Goodbye

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IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends ChristopherWren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on thecasual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia , Henry Cavendish’sweighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings thathave occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestonewas being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundredmiles off the east coast of Madagascar.

There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, thefamously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a ratherirresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolationhad not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.

We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of thelast dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one thathad no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You wouldbe hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divineand felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unpickingthe deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for nopurpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable ofunderstanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularlyshort on insight, it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you hadonly to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see whatwas up.

The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years afterthe last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that theinstitution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on abonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence,stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save onlyits head and part of one limb.

As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely surewhat a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose—ahandful of crude descriptions by “unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a fewscattered osseous fragments,” in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth-centurynaturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidenceof some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived intomodern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence.

So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, andwas the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknownas its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s “osseousfragments” and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a halffeet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested onthe ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeysbrought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainlygone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see itslike again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what soundsit made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg.

From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years. Thatis a breathtakingly scanty period—though it must be said that by this point in our history wedid have thousands of years of practice behind us in the matter of irreversible eliminations.

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fiftythousand years or so wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in oftenastonishingly large numbers.

In America, thirty genera of large animals—some very large indeed—disappearedpractically at a stroke after the arrival of modern humans on the continent between ten andtwenty thousand years ago. Altogether North and South America between them lost aboutthree quarters of their big animals once man the hunter arrived with his flint-headed spearsand keen organizational capabilities. Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer toevolve a useful wariness of humans, lost between a third and a half of their big creatures.

Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent.

Because the early hunter populations were comparatively small and the animal populationstruly monumental—as many as ten million mammoth carcasses are thought to lie frozen in thetundra of northern Siberia alone—some authorities think there must be other explanations,possibly involving climate change or some kind of pandemic. As Ross MacPhee of theAmerican Museum of Natural History put it: “There’s no material benefit to huntingdangerous animals more often than you need to—there are only so many mammoth steaksyou can eat.” Others believe it may have been almost criminally easy to catch and clobberprey. “In Australia and the Americas,” says Tim Flannery, “the animals probably didn’t knowenough to run away.”

Some of the creatures that were lost were singularly spectacular and would take a littlemanaging if they were still around. Imagine ground sloths that could look into an upstairswindow, tortoises nearly the size of a small Fiat, monitor lizards twenty feet long baskingbeside desert highways in Western Australia. Alas, they are gone and we live on a muchdiminished planet. Today, across the whole world, only four types of really hefty (a metric tonor more) land animals survive: elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes. Not for tens of millionsof years has life on Earth been so diminutive and tame.

The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearancesof more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event—whether, in short, humansare inherently bad news for other living things. The sad likelihood is that we may well be.

According to the University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, the background rate ofextinction on Earth throughout biological history has been one species lost every four yearson average. According to one recent calculation, human-caused extinction now may berunning as much as 120,000 times that level.

In the mid-1990s, the Australian naturalist Tim Flannery, now head of the South AustralianMuseum in Adelaide, became struck by how little we seemed to know about manyextinctions, including relatively recent ones. “Wherever you looked, there seemed to be gapsin the records—pieces missing, as with the dodo, or not recorded at all,” he told me when Imet him in Melbourne a year or so ago.

Flannery recruited his friend Peter Schouten, an artist and fellow Australian, and togetherthey embarked on a slightly obsessive quest to scour the world’s major collections to find outwhat was lost, what was left, and what had never been known at all. They spent four yearspicking through old skins, musty specimens, old drawings, and written descriptions—whatever was available. Schouten made life-sized paintings of every animal they couldreasonably re-create, and Flannery wrote the words. The result was an extraordinary bookcalled A Gap in Nature, constituting the most complete—and, it must be said, moving—catalog of animal extinctions from the last three hundred years.

For some animals, records were good, but nobody had done anything much with them,sometimes for years, sometimes forever. Steller’s sea cow, a walrus-like creature related tothe dugong, was one of the last really big animals to go extinct. It was truly enormous—anadult could reach lengths of nearly thirty feet and weigh ten tons—but we are acquainted withit only because in 1741 a Russian expedition happened to be shipwrecked on the only placewhere the creatures still survived in any numbers, the remote and foggy Commander Islandsin the Bering Sea.

Happily, the expedition had a naturalist, Georg Steller, who was fascinated by the animal.

“He took the most copious notes,” says Flannery. “He even measured the diameter of itswhiskers. The only thing he wouldn’t describe was the male genitals—though, for somereason, he was happy enough to do the female’s. He even saved a piece of skin, so we had agood idea of its texture. We weren’t always so lucky.”

The one thing Steller couldn’t do was save the sea cow itself. Already hunted to the brinkof extinction, it would be gone altogether within twenty-seven years of Steller’s discovery ofit. Many other animals, however, couldn’t be included because too little is known about them.

The Darling Downs hopping mouse, Chatham Islands swan, Ascension Island flightless crake,at least five types of large turtle, and many others are forever lost to us except as names.

A great deal of extinction, Flannery and Schouten discovered, hasn’t been cruel or wanton,but just kind of majestically foolish. In 1894, when a lighthouse was built on a lonely rockcalled Stephens Island, in the tempestuous strait between the North and South Islands of NewZealand, the lighthouse keeper’s cat kept bringing him strange little birds that it had caught.

