Chapter Content
## Chapter 44: A World, a Trial
In the early 1680s, around the same time that Edmond Halley, alongside his companions Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, were idly wagering bets in a London coffeehouse – a bet that would ultimately spark Isaac Newton's "Principia," Henry Cavendish's determination of Earth's mass, and many other astounding feats – a far less celebrated, even tragic, event was unfolding on Mauritius, an island nestled in the Indian Ocean, some 800 miles east of Madagascar.
There, an anonymous sailor, or perhaps a pet he brought ashore, was contributing to the final act in the demise of the dodo bird. Famed for its flightlessness, its seemingly simple nature, and its lack of agility, this creature was an easy target for bored newcomers. Millions of years of serene isolation had left it utterly unprepared for the bewildering cruelty of humankind.
The exact circumstances of the last dodo's disappearance, and the precise year it vanished, remain shrouded in uncertainty. So, whether Newton’s “Principia” or the dodo’s final breath came first is a mystery. Nevertheless, it is safe to say they were both products of roughly the same era. It's hard to conjure up a starker juxtaposition of humanity's duality. The same species capable of unlocking the universe's deepest secrets was simultaneously driving to extinction a harmless creature, oblivious to the havoc we wrought upon it. So naive were these birds that legend tells of one catching a dodo and having it cry out, which would attract all the others from the area to where it stood.
The dodo's plight didn't end with its physical annihilation. Some seventy years after the presumed death of the last of its kind, in 1755, the curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, discovering that the museum’s dodo specimen was decaying, ordered its incineration. It was an astounding, almost unthinkable decision, for it was, quite literally, the only example of a dodo left in the world, dead or alive. A horrified employee, chancing upon the scene, attempted to rescue the specimen from the flames, salvaging only its head and a fragment of its leg.
As a result of this and similar acts of astonishing shortsightedness, we can now only speculate on the precise appearance of a living dodo. Our information is far more limited than most might assume. As the 19th-century naturalist H.R. Strickland lamented, our knowledge rests upon "a few simple notices from unscientific mariners," "three or four indifferent paintings," and "a few scattered bones." Strickland observed that we possess far more detailed information about certain ancient sea monsters and colossal sauropods than we do about a bird that persisted into modern times, asking only that we leave it undisturbed to survive.
Piecing together what we know, we can say that the dodo lived on Mauritius, was plump but apparently unpalatable, and represented the largest member of the pigeon family. But precisely how large remains uncertain, as no accurate weight measurements were ever recorded. Based on the "scattered bones" Strickland mentioned and the remnants of the Ashmolean specimen, we can infer a height of around eighty centimeters, with a length from beak to tail of roughly the same dimension. Unable to fly, it nested on the ground, making its eggs and young vulnerable to introduced predators such as pigs, dogs, and monkeys. It likely vanished around 1683, and was almost certainly extinct by 1693. Beyond these meager details, we know almost nothing. We will never see one again. We are ignorant of its mating rituals, its precise diet, its territorial range, the sounds it made in peace or alarm. We don’t even possess a single preserved dodo egg.
Our co-existence with the living dodo spanned a mere seventy years. A shockingly brief interval. Although, it must be said, by this point in our history, we had already been irreversibly extinguishing species for millennia. The extent of human destructiveness remains hazy, but the undeniable truth is that, for the last five thousand years or so, wherever we have gone, animal extinctions have tended to follow, often on a staggering scale.
Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, following the arrival of modern humans in the Americas, thirty genera of large animals – some of them truly enormous – vanished as if overnight. Across North and South America, roughly three-quarters of the megafauna were wiped out, hunted to oblivion by coordinated bands wielding flint-tipped spears. Even in Europe and Asia, where animals had evolved a healthy degree of caution toward humans, between a third and a half of the large animal species went extinct. In Australia, where animals had not yet developed the instinct to fear humans, no less than 95% of the megafauna disappeared forever.
