeking more food perhaps, or a better place, the first people wandered down into what is now Patagonia at least twelve thousand years ago. (The oldest evidence of humans in a nearby area is at Monte Verde in Chile, dated 14,700 B P. It is disputed, as are most claims of settlement for Patagonia prior to twelve thousand years ago.) They came in families and tribes, their ancestors having crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, each generation or so moving a little farther, each with only the most primitive of weapons and tools. It was an extraordinary trek, an adventure as great, as truly wonderful, as any in human experience. The climate was changing. It was a time of dramatic deglaciation and subsequent sea level change—rises of as much as sixty-five feet (twenty meters) in less than five hundred years.
These peoples, called Foot Indians by archeologist Junius Bird, walked south through lands where no human creature had ever stepped. They faced unknowable terrors and hardship but great abundance in game, and they tramped through vast landscapes that seemed without end. They carried their children and their few possessions in the presence of strange, sometimes huge, creatures. There were long-haired megatheriums—giant ground sloths as big as rhinoceroses—and smaller but similar mylodons, some of which survived until eight thousand years ago; saber-toothed tigers; glyptodonts, fifteen-hundred-pound, shell-covered, armadillo-like creatures nearly seventeen feet (five meters) long; huge ancient camels; peculiar horses (which paleontologists call hippidions and onohippidions); and rheas and guanacos like those of today. The migrants ran from those creatures and hunted them. They walked in one direction and then another, and their tribes came in waves, sometimes just ripples, but a few were always headed south. They came by generations, not by destinations, making love, giving birth, fighting, and dying.
They hunted and foraged all the way from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan, and, while the waters were still low, some crossed the Straits into Tierra del Fuego. The few clues they left behind suggest that the trip took only a thousand years or so. How could they have gone so far, so fast, on foot through the trackless wilderness? To doubters, geographer Jared Diamond notes that an eight-thousand-mile expansion of people to Patagonia from, say, the U.S.- Canada border, in a thousand years, is only eight miles per year, "a trivial feat for a hunter-gatherer likely to cover that distance even within a single day's normal foraging." It wasn't quite like that, of course. Those first Patagonians-to-be would have traveled many times eight thousand miles, meandering here and there, wherever prospects for food looked best and where ice and snow permitted, for the glaciers of the last ice age still covered much of North America between twenty-five thousand and twelve thousand years ago. As hunter-gatherers, however, these people moved far faster than the agriculturists who spread over western Asia three or four thousand years later at an average rate of less than one mile per year. Like so many great human migrations, the trip was heroic only in retrospect. Day to day, it was a struggle to survive.
Unlike humans, horses and camels evolved in North America, and they preceded people to Patagonia sometime after the first isthmuses joining North and South America arose, about 2.8 million years ago. Skunks and peccaries also preceded Homo sapiens, and mastodons, wild dogs, foxes, bears, cats, raccoons, tapirs, and deer all made the trip. Most were there when the Foot Indians arrived, as were the rhino-sized ground sloths, giant camels, and huge armadillos, all of which, including the horses, disappeared soon after human arrival—although ground sloths survived in Cuba until just sixty-two hundred years ago.
Archeological studies confirm that these pre-Tehuelches killed mylodons and hippidions and also megatheriums, glyptodonts, and onohippidions. They almost certainly played a role in the complete disappearance of those creatures, as their forebears had in the disappearance of mastodons and giant bison from North America some thirteen thousand years ago. This explanation is controversial, however. Some paleontologists argue that climate change, especially that last ice age, was the cause of a great demise of mega-creatures that took place around the world. Others argue that big extinctions took place at different times in different places, not in accord with any known climate change but often closely correlated with the arrival of human bands. In any event, forty-six genera, chiefly of large animals, are known to have gone extinct in South America in the past fifteen thousand years, most by ten thousand years ago—and most soon after the arrival of humans. Although those creatures differed in many ways, they all tended to be either likely prey or likely competitors of humans.
Thus, the early Patagonians are accused, if not convicted, of having behaved as humans have behaved almost everywhere else—as the Maoris did much later when they killed off the great ostrich-like moas in New Zealand, for example; as the Indonesian immigrants did with Madagascar's giant lemurs and elephant birds; as the Australian aborigines may have done with carnivorous kangaroos, tent-sized tortoises, and giant monitor lizards thirty-five thousand years earlier; and as the Hawaiians did with nearly one hundred species of endemic birds well before the advent of Western settlers. Whatever the facts in Patagonia, the proto-Tehuelches ate or used almost everything at hand, even the body shells of giant armadillos, which they employed as roofs and tombs. The animal supply may have seemed endless.
Shorelines and shallows must have been filled with shellfish; every rocky punta covered with trusting sea lion, seal, or seabird colonies; and the vast plains with immense herds of guanacos, rheas, and their antecedents. I wonder how long the chance to kill easily, that "ecological release," as it is called, persisted? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Did it enable the Foot Indians to become, for some golden age of abundance, far more numerous than the scattered peoples, such as the Tehuelches, Westerners discovered some 480 years ago?
