B.J. Hollars
A Field Guide to Extinction
Grasshopper (Caelifera)
W
e buried what we couldn’t bring back, returning to the site of the slaughter— plastic shovel in tow—to scrape against the broken half of its body. What we needed was a putty knife, or a spatula—anything thin enough to find space between the sidewalk and the freshly flattened insect. My two-year-old son Henry was the cause of the flattening, and upon realizing the finality of something as simple as his footstep, he paused, crouching low to examine the creature’s insides seeping out. “What is it?” he asked. “It was a grasshopper,” I said, still scraping. “It’s dead now.” Henry’s eyes flickered, the causal relationship between shoe and dead grasshopper suddenly becoming clear to him. “He’s dead?” “Yup,” I said, shaking the creature deeper into the scoop. “Now it’s our job to bury it.” We don’t always bury our bugs, but given Henry’s role in its demise, I figured we could use a little closure. Moreover, if that grasshopper could get us talking about life, death, and the environment, then at least we could tack on some moral to its story. Our funeral procession lasted all of a hundred feet—the distance between the sidewalk and the backyard pine. Upon our arrival there, Henry dug like a dog until he’d made a hole in the earth just wide enough for our insect. I watched that creature fall from the lip of that shovel, its body folding back into the earth. “Anything you want to say?” I asked. “Poopy.” “Anything else you want to say?” He declined. His silence, coupled with a perplexed expression, led me to believe that he was embarrassed, or ashamed, or a little confused by our burial proceedings. He caught me staring and shot me a glare, his go-to response when no emotion seemed to fit. “You’re not in trouble,” I told him, our mortality lesson now complete. “It was just a grasshopper. There will be others.” Pinta Island Tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii) In 1906 the world thought it had seen its last Pinta Island tortoise. That year, the California Academy of Sciences led an expedition that yielded a total of three males, after which the search for the long-necked, leather-skinned species went cold. 18
45th Parallel