by Bill Bryson
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 rock called Stephens Island in the tempestuous strait between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, 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 grew very excited because the bird was a relic species of flightless wrens—the only example of a flightless perching bird ever found anywhere. He set off at once for the island, but by the time he got there the cat had killed them all. Twelve stuffed museum species of the Stephens Island flightless wren are all that now exist.
A pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand’s Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper’s cat. (Credit 30.5)
At least we have those. All too often, it turns out, we are not much better at looking after species after they have gone than we were before they went. Take the case of the lovely Carolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking and beautiful bird ever to live in North America—parrots don’t usually venture so far north, as you may have noticed—and at its peak it existed in vast numbers, exceeded only by the passenger pigeon. But the Carolina parakeet was also considered a pest by farmers and easily hunted 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 Ornithology, written in the early nineteenth century, Charles Willson Peale describes an occasion in which he repeatedly empties a shotgun into a tree in which they roost:
At each successive discharge, though showers of them 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 sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the birds had been so relentlessly hunted that only a few remained alive in captivity. The last one, named Inca, died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 (not quite four years after the last passenger pigeon died in the same zoo) and was reverently stuffed. And where would you go to see poor Inca now? Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.
What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so. It is a truly astounding fact that for a very long time the people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.
No-one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild. Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was a strange and reclusive fellow. He lived his entire life, from 1868 to 1937, in the nursery wing of his home at Tring, in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhood—even sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed 135 kilograms.
Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several. (Credit 30.6)
His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects. He sent hordes of trained men—as many as four hundred at a time—to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountains and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens—particularly things that flew. These were crated or boxed up and sent back to Rothschild’s estate at Tring, where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged and analysed everything that came before them, producing a constant stream of books, papers and monographs—some twelve hundred in all. Altogether, Rothschild’s natural history factory processed well over two million specimens and added five thousand species of creature to the scientific archive.
Remarkably, Rothschild’s collecting efforts were neither the most extensive nor the most generously funded of the nineteenth century. That title almost certainly belongs to a slightly earlier but also very wealthy British collector named Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large ocean-going ship and employed a crew to sail the world full-time picking up whatever they could find—birds, plants, animals of all types, and especially shells. It was his unrivalled collection of barnacles that passed to Darwin and served as the basis for his seminal study.
The staggeringly acquisitive Hugh Cuming, who kept a ship at sea more or less constantly searching for new additions for his collections. (Credit 30.7)
However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the most temptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest to Rothschild were the islands’ colourful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very small populations inhabiting extremely specific ranges.
The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable and rare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killed by Rothschild’s ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot for Rothschild’s collection. Altogether, during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensive collecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more.
The male Pitangus sulphuratus, or great kiskadee, collected for Baron Rothschild in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1918. The bird became one of two million specimens in Rothschild’s private collection. (Credit 30.8)
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 Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird 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 if it was deemed the least bit intrusive. In 1890, New York State paid out over one hundred bounties for eastern mountain lions, even though it was clear that the much-harassed creatures were on the brink of extermination. Right up until the 1940s many states continued to pay bounties for almost any kind of predatory creature. West Virginia gave out an annual college scholarship to whoever brought in the greatest number of dead pests—and “pests” was liberally interpreted to 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 the lovely little Bachman’s warbler. A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled 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 separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.
The impulse to exterminate was by no means exclusively American. In Australia, bounties were 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 a private Hobart zoo in 1936. Go to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery today and ask to see the last of this species—the only large carnivorous marsupial to live into modern times—and all they can show
you are photographs and 61 seconds of old film footage. Upon its death, the last surviving thylacine was thrown out with the weekly trash.
A thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, shown with the man who shot it in 1869. The last of the species died in a Hobart zoo in 1936. (Credit 30.9)
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when they are alive and when they are not, we have no idea—really none at all—about how many things have died off permanently, or may do so soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in his book The Sinking Ark, Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he 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 well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under five hundred for animals and slightly over six hundred and fifty for plants—while allowing that this was “almost certainly an underestimate,” particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated.
The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doing many of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, 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, one experiment.”
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here—and by “we” I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp.
We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviourally modern humans have been around for no more than about 0.0001 per cent of Earth’s history—almost nothing, really—but even existing for 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 find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a lot more than lucky breaks.
Earth as viewed from the Apollo 16 spacecraft in 1972. It is remarkable and sobering to think that the only known life in the universe—the only life there may be—exists beneath those frail wisps of cloud. (Credit 30.10)
NOTES
Chapter 1: How to Build a Universe
1 Protons are so small that: Bodanis, E = mc2, p.111.
2 Now pack into that tiny, tiny space: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.254.
3 The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years: New York Times, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives Up Secrets,” 12 Feb. 2003, p.1; US News and World Report, “How Old Is the Universe?,” 18–25 Aug. 1997, pp.34–6.