Since early humans were relatively few and animal populations were immense – an estimated ten million mammoth carcasses have been discovered in the Siberian tundra alone – some authorities argue that large-scale extinctions must have been caused by something else, perhaps climate change or the spread of disease. As Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History put it, “You didn’t need to hunt dangerous animals very often – there were so many mammoths to go around.” Some suggest the animals' naivete played a role. "In Australia and America," Tim Flannery has stated, "the animals probably simply did not realize they were supposed to run away."
Among the vanished were some truly remarkable creatures, animals that would require careful management if they still roamed the earth. Imagine ground sloths peering into upstairs windows, tortoises the size of small cars, six-meter lizards basking beside the highways of Western Australia. Alas, they are gone, and our world is impoverished. Today, only four species of megafauna (weighing one ton or more) survive on land: elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and giraffes. But never in tens of millions of years has life on Earth been so meager and so tame.
The question remains: were the Stone Age and recent extinctions part of the same catastrophic event – is the arrival of humankind, in short, bad news for the rest of life? Tragically, it very well may be. According to David Raup, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, the Earth has, throughout its history, experienced an average extinction rate of approximately one species per year. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, in "The Sixth Extinction," suggest that human-caused extinctions may now be occurring at a rate 120,000 times higher.
In the mid-1990s, Australian naturalist Tim Flannery, currently director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, began to be struck by how little we knew about so many extinct, including recently extinct, species. “Everywhere you look, there were gaps in the record—either incomplete, like the dodo, or simply nonexistent,” he told me in Melbourne in early 2002.
Flannery enlisted the help of his friend Peter Schouten, an Australian artist. Together, they systematically investigated the world’s major museum collections to determine what had disappeared, what was missing, and what was simply unknown. They spent four years gleaning information from old pelts, malodorous specimens, antique paintings, written accounts—whatever they could find. Schouten then rendered each animal as accurately as possible in life-size illustrations, and Flannery wrote the accompanying text. The result was a book called "A Gap in Nature," the most complete – and, it must be said, most poignant – record of animal extinctions of the last three hundred years.
Some animals, despite having comparatively plentiful documentation, are sometimes left unstudied for years, or simply forgotten. Steller's sea cow, a sirenian relative of the manatee resembling a walrus, represents one of the last megafaunal extinctions. It was truly massive—adults could reach nearly nine meters in length and weigh ten tons—yet we know of it almost exclusively because a Russian expedition ship wrecked in 1741 on the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. In that remote, fog-bound location, a population of sea cows still thrived.
Fortunately, the expedition included a naturalist named Georg Steller, who became fascinated with the animal. "He took copious notes," Flannery said, "He even measured the length of its whiskers. The only thing he was reluctant to describe was the male sea cow's genitals—although for some reason, he delighted in describing the female's. He even brought back a piece of its hide, so we have a good idea of the texture of its skin. But we are not always so fortunate."
One thing Steller could not do was save the sea cow itself. Already hunted to near extinction, the sea cow was gradually wiped out entirely within twenty-seven years of Steller’s discovery. And there are many other creatures not even afforded that small measure of documentation. The Darling Downs hopping mouse, the Chatham Island swan, the Ascension Island flightless rail, at least five types of giant tortoise, and countless others—their names are all we shall ever know.
Flannery and Schouten found that many extinctions occurred not through malice or greed, but through a sort of grandiose stupidity. In 1894, on a windswept rock in the strait separating New Zealand’s North and South Islands, a lighthouse was built on Stephens Island. The lighthouse keeper’s cat kept bringing him unusual small birds. Ever dutiful, he sent several of them to the museum in Wellington. The curator was ecstatic: it was a surviving flightless wren – the only passerine ever discovered incapable of flight. The curator immediately set sail for the island, but by the time he arrived, the cat had killed them all. The Stephens Island wren now exists only as twelve stuffed specimens in a museum.