Populations of most creatures, human hunter-gatherers not excepted, are dictated by the worst of times, not the best. I suspect that any golden period of numerous Foot Indians fed by uncontrolled access to abundant naive animals, as has been suggested for some other peoples and places, was short-lived if it occurred at all. There is no archeological evidence of large ancient human populations. Patagonia was, even then, a tough place for people to live, a cool semidesert where the Andes had cut off the rain.
Long before, 12 million years ago, the gradual elevation of the Andes was already significant though modest. Then, between 4.5 million and 2.5 million years ago, there was an extraordinary rise of between six thousand and thirteen thousand feet. (The Andes are still rising about half an inch a year.) The result was interception of the wet winds off the Pacific and the creation of a vast rain shadow throughout the eastern steppes. Today, only a few miles east from the mountains, precipitation drops by an order of magnitude. A little less rain, and the steppes would be not a semidesert but a wasteland of sand and rocks. A little more, and it would be a forest. Whatever the effects of the new Patagonian people on the wildlife, the growing desert they found must have been a better place for camels than for ground sloths.
Eventually, the Foot Indians of the Southern Cone split into subgroups, tribes called Araucanians and Puelches, who lived north and west of Patagonia, and Onas, Yaghans, and Hausch, who lived south in Tierra del Fuego—and the aforementioned Tehuelches. These last were a handsome tribe of unusually big people who chose to live nomadic lives on Patagonia's harsh steppes and blustery coast between the Rio Negro–Rio Colorado area in the north and the Straits of Magellan in the south. They were, above all, camel hunters, and it is in the dry soils of that area that I have often found their arrowheads and boleadoras.
Patagonia's guanaco is a camel, a pony-sized, humpless camel that flourished in the aridity of the steppes. Its herds reached the tens of millions, maybe as many as forty million by the time Europeans first arrived. The rhea prospered, too, and, with the guanaco, became the backbone of the Tehuelche's simple hunting-gathering economy, of their religion and food and clothing, and even the materials for the crude tentlike toldos in which they lived. The lack of a more complex culture and economy may reflect the small size and scattered nature of Tehuelche populations. Numbers are needed to build cultural creativity and economic complexity. Although intriguing paintings and engravings of uncertain meaning are found in caves and on sheltered stone formations here and there in Patagonia, most apparently predate the Tehuelches. Some feature hundreds of human hands, while others are scenes of humans surrounding and attacking running herds of guanacos. At any rate, the effect of these peoples on the species of wildlife still extant today must have been modest, whatever that of their ancestors on the creatures of twelve thousand years ago. Even into the twentieth century, there were teeming colonies of sea lions, seals, and seabirds breeding on the Atlantic beaches and headlands. There simply weren't many Tehuelches to hunt them—no matter how large those hunters were.
The Tehuelches' stature was famously magnified by the reports of Ferdinand Magellan and his crew. Besides being the first to circumnavigate the world, the expedition's members were the first Europeans to visit Patagonia. With some courage, they spent more than six months in the austral winter of 1520 repairing their boats along the coast, at a place Magellan named San Julián. Four years before, Juan Diaz de Solís, who was one of the first European explorers of northern Argentina and discovered the great Rio de la Plata, was reported to have been killed and eaten by cannibals near where Buenos Aires is now.
Magellan's expedition branded Patagonia "a land of giants," claiming that crew members stood barely as high as the Tehuelches' waists. Darwin's observations provided a different picture:
We had an interview ... with the famous so-called gigantic Patagonians, who gave us a cordial reception. Their height appears greater than it really is, from their large guanaco mantles, their long flowing hair, and general figure: on average their height is about six feet, with some men taller and few shorter; and the women are also tall; altogether they are certainly the tallest race which we anywhere saw.
It was Magellan's diarist, Antonio Pigafetta, Knight of Rhodes, former assistant to His Excellency the Roman Ambassador to the Court of King Charles I of Spain, whose chronicle gave rise to the name "Patagones," thus "Patagonia." The word has been doubtfully interpreted as "large footed." After all, their feet were swathed in guanaco skins. However, historian Ramón Lista claims, rather indignantly, that the word is from a Quechua-derived Tehuelche term, patak, for "hundreds," as in, "We are hundreds." Writer Bruce Chatwin came up with a more convoluted explanation, suggesting that Magellan adopted the name of a monstrous beast from a book published by an unknown author in Spain in 1512. At the moment, further scholarship seems unlikely to shed more light.
While in San Julián, Magellan dealt summarily with a mutiny in his little fleet. Luis de Mendoza, leader of the mutiny and captain of the Vittoria was killed and his body drawn and quartered. The same fate was visited upon Gaspar Quesada, captain of the Concepción. Magellan left one of the mutineers spitted on the shore, while two others, Juan de Cartegna and Father Pedro Sanchez de la Rena, were sentenced to be marooned and were put ashore two months after Magellan left San Julián. For the Tehuelches, these leavings could not have been reassuring.
