The Birds of Oppenheimer
Last year’s powerful film Oppenheimer moved people in many
different ways and was granted many awards. Given my professional activities, my
interest in the film embraces many dimensions. One worth capturing on this
blog is the film’s depiction of the landscape and its wildlife, which was my
preoccupation for three decades (still burning strong today).
The siting of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos is a story
documented by numerous historians and popular science writers, in greatest
detail in “American Prometheus,” the fabulous book by Bird and Sherwin that inspired the movie. Oppenheimer had strong connections
with northern New Mexico that trace back to his childhood. Although his
professional life was centered at other places (Berkeley, Pasadena, Princeton,
and Europe), he returned many times to vacation in New Mexico, ultimately
purchasing a cabin there at the southern end of the Pecos Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range, east of Santa Fe. Today there are
Forest Roads passing quite close to the cabin site; I went to that general area
many times for hiking and wildlife watching, so I have a profound understanding
of the allure. When Groves and Oppenheimer sought a site to build the bomb,
they initially looked at picturesque Jemez Springs,
northwest of Albuquerque in the southern part of the Jemez Mountains (American
Prometheus p. 205). Groves didn’t think much of the canyon location, so
Oppenheimer suggested the Pajarito Plateau, where he had taken long horseback
rides on his visits. (Those rides must have begun in Santa Fe, not the
inconveniently remote cabin location in the Sangre de Cristos.) The film
depicts this search briefly but plausibly. Oppenheimer knew about the Los
Alamos Ranch School on the plateau, and suggested that Groves consider it. (“Los
Alamos” refers to the gallery forests of cottonwoods in the wet spots of the
canyons.) Oppie would have known at that point that the view is inspirational
and the mesa tops suitable for construction. The jeep ride from Jemez Springs
to Los Alamos, along logging roads, must have been quite an adventure in the
early 1940s, and would have taken easily a half day. But Groves was sold, and
history was made. Hans Bethe and George Kistiakowsky were two of the legendary
scientists on the project who appreciated the selection of that site, bringing
back their own childhood memories of the Swiss alps, and they spent spare hours
hiking up to the peaks above the project site. (My late professional colleague Tony
Arrington was a graduate student of Kistiakowsky’s, who was raised in Kyiv
Ukraine and then taught chemistry at Harvard.) They also carved ski trails out
of the forested slopes – Kistiakowsky put leftover explosives to good use to
bring down the bigger pine and Douglas Fir trees. (He needed practice on
implosion design, after all.)
 |
| Gallina Canyon, Jemez Mountains. Ponderosa Pines that have escaped the axe. I don't know if Oppenheimer ever made it there, but it is the kind of place he talked about often. |
The plateau where the Los Alamos laboratory is situated
today did not get its name until quite late in the history of human settlement
and use. The predecessors of today’s native American Northern Pueblos used the plateau about a thousand years ago (and likely much longer); ancient cliff
dwellings can still be visited today in Bandelier National Monument,
in Frijoles Canyon and other places. Early Spanish settlers left their mark in
the 1600s-1700s;
they carved wagon paths and brought livestock to graze, cut firewood, and
expanded on the trails that the native Americans had left. Adolph Bandelier and
Edgar Lee Hewett studied archeological sites on the plateau in the late 1800s.
The story goes that Hewett thought the plateau needed a name. He must not have
gotten input from the numerous Pueblo people who were close by, or maybe they
did have names for it that Hewett chose to ignore. But he landed on “Pajarito,” which means
“little bird” in Spanish. I have wondered which little bird Hewett was inspired
by. If he spent a lot of time there in July and August, he would certainly have
seen four species of hummingbirds visiting the abundant penstemon wildflowers
(Broad-tailed, Black-chinned, Rufous, and Calliope Hummingbirds). Or maybe he
noticed the flocks of Bushtits using the Pinyon Pine and One-seed Juniper that
were abundant on the mesa tops. Or the many Pygmy Nuthatches in the tall stands
of Ponderosa Pine.
 |
| The southern tip of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as seen from the Pajarito Plateau. At sunrise in December. |
When it came time to film the 2023 movie, the director was
faced with a problem of his own. The town and lab of Los Alamos are thoroughly developed,
and the kinds of uncontaminated views that Oppenheimer appreciated no longer existed.