With the wren, at least, we have specimens. Often, it seems, we are as careless in our stewardship after a species has gone extinct as we were before. Consider the lovely Carolina parakeet, a small, vibrant green bird with a golden yellow head, once considered the most conspicuous and beautiful bird in North America. As you might expect, parrots don’t usually venture that far north. At its peak, it was abundant, second only to the passenger pigeon. But it was regarded as a pest by farmers, and was devastatingly susceptible to injury since they flew in flocks and have an incredibly odd habit of all flying up in the air at the sound of gunfire, then almost immediately returning to hover over their fallen companions.
Charles Wilson Peale, in his masterwork *American Ornithology*, written in the early 19th century, described one such encounter where he shot repeatedly at a tree full of parakeets:
> “At every discharge, though numbers fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of distress and sympathy, as entirely disarmed me.”
By the 1920s, hunted and harassed, only a handful remained, lingering in cages. The last Carolina parakeet, named Inca, died in 1918 at the Cincinnati Zoo (less than four years after the last passenger pigeon, also at the same zoo), and was dutifully stuffed. Where is poor Inca now? Nobody knows. The zoo lost the specimen.
What is most unsettling about these tales is that Peale, a man who clearly loved birds, thought nothing of slaughtering dozens of parakeets. He did so for no reason other than curiosity. For a long time, those with the strongest interest in the world’s creatures have often been the very ones most likely to contribute to their demise. It's a troubling reality.
A prime example of this, in every sense of the word, was Lionel Walter Rothschild, the Second Baron Rothschild. Heir to an immensely wealthy banking family, Rothschild was a reclusive eccentric. He spent his entire life (1868-1937) in the nursery wing of his family’s mansion in Tring, Buckinghamshire, surrounded by the furniture of his childhood—even sleeping in the cot he had used as a toddler, despite eventually weighing 135 kilograms.
His passion was natural history, and he became an obsessive collector of specimens. He dispatched armies of trained personnel—as many as 400 at a time—to every corner of the globe, scrambling over mountains and hacking through jungles to find new specimens, especially flying creatures. These acquisitions were crated or packed and shipped to Rothschild’s estate in Tring. There, Rothschild and a team of assistants cataloged, registered, and studied them exhaustively. From this, he produced a series of books, collections, and papers—over 1,200 volumes in all. Rothschild’s natural history workshop processed more than two million specimens and added over 5,000 new species to the scientific record.
Remarkably, Rothschild's specimen collecting, vast as it was, was not the largest such enterprise of the 19th century, in terms of either scale or expenditure. That honor almost certainly goes to Hugh Cuming, an earlier and equally wealthy British collector. Cuming was so devoted to specimen collection that he commissioned a large ocean-going ship and hired a full-time crew to scour the world for specimens – birds, plants, all kinds of animals, and especially shells. Among their discoveries were masses of barnacles that later became the basis of Darwin's research into reproduction.
Rothschild was, however, the most scientifically minded collector of the era, and also one of the most tragically destructive. In the 1890s, his interest turned to Hawaii, perhaps the most alluring and certainly one of the most vulnerable places on Earth. Millions of years of isolation had produced 8,800 unique species of plants and animals. Rothschild was particularly interested in the islands' colorful and rare birdlife, which were often found in very small numbers and within very small ranges.
The tragedy of so many Hawaiian birds was that they possessed a hazardous combination of qualities—they were distinctive, desirable, remarkably rare, and, sadly, often remarkably trusting. The Greater Koa Finch, an innocuous insectivorous songbird, frequently rested pensively under koa trees. However, if someone mimicked its call, it would instantly fly down to investigate. The last Greater Koa Finch was killed in 1896 by Harry Palmer, Rothschild’s most effective field man, and has never been seen since. Five years earlier, a cousin of the Greater Koa Finch, an exceedingly rare bird seen just once, the Lesser Koa Finch, was shot and killed by Rothschild himself: the victim of a single bullet, it joined his collection. In about a decade, thanks to Rothschild’s diligent collection, at least nine Hawaiian bird species disappeared, possibly more.
