30 GOOD-BYE

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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 Isaaewton’s Principia , Henry dish’sweighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and endable uakings 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 O some eight hundredmiles off the east coast of Madagascar.

    There, some fotten 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 erratid 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 tained a Principia or ohathad no dodos, but we do know that they happe more or less the same time. You wouldbe hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurreo illustrate the divineand felonious nature of the human being—a species anism that is capable of unpigthe deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding iin, f９9lｉb?or nopurpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t eveely capable ofuanding 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 viity you hadonly to cate a to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what.

    The indigo 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 being unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on abohis was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo ieuffed 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 on sense, we are not irely surewhat a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose—ahandful of crude descriptions by “uific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a fewscattered osseous fragments,” in the somewhat aggrieved words of the eenth-turynaturalist H. E. Strid. As Strid wistfully observed, we have more physical evidenceof some a 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, lump 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 Strid’s “ossements” 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 ed onthe ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey fs, dogs, and monkeysbrought to the island by outsiders. It robably 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 acquaintah animate dodos lasted just seventy years. Thatis a breathtakingly sty period—though it must be said that by this point in our history wedid have thousands of years of practice behind us iter 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 teo 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 ti between ten ay 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 anizational capabilities. Europe and Asia, where the animals had had looevolve a useful wariness of humans, lost between a third and a half of their big creatures.

    Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost han 95 pert.

    Because the early hunter populations were paratively small and the animal populationstruly moal—as many as ten million mammoth carcasses are thought to lie frozen iundra of northern Siberia alone—some authorities think there must be other explanations,possibly involving climate ge or some kind of pandemic. As Ross MacPhee of theAmeri Museum of Natural History put it: “There’s no material be to huntingdangerous animals more often than you o—there are only so many mammoth steaksyou  eat.” Others believe it may have been almost criminally easy to catd 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 iern Australia. Alas, they are gone and we live on a muchdiminished plaoday, across the whole world, only four types of really hefty (a metrior more) land animals survive: elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes. Not for tens of millionsof years has life oh been so diminutive and tame.

    The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearanore ret times are in effect part of a siin event—whether, in short, humansare ily bad news for other living things. The sad likelihood is that we may well be.

    Acc to the Uy of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, the background rate ofextin oh throughout biological history has been one species lost every four yearson average. Acc to o calculation, human-caused extin 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 mains, includiively ret 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 whe him in Melbourne a year or so ago.

    Flannery recruited his frieer Schouten, an artist and fellow Australian, and togetherthey embarked on a slightly obsessive quest to scour the world’s major colles to find outwhat was lost, what was left, and what had never been known at all. They spent four yearspig through old skins, musty spes, 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 araordinary bookcalled A Gap in Nature, stituting the most plete—and, it must be said, moving—catalog of animal extins 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 happeo be shipwrecked on the only placewhere the creatures still survived in any numbers, the remote and foggy ander Islandsin the Bering Sea.

    Happily, the expedition had a naturalist, Ge Steller, who was fasated 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 ohing Steller couldn’t do was save the sea cow itself. Already huo the brinkof extin, it would be googether withiy-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, Assion Island flightless crake></a>,at least five types of large turtle, and many others are forever lost to us except as names.

    A great deal of extin, 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, iempestuous strait between the North and South Islands of NewZealand, the lighthouse keeper’s cat kept bringing him stratle birds that it had caught.

    The keeper dutifully sent some spes to the museum in Wellington. There a curatrewvery excited because the bird was a relic species of flightless wrens—the only example of aflightless perg 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 .

    At least we have those. All too often, it turns out, we are not much better at looking afterspecies after they have gohan we were before they went. Take the case of the lovelyCarolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking aiful 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 sidered 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 theurning almost at oo che fallen rades.

    In his classic Ameriithology, written in the early eenth tury, 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 affe of thesurvivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they againalighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered panions with such masymptoms of sympathy and , as entirely disarmed me.

    By the sed decade of the tweh tury, the birds had been so relentlessly huhat only a few remained alive in captivity. The last one, named Inca, died in the atiZoo 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 Inow? Nobody knows. Thezoo lost it.

    What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that <dfn></dfn>Peale was a lover ofbirds, a did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for er reason than that itied him to do so. It is a truly astounding fact that for the loime the people whowere most intensely ied in the world’s living things were the ones most likely toextinguish them.

    No one represehis position on a larger scale (in every sehan Lionel WalterRothschild, the sed Baron Rothschild. S 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 Bughamshire, 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 hu a time—to every quarter of the globe toclamber over mountains and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of newspes—particularly things that flew. These were crated or boxed up a back toRothschild’s estate at Tring, where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged andanalyzed everything that came before them, produg a stant stream of books, papers, andmonographs—some twelve hundred in all. Altogether, Rothschild’s natural history factoryprocessed well over two million spes and added five thousand species of creature to thestific archive.

    Remarkably, Rothschild’s colleg efforts were her the most extensive nor the mostgenerously funded of the eenth tury. That title almost certainly belongs to a slightlyearlier but also very wealthy British collector named Hugh g, who became sopreoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large ogoing ship and employed acrew to sail the world full-time, pig up whatever they could find—birds, plants, animalsof all types, and especially shells. It was his unrivaled colle of barhat passed toDarwin and served as the basis for his seminal study.

    However, Rothschild was easily the most stific collector of his age, though also themrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became ied in Hawaii, perhaps the mosttemptingly vulnerable enviro Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation hadallowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular ioRothschild were the islands’ colorful and distinctive birds, often sisting of very smallpopulations inhabitiremely specifiges.

    The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, andrare—a dangerous bination in the best of circumstances—but also oftebreakinglyeasy to take. The greater koa finch, an innoember of the honeycreeper family, lurkedshyly in the opies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its coverat ond fly down in a show of wele. 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 beehe one shot forRothschild’s colle. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensivecolleg, 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 spes of black mamos, a species of forestbird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he hat the news filled him with“joy.”

    It was, in short, a difficult age to fathom—a time when almost any animal ersecuted 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 extin. Right up until the 1940s many states tio 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 thae of thelovely little Ba’s warbler. A native of the southern Uates, the warbler wasfamous for its unusually thrilling song, but its population numbers, never robust, graduallydwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether a unseen for many years.

    Then in 1939, by happy ce two separate birdihusiasts, 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 Ba’s warblers.

    The impulse to exterminate was by no means exclusively Ameri. In Australia, bountieswere paid oasmanian tiger (properly the thylae), 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 ivorous marsupial to live into modern times—and all they show you are photographs. The last surviving thylae was thrown out with the weekly trash.

    I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an anism to look after lifein our lonely os, 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 aremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence orwhatever you wish to call it. As far as we  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  all—about how many things have died offpermaly, or may soon, or may never, and what role layed in any part of theprocess. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested thathuman activities were causing about two extins a week on the pla. By the early 1990she had raised the figure to some six hundred per week. (That’s extins of all types—plants, is, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure even higher—to wellover a thousand a week. A United Natio of 1995, oher hand, put the totalnumber of knowins in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animalsand slightly over 650 for plants—while allowing that this was “almost certainly aimate,” particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think mostextin figures are grossly inflated.

    The fact is, we d<bdi>?</bdi>on’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know whearted doingmany of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how ourpresent as will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one plao do iton, and only one species of being capable of making a sidered difference. Edward O.

    Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One pla, 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 a<bdo>９９lｉb?</bdo>ny 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 ofexiste 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 eminen a stunningly short time. Behaviorallymodern human beings—that is, people who  speak and make art and anize plexactivities—have existed for only about 0.0001 pert 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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