Subject: NY Times Article: Celebrating Vanished Birds
Date: Aug 9 10:35:49 2001
From: LGAEBE at msn.com - LGAEBE at msn.com


Hello Tweeters,
Here's an interesting, but long story from the New York Times of interest to birders and bird lovers.
Lydia Gaebe Bishop
Kent, WA
***********
Celebrating Vanished Birds, Comical or Exquisite

By CAROL KAESUK YOON



>From what was once a grand spectacle of millions, by some counts
billions, of birds darkening the skies over North America, the wild
hordes of passenger pigeons came down to this: one bird named
Martha, the last of her species, an aging, captive widow waiting
out her days on earth in a stone cage in Cincinnati.

Martha finally breathed her last on Sept. 1, 1914, at a zoo (not
under the tender watch of eminent ornithologists, as legend would
have it, but alone in her cage). In so doing, she left scientists
with an unusual bequest: the knowledge, very nearly to the hour, of
when one particular species became extinct.

The last survivors of nearly all the world's extinct species have
taken their leave in absolute anonymity, even in relatively recent
times. So it is a testament to the devotion inspired in humans by
birds that the named and treasured Martha is not unique among her
kind.

In the 1930's, the loss of the wild and well-watched Mr. H. H.,
for heath hen ? also affectionately known as Booming Ben for his
loud, rolling mating call ? marked the end of this prairie chicken
subspecies that made its last stand on Martha's Vineyard.

And sometime in February 1918, a bird known as Incas, the last
documented Carolina parakeet, also died. Thus ended the reign of
this native North American bird, which once flew from the Great
Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and was so numerous that it was a pest
to colonial farmers.

So it is with birds, which must certainly vie for the title of
best- studied organisms on earth. Their losses are precisely
documented, from the minutiae of sole survivors to the patterns of
extinctions of birds and their ancient relatives over the eons of
geological time.

Among the species lost in just the last several hundred years are
creatures ranging from the nearly fantastical and exquisite to the
comical. Their pictures and histories have been collected in a
newly revised book that is in itself an ode to the remarkable
record on birds, the obsessively researched and beautifully
illustrated "Extinct Birds" by Errol Fuller, an artist (Cornell
University Press).

But there is more to this examination of the dead than just the
dolorous details. In many ways a consideration of these creatures
provides an inventory of what to avoid, with human hunters topping
the list, to head off extinction.

Strutting about, huge and spectacular, turns out to rank high on
the list of dangerous activities. One of the world's most
unbelievable yet quite real creatures, the elephant bird, may well
have been done in by its sheer obviousness. Ten feet tall and
weighing half a ton, these flightless, bipedal behemoths ? worthy
of their superlative Latin name, Aepyornis maximus ? were rather
like Big Bird in appearance.

Clomping about the island of Madagascar, probably as recently as
the 1600's, the elephant birds laid eggs that rivaled in size any
egg ever known. Intact fossil specimens are occasionally found even
today. Over a foot across, these masterpieces of motherhood could
have held the goods from 7 ostrich eggs, 180 chicken eggs or 12,000
hummingbird eggs.

Being exceedingly beautiful, or even notably clever, proved deadly
for some other bird species. Some parrots, parakeets and macaw
species, spectacularly plumed and sometimes intelligent enough to
provide chatty company for humans, have vanished, collected for use
as pets or as fashion accessories. Carolina parakeets, for example,
were sought not just for their colorful feathers; their small
corpses were used whole by milliners to adorn women's hats.

Another species among the sorely missed by ornithologists is the
great auk, a black-and-white wonder of a bird that stood two and a
half feet tall. Like a penguin, the great auk was so definitively
aquatic that while standing on land it looked simultaneously regal
and ridiculous.

Easily caught out of the water and desired both for feathers and
food, the great auk also had the misfortune of producing eggs that
were nothing less than works of art. These grand teardrop-shaped
eggs, the color of aging parchment, measured just under half a foot
in length. Adorned in a kind of mad inky scribble, they looked like
the work of an ornithological Jackson Pollock or perhaps a deranged
calligrapher, making them all the rage of collectors in the 1800's.

Perhaps the most famous among the dead is the dodo, a comically
squat and ungainly blob of a bird. But while the dodo committed
neither the sin of being too beautiful nor of being too tasty (one
17th-century diner described dodo meat as "offensive and of no
nourishment"), the dodo was still hunted mercilessly by humans.

The problem was that the dodo was guilty of two of the other big
no- no's. First, the dodo could not fly (never a good thing when
one has to escape humans or the carnivores that inevitably
accompany them, like cats and dogs). Second, the dodo lived on
Mauritius, a remote oceanic island ? a recipe for disaster when
hungry seafarers were looking for an easily procured, even if
barely palatable, piece of meat. Today the only remnants of dodos
once seen alive are a single decapitated head, some skins,
fragmented bits of this and that and a mismatched pair of feet.