Rothschild was hardly alone in his near-obsessive pursuit of birds. Some others were even more callous. In 1907, when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan learned that he had shot the last three known Black Mamo, a bird discovered in the forest only ten years earlier, he said he was “thrilled” by the news.
It was, in short, a bewildering age—an age in which almost any animal that was perceived as even remotely bothersome was subject to often brutal treatment.
In 1890, New York State paid out more than one hundred bounties for mountain lions killed in the eastern mountains, even though the beleaguered cat was demonstrably on the brink of extinction. Well into the 1940s, many states across America continued to pay bounties for the killing of virtually every type of carnivorous animal. In West Virginia, college scholarships were awarded annually to those who killed the most pests – and the term "pest" was applied to virtually anything that was not either a farm animal or kept as a pet.
Perhaps no story better illustrates the era's incomprehensibility than the fate of the charming Bachman’s warbler. Native to the American South, this bird was known for its exceptionally beautiful song. But its numbers were always small, and by the 1930s, it had vanished entirely, unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, two keen birdwatchers independently stumbled upon a few surviving Bachman's warblers at widely separated locations, within two days of one another, and both promptly shot them.
This kind of extinction behavior wasn’t confined to America. In Australia, bounties were paid for the killing of Tasmanian tigers (more properly called thylacines), dog-like animals with pronounced tiger stripes on their backs – until one by one they silently died, with the very last of their kind quietly passing away in a private zoo in Hobart in 1936. Today, if you visit the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and ask to see the last of these creatures—the largest marsupial carnivore to survive into modern times—all they can show you is photographs of the animal, and sixty-one seconds of grainy old film. When the last thylacine died, it was tossed out with the weekly trash collection.
I mention all this to underscore the point that, if you were planning to appoint a species to oversee life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is headed and to record where it has been, you would not choose humanity for the task.
But the undeniable truth is that we have been chosen. By fate, by chance, by providence, or whatever else you wish to call it. As far as we know, we are the best there is. Perhaps we are the most intelligent. Perhaps we are the custodians of the universe. It is also possible that we are its worst nightmare, a depressing thought.
So lax are we in our stewardship, so indifferent have we been both during and after their existence, that we do not know how many species have gone extinct, how many are teetering on the brink, or how many will never go extinct. We simply have no idea. In his book *The Sinking Ark*, published in 1979, author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing the extinction of two species on Earth per week. By the early 1990s, he had raised that figure to nearly 600 species per week. (This includes all organisms—plants, insects, and so on, as well as animals.) Other people have estimated the number to be even higher—over 1,000 species per week. On the other hand, a 1995 report from the United Nations stated that nearly 500 species of animals and over 650 species of plants have been confirmed as extinct in the last 400 years—and cautioned that this statistic “is almost certainly an underestimate,” particularly for tropical species. But there is also a small contingent who believe that most extinction data is significantly exaggerated.
The reality is: we do not know. We have absolutely no idea. We do not know when we began doing many of the things that we do. We do not know what we are currently doing. We do not know the effects of our current actions on the future. All we know is that we have only one planet and only one species capable of altering its fate. As Edward O. Wilson put it with unparalleled succinctness in his book *The Diversity of Life*: “One planet, one experiment.”
If this book has a message, it is that we are extraordinarily lucky to be here—and by "we," I mean all living things. The attainment of any kind of life in this universe is a miracle. But as humans, we are doubly blessed. We not only enjoy the gift of existence but also possess the unique ability to appreciate that existence and even, in myriad ways, to enhance it. It is a skill we have only just begun to grasp.
In a relatively short period, we have attained a place of prominence. In behavioral terms—that is, being able to speak, create art, organize complex and rewarding pursuits—modern humans have been around for only one-ten-thousandth of the Earth’s history – a brief instant. But even such a brief existence has required an almost endless series of good breaks.
We are, indeed, only just getting started. The trick, of course, is to ensure that we start off well, and to ensure that we continue forever. And that, almost certainly, will require more than just good luck.