Hope is the Thing with Feathers
Source: The Workbook, vol. 25, Spring 2000, pp. 26-7.
Christopher Cokinos
According to University of California biologist Peter J. Bryant, while "the natural rate of extinction is estimated at about one species per year, the present rate is estimated at 10,000 times that–about one per hour–and almost all of these losses are caused by human activities. We probably have already lost 1 million species, and several more million will be lost in the first few decades of the 21st century."
To confer meaning on such numbers, writers often focus on a few known, picturesque, extinctions. Christopher Cokinos selected precisely such colorful, North American, representatives of the lost million–the Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Heath Hen, Passenger Pigeon, Labrador Duck, and Great Auk.
This meticulously researched book provides a useful description of the natural history of these annihilated birds. Carolina Parakeets, for instance, would not desert their injured companions, staying nearby and showing signs of "sympathy and concern." The swift Passenger Pigeon (60 miles per hour) flew in incredibly large flocks containing millions, even billions, of individuals. The goose-sized flightless Great Auk was married for life.
The book provides a touching, lucid, picture of each melancholy bird’s last stand. In a typical case, the last 13 Labrador Ducks may have been seen in 1904 by a respected ornithologist, who then killed a handful "even though he knew the species was nearly extinct."
The Heath Hen’s swan’s song is particularly instructive. It involves the only wholehearted official effort to save one of the six lost species, thus underscoring the inherent unpredictability of the best-laid ecological plans. By 1870, owing in part to destroyed habitats and expanding railroads, this hen only survived in Martha’s Vineyard. The closed season instituted by 1890–when only 200 hens remained–had little effect; by 1896 less than 100 were left. By 1907, Massachusetts set aside thousands of acres and instituted a $100 fine for poaching. By 1916, these efforts bore fruit, with the island’s population soaring to some 2,000 birds. Then, following a big fire, a harsh winter, and all-out management efforts, the population nose-dived, reaching 23 by 1923 and three males by 1928.
To capture the tragedy of the six species, Cokinos takes us to many a site where they once dwelled. There he deftly recreates a sense of place by portraying the creatures who still reside there and reflecting upon the gaps left by the absent ones.
The book likewise offers many fascinating details, and much new information, about the people whose lives intersected the lives of these six species. Thus, a logging baron explains his refusal to give the few remaining Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers a chance: "We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned . . . with ethical considerations."
Prof. H. B. Roney’s adventures are more uplifting. Towards the end of the passenger pigeon’s reign as the most numerous bird species on earth, the state of Michigan enacted protective laws. "In a heroic attempt to both enforce Michigan’s law . . . and simultaneously highlight its weaknesses," Roney and friends went in 1878 to Petoskey, where, Roney wrote, "wagon load after wagon load of dead and live birds hauled up." To find out what was going on in the face of hostility, silence, and threats, Roney feigned sleep in the hotel’s lobby. While he and his friends actually managed to secure the indictment of one lawbreaker ($50 fine) and the expulsion of Native American hunters from the nesting grounds, their wings were clipped while trying to convict a richer, more influential, man. Yet, according to Cokinos, they succeeded in bringing about "a steep decline in the market for Petoskey pigeons," probably by spreading the false rumor that the birds ate poisonous berries.
In view of Roney’s failure to save the passenger pigeon–his good will, creativity, and spunk notwithstanding, in view of our collective failure to stave off massive current extinctions, it is hard to be optimistic about Cokinos’ call to "save what is left and restore what we can" by such brushfire tactics as writing politicians and speaking up at commission meetings. As an ex-geneticist and a practicing human ecologist, I find it even harder to share Cokinos’ qualified hope that fairly soon science (through cloning) will be able to raise from the dead the very species its railroads, steamboats, guns, refrigerators, chainsaws, and expanding populations unwittingly destroyed.
One hopes that the next printing of this touching book will offer higher quality, color photographs (not just black-and-white), and that it will remove the many distractingly clumsy or ungrammatical sentences.
Some trivia could be edited out as well. Thus, an entire chapter recounts the saga of the luckless boy who may have shot the last wild pigeon. Will readers be interested in countless details of this boy’s life, his two photographs, his friends and descendants, his scrapbook entries? Will readers be interested in the page after page of Cokinos’ own quest for the place where, a century ago, this particular boy killed that lone bird? Similarly, do the interminable controversies about the date and location of the death of every last specimen merit our close attention? Most readers, I suspect, would have preferred knowing more about the lost birds themselves, the circumstances that led to their demise, and the many conservationists who–like the indomitable Roney–spoke for them.