4 there came the moment known to science as t = 0: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.86.
5 They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean: Lawrence M. Krauss, “Rediscovering Creation,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.50.
6 an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.153.
7 They had found the edge of the universe: Scientific American, “Echoes from the Big Bang,” Jan. 2001, pp.38–43.
8 Penzias and Wilson’s finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.101.
9 about 1 per cent of the dancing static you see: Gribbin, In the Beginning, p.18.
10 “These are very close to religious questions”: New York Times, “Before the Big Bang, There Was … What?,” 22 May 2001, p. F1.
11 or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths: Alan Lightman, “First Birth,” in Shore (ed.), Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p.13.
12 He was thirty-two years old and, by his own admission, had never: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.216.
13 The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest: Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.89.
14 doubling in size every 10−34 seconds: Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, p.242.
15 it changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger: New Scientist, “The First Split Second,” 31 March 2001, pp.27–30.
16 perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars, galaxies and other complex systems: Scientific American, “The First Stars in the Universe,” Dec. 2001, pp.64–71; New York Times, “Listen Closely: From Tiny Hum Came Big Bang,” 30 April 2001, p.1.
17 “Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts”: quoted by Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p.14.
18 He makes an analogy with a very large clothing store: Discover, “Why Is There Life?,” Nov. 2000, p.66.
19 with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.147.
20 In the long term, gravity may turn out to be a little too strong: Financial Times, “Riddle of the Flat Universe,” 1–2 July 2000; Economist, “The World is Flat after All,” 20 May 2000, p.97.
21 the galaxies are rushing apart: Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p.26.
22 Scientists just assume that we can’t really be the centre: Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.47.
23 This visible universe—the universe we know and can talk about: Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.13.
24 the number of light years to the edge of this larger, unseen universe: Rees, Just Six Numbers, p.147.
Chapter 2: Welcome to the Solar System
1 From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars: New Yorker, “Among Planets,” 9 Dec. 1996, p.84.
2 “less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground”: Sagan, Cosmos, p.261.
3 In the summer of that year, a young astronomer named James Christy: US Naval Observatory press release, “20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto’s Moon Charon,” 22 June 1998.
4 Pluto was much smaller than anyone had supposed: Atlantic Monthly, “When Is a Planet Not a Planet?,” Feb. 1998, pp.22–34.
5 In the words of the astronomer Clark Chapman: quoted on PBS Nova, “Doomsday Asteroid,” first broadcast 29 April 1997.
6 it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again: US Naval Observatory press release, “20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto’s Moon Charon,” 22 June 1998.
7 after a year’s patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto: Tombaugh paper, “The Struggles to Find the Ninth Planet,” from NASA website.
8 A few astronomers continue to think there may yet be a Planet X out there: Economist, “X marks the spot,” 16 Oct. 1999, p.83.
9 The Kuiper belt was actually theorized by an astronomer named F. C. Leonard in 1930: Nature, “Almost Planet X,” 24 May 2001, p.423.
10 Only on 11 February 1999 did Pluto return to the outside lane: Economist, “Pluto Out in the Cold,” 6 Feb. 1999, p.85.
11 as of early December 2002 had found over six hundred additional Trans-Neptunian Objects: N
ature, “Seeing Double in the Kuiper Belt,” 12 Dec. 2002, p.618.
12 about the same as a lump of charcoal: Nature, “Almost Planet X,” 24 May 2001, p.423.
13 now flying away from us at about 56,000 kilometres an hour: PBS News Hour transcript, 20 Aug. 2002.
14 but all the visible stuff in it … fills less than a trillionth of the available space: Natural History, “Between the Planets,” Oct. 2001, p.20.
15 The total now is at least ninety: New Scientist, “Many Moons,” 17 March 2001, p.39; Economist, “A Roadmap for Planet-Hunting,” 8 April 2000, p.87.
16 we won’t reach the Oort cloud for another … ten thousand years: Sagan and Druyan, Comet, p.198.
17 and probably result in the deaths of all the crew: New Yorker, “Medicine on Mars,” 14 Feb. 2000, p.39.
18 so the comets drift in a stately manner, moving at only about 220 miles an hour: Sagan and Druyan, Comet, p.195.
19 The most perfect vacuum ever created by humans is not as empty as the emptiness of interstellar space: Ball, H2O, p.15.