So Christopher Nolan opted for Ghost Ranch, about
an hour’s drive north of Los Alamos. It is a place of great beauty. With red
rock cliffs looking over a wide valley, it is generally regarded as one of the
most beautiful spots in the state, which Georgia O’Keeffe would reiterate. The
iconic figure of Cerro Pedernal (“flint hill”) towers over the southern edge of
the valley through which the Rio Chama meanders (or did, until Abiquiu Dam was
so rudely imposed in 1959).
 |
| Cerro Pedernal looming above Ghost Ranch on a winter morning |
Ownership of Ghost Ranch is a combination of private, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management, preserving the kind of vistas that have provided backdrops for many films. The bird life of Ghost Ranch shares much in common with pre-development Los Alamos, making it a nice substitute, as you can experience today driving along Route 84. Like much of the land in the state, Ghost Ranch is both arid and overgrazed by cattle, which is a shame. But movie cameras don’t get close to the plants, so the defect is glossed over. A few other scenes capture Oppie moving with friends on horseback through the landscape, and these were mostly filmed in central Santa Fe county, where the Ortiz Mountains, Sandia Mountains, and Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide the backdrop. I know this because I recognize the peaks in the camera footage, and because the landscape is clearly pinyon-juniper (“P-J”) scattered among forbs. I spent many thousands of hours making my own bird-finding drives in that area along Rte 14, Rte 285, and the intervening dirt roads. (I carried out Breeding Bird Surveys for almost twenty years.)
Last week I watched Oppenheimer for a second time, so I
could pay more attention to the details. It was a reminder for me of a dramatic
device used by sound editors of Hollywood movies. When the action shifts from
an indoor conversation to the outdoors, the sound editor sprinkles in a few
bird sounds to cleverly clue in the audience. Listeners who are birders like me
have this secondary auditory experience as we watch. It is mostly a pleasurable
one, but with caveats. Hollywood sound editors don’t pay much attention to
using the right bird sounds in the right locations. This is not just a minor
issue for us; we spend huge amounts of effort searching for birds in local
patches of suitable habitat at suitable seasons and time of day, so this stuff
matters – a lot. Movie sound editors obviously choose bird sounds that are loud
and distinctive to make an impression. That’s reasonable, but I wish they would
try harder to get the right ones. So, specifically, “Oppenheimer” at about the
1:01 mark shows Oppie rolling into the lab site at Los Alamos to the call of a
Cactus Wren. At the 1:27 mark, Kitty searches for Oppie on horseback in a dark,
late afternoon canyon with snow patches on the ground, and a Carolina Wren
sings out.
 |
| Cactus Wren, on a Cholla cactus near Blue Grama grass. Santa Fe county, NM |
Those are North American birds, so what is there to complain
about? Plenty. Cactus Wren is not a bird of the Pajarito Plateau. It is common
in southern New Mexico, where the landscape is a lot lower, flatter, and more
arid. Now to be sure, Cactus Wren is slowly on the march to the north. Most of
us believe this can be attributed to overgrazing by cattle that has caused
Cholla Cactus to move north and to colonize flat sunny spots where the
competition from palatable grasses has been eliminated. Cactus Wren really
likes Cholla, because it provides perfect sites for nest building, and it
probably supplies the right kind of insect life for Cactus Wrens to thrive on.
In recent decades, the northern extent of the range of Cactus Wren had been Socorro
(Hubbard, John P. Check-list of the Birds of New Mexico.
1968), quite a ways south of the lab site that was being portrayed in the film.
Those of us who bird in Santa Fe county got kind of excited when Cactus Wrens
moved in and set up shop in 2014. Today, they seem to be entrenched there, at
least in small numbers. But they are still restricted to places like the Caja
del Rio plateau, across the Rio Grande and east of the Pajarito Plateau and
significantly different because of the slope, predominant vegetation, and soil
conditions. Cactus Wren was non-existent as far north as Los Alamos in the
1940s, decades before range expansion kicked in. So, sorry sound editor, but that
particular bird call is incongruous in that setting.
How about Oppenheimer’s Carolina Wren? It is one of
the loudest and most distinctive bird songs in North America, heard commonly
because they are well adapted to human residences. But, as the name suggests,
it is a bird of eastern North America, not New Mexico. West of the Mississippi,
the wren family is represented more by Bewick’s Wren, Canyon Wren, Rock Wren, Cactus
Wren, House Wren, and Marsh Wren. Here again, it is important to point out that
Carolina Wren is slowly expanding westward. Nobody is quite sure why this is
happening, because the North American west was never thought to provide the
right habitat. Perhaps it is growth of human settlements. So Carolina Wren started
to gain a foothold in New Mexico near Socorro on the Rio Grande, in dense
riparian areas, in the late 1990s. I found one in Santa Fe county in the autumn
of 2016, but it was a brief visit only. In the 1940s on Pajarito Plateau? Certainly
not, as attested by published sources on bird distribution. (The most recent
and most detailed of these is the treatise by ornithologist Sandy Williams.)
