The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 Page 3

  Finally—Amy Leach, where have you been all my life? Her delightful short piece “The Modern Moose” sent me right out in search of everything else she’s ever written. This brief and breathtaking tribute to the moose (“as modern as Mugellini and should be coequally respected”) is so startling that I could do nothing but make a list of adjectives, which I present here in alphabetical order: brilliant, fantastical, imaginative, irreverent, reverent, subversive, surreal, tricky, unconventional, unworldly, weird, wonderful.

  I could go on, but you get the idea.

  Thanks to series editor Tim Folger, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor Naomi Gibbs, and also to former editors Mary Roach and Deborah Blum, who offered wisdom and encouragement along the way. Thanks to my husband, Scott Brown, for reading a hundred or so wonderful science and nature essays along with me this year and talking about them every night for many, many weeks. And thanks to all the writers who show up to entertain the folks. Here’s to 2016.

  AMY STEWART

  CHELSEA BIONDOLILLO

  Back to the Land

  FROM Orion

  NOT FAR FROM AUSTIN, a dirt road winds through patches of bluestem, spiked mesquite, and twisted live oaks on the working Freeman Ranch, owned by Texas State University. The ranch is home to an organic garden, a lively herd of cattle, and the Texas State Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, or FARF. It is also home to FARF’s ongoing research project on scavenging and decomposition, which is led by two forensic anthropologists.

  Another way of saying this is that if you travel for long enough on a dirt road just outside San Marcos, and if you are able to get through the double security gates, what you will find amid the grasses and trees and occasional longhorn is a field of human bodies in varying states of decay.

  I’m here to ask one of the researchers about vultures. Specifically, I want to understand how the birds are helping law enforcement to develop crime-scene-investigation protocols. The researcher gives me a pair of blue hospital-style booties to slip over my shoes just inside the second gate.

  The anthropologists are studying two things: how the Texas sun turns a body into a rusted mummy feeding the switchgrass, and how vultures scavenge those bodies. To learn about the former, the donated cadavers are laid under metal mesh cages. To understand the latter, they are left exposed, tagged wrists crossed, or open, as in savasana—the corpse pose.

  Except nothing I see in the open looks reposed. The spines are twisted, the bones scattered. “This young man died in a violent accident,” my guide says as she crouches down to point out signs of vultures, certain cracks and predictable breaks the birds leave behind on the bones. Families donate the bodies of loved ones for a variety of reasons, she says. So the deceased can continue to teach, for example.

  My eyes stay wide open and my mouth stays mostly shut as we walk through the grass. I try to think of what I’m seeing as former people, but I can’t. The people have left. All that remains are remains: a countable collection of bones. Shin is connected to leg; leg is connected to hip. I stare at teeth, my notebook full of questions forgotten. I am trying to place birds there, in that mouth, or this eye. But the birds, too, have left. They circle high above us; even their specks have vanished.

  The work the researchers and their teams of student volunteers undertake is helping law enforcement in the borderlands solve crimes and identify the dead. That’s why they place donated bodies in the fields, why they work first under the fierce sun, monitoring rates of decay and dispersal, and later in the lab, with toothbrushes and dish soap, scrubbing off stubborn shreds of tendon and cartilage. They need to know how long until the birds come, and how long before they leave, so that a coroner out in the desert has data he can look to when he makes his time-of-death estimate. How long has this body been here? How long has this person been lost?

  I remember a story I’d read about butterflies scavenging ammonia salts from carrion. I ask the anthropologist if she’s ever seen butterflies out here. I cannot say the word “carrion.” Instead, I gesture toward the low cages when I say “out here.”

  “Oh my, yes,” she says. Her voice is soft with a gentle Texas lilt. “In the spring, it’s quite beautiful—all the black-eyed Susans are in bloom and there are butterflies all over . . . It’s a sight.”

  For a moment, I forget the talons and curved beaks of vultures. I forget the frenzy of feathers. Instead, I imagine a field of migrating monarchs, green sulfurs, orange-eyed buckeyes, and gilt-edged mourning cloaks. This field becomes their wished-for respite during a long journey. The deliberate opening and closing of all those wings becomes a kind of breath, a last sigh that reaches at once down into the roots of the bluestem and up into the flyway, following the current all the way to Mexico.