The documentation of bird species trounced by humans goes well
beyond the deliberate records of the recent historical past so well
gathered by Mr. Fuller.

Archaeological studies by Dr. David Steadman, a curator at the
Florida Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues have shown an
even broader scale of devastation.

In the last two millenniums of human colonization of the islands
of the Pacific, some 2,000 species disappeared, nearly 20 percent
of all the world's birds. On the Hawaiian islands alone, 60 bird
species found nowhere else became extinct, their disappearances
coinciding with the appearance of humans, marked in the fossil
record by, among other things, the advent of trash heaps.

But even looking back 2,000 years can seem myopic when one ponders
the fact that many evolutionary biologists consider birds to be the
only living members of the otherwise extinct dinosaur group. The
way birds and dinosaurs cluster together on the tree of life
requires that biologists recognize the entire group as a single
entity. Such newfangled thinking, accepted by many, also demands
that this single entity be called a single name ? in this case, the
dinosaurs.

In the same way that gazing at pinpricks of ancient starlight in
the endless night sky can make one's woes seem daintily trivial,
the view of the birds as the dinosaurs that made it through the
great Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction puts the loss of a Martha in a
rather different light.

Birds might be viewed not as dwindling weaklings, but as hearty
survivors that jumped (or perhaps flew) through a gargantuan hoop
65 million years ago, a mass extinction that even Tyrannosaurus rex
could not span. Put another way, perhaps the remaining birds can be
seen as evidence that the dinosaurs have not become extinct ? not
just yet anyway.

Yet another way to look at the loss of these well-studied birds is
to consider the extinction statistics. Biodiversity scientists,
like Dr. E. O. Wilson of Harvard, know them well, and are able to
roll off the endless and endlessly depressing litany of numbers of
acres and species lost, day by day, moment by moment. At last look,
a study of the threatened species of the world by an organization
known as BirdLife International has estimated that one in eight
bird species is at risk of extinction over the next century.

But such faceless and hypothetical losses of species can make even
the most earnest environmentalist's eyes glaze over. In the end, it
is the gripping tale of the demise of the species that can lay the
world's biggest egg, or, better yet, the charisma of the Marthas
and Booming Bens, that is moving enough to drag busy people away
from their daily tasks to consider the losses. (For a fascinating
and detailed accounting of Martha, Incas and others, read "Hope Is
the Thing With Feathers" by Christopher Cokinos, a poet, just
issued in paperback by Warner Books.)

Clearly the vast knowledge available on birds can drown a bird
enthusiast in grim detail, but the keenness with which birds are
observed can also be cheering.

In the past 20 years, more new bird species have been discovered
than have become extinct. Even better, some species consigned to
the ranks of the extinct have turned up again, feeding the hope
that there may yet exist wild corners undiscovered and untrammeled.

For example, Jerdon's courser, a bird resembling a killdeer, had
not been seen in India for 80 years and was, by all accounts, gone.
What scientists did not know was that the bird is nocturnal. Like a
deer caught in the headlights, one was spotlighted by a birder's
flashlight in the 1980's and thereby instantaneously plucked out of
the morgue.

A bird from the Philippines known as the four-colored flowerpecker
had also been assumed to be extinct, as there was thought to be no
suitable habitat left on its island of Cebu. Yet in recent years, a
patch of forest has since been found with flowerpeckers within.

The truth is that birds can be among the more difficult animals to
survey. Mammalogists can trap their prey and entomologists
typically net their quarry, providing the opportunity for a good,
long look. Luckiest of all are the botanists, who can inspect a
plant, take time out for lunch and inspect it once again, sure that
it will still be there.

Those in search of birds, however, often enjoy only the briefest
of sightings. In less than a second, they may have gotten their one
and only shadowy glimpse of a flash of feathers, or heard perhaps a
nondescript chirp.

As a result, a shroud of mystery surrounds even those birds
presumed by most to have long since disappeared, like the
ivory-billed woodpecker of the Southern swamps. Sightings continue
of this largest North American woodpecker, nearly two feet tall,
but they are all unconfirmed. Whether this is wishful thinking,
hoaxes or the real deal remains unclear. A pair of ivory-billed
woodpeckers was most recently reported to be seen on April Fools'
Day in 1999. Hope and the rumors remain.

Some birders have built up such a mountain of hope that they
believe that moas ? large, ostrichlike birds ? may still survive
unnoticed in New Zealand. So strong is the love of birds that it
can keep the ever-optimistic imagining these hard-to-hide titans
still lurk in some hidden corner, despite all evidence, and even
despite the lamentations of a popular New Zealand song:
No moa, no moa,

In old Ao-tea-roa.

Can't get 'em.

They've et
'em.

They've gone and there ain't no moa.



http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/science/life/07EXTI.html?ex=998356745&ei=1&en=c84e2ac402c9ca41



Lydia Gaebe

Life is a sit-com on the reality side of the tube. I know. I live it.
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