 |
| Carolina Wren. A rare vagrant at the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve, 2016. |
The service provided by film sound editors is a vital one. I
think it is wonderful when a film is enhanced by the right bird vocalization in
the time and place of the film script. It adds an element of authenticity and
realism. But, jeez guys, get it right. Bird songs and calls can only very
rarely be captured by the microphone in the filming process, so they are almost
always added in at post-production. Today we have voluminous sound libraries that are available at everyone’s fingertips – let’s use them! In the case of “Oppenheimer”,
instead of piping in a Cactus Wren, it would have been great to use sounds of
Pinyon Jay, Acorn Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Western Wood-Pewee,
Ash-throated Flycatcher, Plumbeous Vireo, Steller’s Jay, Juniper Titmouse,
Black-headed Grosbeak, Bullock’s Oriole, White-crowned Sparrow – so many to
choose from. Instead of the ringing song of Carolina Wren, it was a missed
opportunity to use Canyon Wren, one of the most beautiful North American bird
songs. They are commonly heard today in Los Alamos Canyon, above the town. Or how
about a Grace’s Warbler?
 |
| Canyon Wren. Diablo Canyon, Santa Fe county, New Mexico |
I make the same plea to Ken Burns, who has created so many
wonderful films about American history. Burns’s editorial team makes frequent
use of bird sounds, adding much to the film experience. But there are too many
times when they choose a jay, oriole, sparrow, or warbler from the wrong side
of the continent or the wrong elevational range or the wrong season.
Surprising, in light of Burns’s exceptional focus on accuracy.
In years of watching films and television documentaries, I
have found it amusing to note what bird sounds are selected to populate the
soundtracks. One common call is the Boreal Owl. Ironically, Boreal Owl is one
of the most difficult species to find in North America, at least when it is
singing, which happens only when the snow is too deep for humans on foot. Not
so rare in movies. Prairie Warbler is a frequent guest on programs, often
mislocated in western places where it doesn’t occur. The fierce call of the Red-tailed
Hawk is frequently heard on television ads. It is a piercing, descending scream.
Amusingly, though, it usually accompanies the video image of Bald Eagle.
Apparently, Madison Avenue thinks that the very different, whimpering call of
the eagle is not what it should be, if you aim to sell stuff. British period
dramas are fond of using the repetitive call of the Chiffchaff and the low hoot
of the Eurasian Collared Dove. For Africa, the favorite seems to be
White-browed Coucal, which I have nicknamed the “David Attenborough Bird.”
 |
| Red-tailed Hawk, Jemez Mountains, New Mexico |
One additional comment about Oppenheimer pertains to the weather. The Trinity Test, the first explosion test of the newly designed bomb, occupies much of the middle part of the movie. The scene depicts a long delay in the test, at today’s White Sands Missile Range, due to a rainstorm. The portrayed project scientists and technicians don thick rubber raincoats or huddle indoors in a fierce, wind-driven rain. It appears to last for hours, causing everyone to mill about in nervous anticipation. In New Mexico, in mid-July? Wait a minute. It doesn’t rain like that in the southwest. July is the month of afternoon thunderstorms, and it rains alright, but in any one location, it never rains for more than about fifteen minutes. The rain can be intense, but brief. And on a hot summer day, it usually feels nice to let your clothes get a little wet. In my thousands of hours of bird finding in the southwest, I never took a raincoat with me. Historical accounts say that there was a storm delay on that famous day (or infamous, to some). It was highly unusual that there was storm activity in the early morning at 4:00. But it was only a short one, and the intensity of the storm was “hollywood-ized” in the film as a tension-building device for dramatic effect.
* * * * * * * * * * *
There is a tragic side to the otherwise compelling story of
the site selection of Los Alamos. While the Pajarito Plateau provided enough
flat spaces for the bomb development work, the plateau was subdivided by
canyons with small and slow-moving streams. The canyons became the inevitable
repository of chemical waste from the handling of nuclear materials. In the desperate
scramble of wartime, there was no time even to consider waste disposal. Later,
in the 1950s and 1960s, national standards for waste treatment were lax because
fate and transport of chemicals and radionuclides was not well understood. Technologies
improved in the 1970s and later, reducing outflow to the canyons, but the
damage was done, and the canyons accumulated legacy materials. Analytical
chemistry technologies made enormous strides during that same time, enabling
the precise determination of even the most trace radionuclide quantities in
soil, vegetation, and rock, and there are multiple, well-documented
contamination areas that are known today. A program exists today to keep track of these legacy sites, but unfortunately there is no
practical way to clean up all of them without destroying the canyons as
ecologically important areas for wildlife and spring runoff management. Ironically,
if Oppenheimer had less love for New Mexico’s topography and scenery, and
Groves had chosen some flat, featureless area for the Manhattan Project, the chemical
and radionuclide waste problems would be far less pressing today. But that’s
not the way it worked out.