The keeper dutifully sent some specimens to the museum in Wellington. There a curator grewvery excited because the bird was a relic species of flightless wrens—the only example of aflightless perching bird ever found anywhere. He set off at once for the island, but by the timehe got there the cat had killed them all. Twelve stuffed museum species of the Stephens Islandflightless wren are all that now exist.

At least we have those. All too often, it turns out, we are not much better at looking afterspecies after they have gone than we were before they went. Take the case of the lovelyCarolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking andbeautiful bird ever to live in North America—parrots don’t usually venture so far north, asyou may have noticed—and at its peak it existed in vast numbers, exceeded only by thepassenger pigeon. But the Carolina parakeet was also considered a pest by farmers and easilyhunted because it flocked tightly and had a peculiar habit of flying up at the sound of gunfire(as you would expect), but then returning almost at once to check on fallen comrades.

In his classic American Omithology, written in the early nineteenth century, CharlesWillson Peale describes an occasion in which he repeatedly empties a shotgun into a tree inwhich they roost:

At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of thesurvivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they againalighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifestsymptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the birds had been so relentlessly huntedthat only a few remained alive in captivity. The last one, named Inca, died in the CincinnatiZoo in 1918 (not quite four years after the last passenger pigeon died in the same zoo) andwas reverently stuffed. And where would you go to see poor Inca now? Nobody knows. Thezoo lost it.

What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover ofbirds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that itinterested him to do so. It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people whowere most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely toextinguish them.

No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel WalterRothschild, the second Baron Rothschild. Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was astrange and reclusive fellow. He lived his entire life in the nursery wing of his home at Tring,in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhood—even sleeping in his childhoodbed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.

His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects. He senthordes of trained men—as many as four hundred at a time—to every quarter of the globe toclamber over mountains and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of newspecimens—particularly things that flew. These were crated or boxed up and sent back toRothschild’s estate at Tring, where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged andanalyzed everything that came before them, producing a constant stream of books, papers, andmonographs—some twelve hundred in all. Altogether, Rothschild’s natural history factoryprocessed well over two million specimens and added five thousand species of creature to thescientific archive.

Remarkably, Rothschild’s collecting efforts were neither the most extensive nor the mostgenerously funded of the nineteenth century. That title almost certainly belongs to a slightlyearlier but also very wealthy British collector named Hugh Cuming, who became sopreoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large oceangoing ship and employed acrew to sail the world full-time, picking up whatever they could find—birds, plants, animalsof all types, and especially shells. It was his unrivaled collection of barnacles that passed toDarwin and served as the basis for his seminal study.

However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also themost regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the mosttemptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation hadallowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest toRothschild were the islands’ colorful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very smallpopulations inhabiting extremely specific ranges.

The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, andrare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakinglyeasy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurkedshyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its coverat once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killedby Rothschild’s ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin thelesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot forRothschild’s collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensivecollecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more.

Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost.

Others in fact were more ruthless. In 1907 when a well-known collector named AlansonBryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forestbird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with“joy.”

It was, in short, a difficult age to fathom—a time when almost any animal was persecuted ifit was deemed the least bit intrusive. In 1890, New York State paid out over one hundredbounties for eastern mountain lions even though it was clear that the much-harassed creatureswere on the brink of extinction. Right up until the 1940s many states continued to paybounties for almost any kind of predatory creature. West Virginia gave out an annual collegescholarship to whoever brought in the most dead pests—and “pests” was liberally interpretedto mean almost anything that wasn’t grown on farms or kept as pets.

Perhaps nothing speaks more vividly for the strangeness of the times than the fate of thelovely little Bachman’s warbler. A native of the southern United States, the warbler wasfamous for its unusually thrilling song, but its population numbers, never robust, graduallydwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years.

Then in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separatedlocations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds, and thatwas the last that was ever seen of Bachman’s warblers.

The impulse to exterminate was by no means exclusively American. In Australia, bountieswere paid on the Tasmanian tiger (properly the thylacine), a doglike creature with distinctive“tiger” stripes across its back, until shortly before the last one died, forlorn and nameless, in aprivate Hobart zoo in 1936. Go to the Tasmanian Museum today and ask to see the last of thisspecies—the only large carnivorous marsupial to live into modern times—and all they canshow you are photographs. The last surviving thylacine was thrown out with the weekly trash.

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after lifein our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, youwouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence orwhatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be allthere is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievementand its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive andwhen not, we have no idea—really none at all—about how many things have died offpermanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of theprocess. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested thathuman activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990she had raised the figure to some six hundred per week. (That’s extinctions of all types—plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure even higher—to wellover a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the totalnumber of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animalsand slightly over 650 for plants—while allowing that this was “almost certainly anunderestimate,” particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think mostextinction figures are grossly inflated.

The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doingmany of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how ourpresent actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do iton, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O.

Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, oneexperiment.”

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by “we” I meanevery living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite anachievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege ofexistence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, tomake it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorallymodern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complexactivities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving foreven that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never findthe end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

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