  BRYAN CHRISTY

  Tracking Ivory

  FROM National Geographic

  WHEN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM of Natural History wanted to update the Hall of North American Mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. When the tortoise Lonesome George, emblem of the Galápagos Islands, died, it was Dante who was tasked with restoring him. But Dante, who is one of the world’s most respected taxidermists, has never done what I’m asking him to do. No one has.

  I want Dante to design an artificial elephant tusk that has the look and feel of confiscated tusks loaned to me by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Inside the fake tusk, I want him to embed a custom-made GPS and satellite-based tracking system. If he can do this, I’ll ask him to make several more tusks. In the criminal world, ivory operates as currency, so in a way I’m asking Dante to print counterfeit money I can follow.

  I will use his tusks to hunt the people who kill elephants and to learn what roads their ivory plunder follows, which ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it transits, and where it ends up. Will artificial tusks planted in a central African country head east—or west—toward a coast with reliable transportation to Asian markets? Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? Or will they go nowhere, discovered before they’re moved and turned in by an honest person?

  As we talk over my design needs, Dante’s brown eyes sparkle like a boy’s on Christmas morning. To test ivory, dealers will scratch a tusk with a knife or hold a lighter under it; ivory is a tooth and won’t melt. My tusks will have to act like ivory. “And I gotta find a way to get that shine,” Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has.

  “I need Schreger lines too, George,” I say, referring to the crosshatching on the butt of a sawn tusk that looks like growth rings of a tree trunk.

  Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. A booming Chinese middle class with an insatiable taste for ivory, crippling poverty in Africa, weak and corrupt law enforcement, and more ways than ever to kill an elephant have created a perfect storm. The result: some 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year, more than 100,000 between 2009 and 2012, and the pace of killing is not slowing. Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching. In June the Tanzanian government announced that the country has lost 60 percent of its elephants in the past five years, down from 110,000 to fewer than 44,000. During the same period, neighboring Mozambique is reported to have lost 48 percent of its elephants. Locals, including poor villagers and unpaid park rangers, are killing elephants for cash—a risk they’re willing to take because even if they’re caught, the penalties are often negligible. But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. They’re looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way.

  South Sudan. The Central African Republic (CAR). The Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC). Sudan. Chad. Five of the world’s least stable nations, as ranked by the Washington, D.C.–based organization the Fund for Peace, are home to people who travel to other countries to kill elephants. Year after year, the path to many of the biggest, most horrific elephant killings traces back to Sudan, which has no elephants left but gives comfort to foreign-born poacher-terrorists and is home to the Janjaweed and other Sudanese cross-continental marauders.

  Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. Outnumbered and ill-equipped, they’re manning the frontline in a violent battle that affects us all.

  Garamba’s Victims

  Garamba National Park, in the northeast corner of the DRC and on the border with South Sudan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally famous for its elephants and its boundless ocean of green. But when I ask a gathering of children and elders in the village of Kpaika, about 30 miles from the park’s western border, how many of them have visited Garamba, no one raises a hand. When I ask, “How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?”—I understand why.

  Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africa’s most wanted terrorists. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Kony’s army. “I’ve met more than a thousand children who have been abducted,” he says as we talk inside his church in the nearby town of Dungu. “When they’re abducted, they’re very young, and they’re forced to do horrible things. Most of these children are very, very traumatized when they come back home.” They have nightmares, Sugule continues. They have flashbacks. Their own families are afraid that they’re devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so it’s difficult for them to find husbands. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Kony’s men: “LRA Tongo Tongo.” “LRA Cut Cut”—a reference, Sugule explains, to the militants’ vicious use of machetes.

  Kony is a former Roman Catholic altar boy whose stated mission is to overthrow the Ugandan government on behalf of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, and to rule the country according to his version of the Ten Commandments. Since the 1980s, and beginning in Uganda, Kony’s minions are alleged to have killed tens of thousands of people, slicing the lips, ears, and breasts off women, raping children and women, chopping off the feet of those caught riding bicycles, and kidnapping young boys to create an army of child soldiers who themselves grow into killers.

  In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. At the time Sudan’s north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudan’s government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. For 10 years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. It was thanks largely to efforts by the group Invisible Children and its video Kony 2012 that Kony became a household name in the West. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. The U.S. State Department named Kony a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2008, and the African Union has designated the LRA a terrorist organization.

  When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. From Garamba, Kony signaled his desire for peace with Uganda, sending emissaries to neutral Juba, in southern Sudan, to negotiate with Ugandan officials while he and his men lived unmolested in and around the park, protected by a cease-fire agreement. His army farmed vegetables. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. Meanwhile, flouting the cease-fire, his men crossed into CAR, where they kidnapped hundreds of children and made sex slaves of women they brought back to the park.