Subsequent European visits to Patagonia brought settlers. In 1539, there was Francisco de Camargo, who left an exploratory expedition of 150 men in Patagonia—nothing is known of their fate, nor has any trace of them ever been discovered. Nevertheless, rumors that they had found great wealth led to at least four expeditions to search for them and many hopeful legends, which lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was said that the men set up the colony of "Traplanda," described as a community of white Indians and sometimes called the enchanted "City of the Caesars," which has not yet been found.
Sir Francis Drake followed Magellan at Port San Julián in 1578 and, with dismaying coincidence, also put to death two and marooned another of his captains who had mutinied. Drake's chaplain added to Pigafetta's description of the Tehuelches: "They don't cut their hair but keep all manner of things in it. They carry a quiver for arrows, knives, a case for tooth picks, and a box for firesticks." They have "clean, comely and strong bodies" and are "very active, a goodly and lively people ... fond of dancing with rattles around their waists." Later, near the eastern entrance of the Straits of Magellan, Drake's crew killed "no lesse than 3,000" penguins on Santa Magdalena Island for provisions. Subsequently, the island became a regular provisioning stop, and, in 1594, Sir Richard Hawkins commended the unlucky penguins, observing that "they are reasonable meate rosted, baked or sodden; but best rosted." Elizabethan sailors are said to have believed penguins could be the souls of their drowned companions—but that did not save them from the pot.
The year after Drake's visit, 1579, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa was dispatched from Callao to search Magellan's Straits for Drake, the Spanish fearing that the famous seaman was attempting to lay claim to Patagonian lands. (They were right to be suspicious. Drake had made a fortune preying on Spanish treasure ships. From one voyage, he returned to England with spoils worth, in today 's money, $60 million.) Amazingly, Sarmiento saw Tehuelches who chased their game on horseback and brought the animals down with boleadoras. It was less than forty years since horses were first imported by the Spanish nearly a thousand miles north at the Rio de la Plata. By Drake's time, there were already thousands of horses roaming the pampas; many seem to have resulted from the five mares and seven stallions abandoned by Captain Pedro de Mendoza in 1541, when Indians isolated the town he had set up near present-day Buenos Aires and starved the settlers out.
In 1581, Sarmiento was sent out from Spain again, this time with twenty-five hundred people in twenty-three ships, to found new colonies in the Straits, Spain still being suspicious of the colonial aims of the British. Sarmiento did establish a settlement, leaving four hundred men and thirty women with eight months of provisions. But on the way home, the English captured his boat, and the colonists were forgotten. Five years later, Thomas Cavendish arrived at the settlement and found only twelve men (some say fifteen) and three women surviving. According to some reports, two hundred of the men had been turned out to shift for themselves because of lack of supplies, and those two hundred, not those put ashore by Camargo, were the people who established the legendary city of Traplanda. In any event, most of Sarmiento's colonists who remained at the colony died of slow starvation and disease. Cavendish named the place Port Famine.
Patagonia is no place for the uninitiated. The Tehuelches could find enough to eat, however, and, in fairness, settlers came to sad ends in many places. Of the six thousand settlers sent by the London-based Virginia Company to Jamestown, Virginia, between 1607 and 1625, forty-eight hundred quickly perished. Still, Patagonia is undeniably forbidding. It was one of the last areas in the world's temperate climate zones to be settled by Europeans and the very last part of Argentina, partly because of its unfriendly soils and climate and partly because of its unfriendly stone age Indians, who had not discovered the wheel, had no written language, and grew no crops. Although their numbers were small, they could be fierce, and they had no use for the settled ways or products of the Europeans, except for their horses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Act III in Patagonia by William Conway. Copyright © 2005 William Conway. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: To Patagonia and the Southern Cone
Prelude
-Counting Elephant Seals on Peninsula Valdés
-Subplots and Stage Directions in Argentina
-A Patagonian Conservationist in the Campo
ACT I - 12,000 years in Patagonia
ACT II - Hunting's High Tide
ACT III - The Road to Conservation
PART I. Steppe and Altiplano
Chapter 1. The Camel and the Sheep
Chapter 2. Mr. Darwin's Ostrich and the Green-Egged Martineta
Chapter 3. A Giant Monogamous Mouse
Chapter 4. The Parrot Metropolis of Rio Negro
Chapter 5. The Tortoise and the Bus Driver
Chapter 6. The Condor, the Puma, the Fox, and the Aliens
Chapter 7. The Altiplano and the Flamingos
Chapter 8. A Once and Future Patagonian Steppe
PART II. Coastal Chronicles
Chapter 1. The Doctor and the Sea Lions
Chapter 2. Incredibly Deep-Diving Super Seal
Chapter 3. Adventures of a Billion Dollar Bird
Chapter 4. Penguin Lives and Principles
Chapter 5. The Critical Colony
Chapter 6. Plans for Coast and Sea
PART III. Sea and Sky
Chapter 1. The Toothfish, the Hake, and the Squid
Chapter 2. Orcas, Right Whales, and Economics
Chapter 3. Report from a Sea and Sky Outpost 283
The Scene Ahead
Notes
Suggested Reading
Index