  Father Sugule introduces me to three young girls, recent LRA kidnapping victims, who are sitting on a wooden bench in his church. Geli Oh, 16, spent longer with Kony’s army than her two friends—two and a half terrible years. She looks at the floor while her friends whisper to each other, smile radiantly, and nibble on cookies we’ve brought for them. Geli Oh perks up at the word “elephant.” She saw many elephants in Garamba National Park, she says, which is where the LRA took her. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. “They say the more elephants they kill, the more ivory they get.”

  Kony’s force has declined from a peak of 2,700 combatants in 1999 to an estimated 150 to 250 core fighters today. Killings of civilians have likewise dropped, from 1,252 in 2009 to 13 in 2014, but abductions are rising again, and it takes the arrival of only a few of the armed militants to send fear ricocheting through communities. In village after village along the road between Father Sugule’s church and what is now South Sudan, I meet Kony victims who describe being fed elephant meat and how, after elephants were killed, militants took the ivory away.

  But where?

  The Problem Solver

  To follow my artificial tusks from the jungle to their final destination, I need a tracking device capable of transmitting exact locations without dead zones. It needs to be durable and small enough to fit inside the cavities George Dante would make in the blocks of resin and lead that formed the tusks. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, I’m looking for. Kermeen started in the radio-tracking business when he was 15 and has since built electronic trackers and collars for wildlife from Andean bears to California condors to Tasmanian devils. He designed a GPS tracker that the U.S. Geological Survey embedded in live Burmese pythons to monitor the invasive snakes in the Florida Everglades. For his “Judas pig” project, he built GPS satellite collars to enable pest-control authorities in New Zealand to send feral pigs into the bush and locate their invasive piggy friends. We meet over Skype.

  “You must be a real animal lover,” I say.

  “I’m not an animal lover,” he snaps. “I’m a problem solver.”

  I laugh. “Then you’re just the man for me.”

  After months of tinkering, Kermeen’s final bespoke ivory-tracking device arrives in the mail. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor.

  While Dante set about embedding Kermeen’s tracker inside his tusk mold, a third team member, John Flaig, a specialist in near-space, balloon-based photography—images taken from at least the height of spy planes—was preparing to monitor the tusks as they moved. Using Kermeen’s technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. We would follow them using Google Earth.

  “I Want Ivory for Ammunition”

  On September 11, 2014, Michael Onen, a sergeant in Kony’s army, walked out of Garamba National Park carrying an AK-47, five magazines of ammunition, and a story. Onen is short and looks even smaller wearing a camouflage-patterned Ugandan army uniform that’s too long for him in the sleeves. He sits on a plastic chair opposite me in a clearing at the African Union forces base in Obo, in the southeastern corner of CAR, where he is in custody. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Kony’s son Salim. The operation was designed by Kony himself, Onen says. During the summer Kony’s soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory.

  Around us stroll Ugandan army soldiers, who make up the entire African Union contingent based in Obo and are committed to finding and killing Kony. The soldiers embrace Onen as one of their own, and in fundamental ways he is. He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Kony’s soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. His wife, abducted later, was killed.

>   From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. Being small, he balked at having to carry the heavy bundles that Kony’s militants ferry from camp to camp in their patrols across central Africa, and for his whining, he was beaten with a machete. But Onen got his way. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signaler—a radioman privy to Kony’s secret communications.

  During the failed peace talks with Uganda, while Kony hid in Garamba from 2006 to 2008, Onen had been assigned to Kony’s lead peace negotiator, Vincent Otti. Otti liked elephants, Onen recalled, and forbade their killing. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory.

  Otti was furious, Onen says. “Why are you collecting ivory?” Otti demanded of Kony. “Aren’t you interested in peace talks?”

  No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Kony’s reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. “Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony,” says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Kony’s army had arrived in Garamba in 2006 with little ammunition left to continue its war, Onen tells me. “It’s only the ivory that will make the LRA strong,” he recalls Kony saying.

  Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed.

  From Garamba, Kony sent an exploratory team to Darfur to look into forging a new relationship with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), who had supported him against Uganda, hoping to exchange ivory for rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Kony’s men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. His account was corroborated by Caesar Achellam, a former intelligence chief for Kony who is now in the Ugandan government’s custody. Achellam told me that Kony’s men planned for the future. He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well.