A Field Guide to Extinction

Grasshopper (Caelifera)

We 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.

O ur 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.”

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.

Fast forward to December of 1971, when a Hungarian scientist in search of snails spotted a Pinta Island tortoise, instead. Upon the tortoise’s capture and relocation, we bestowed him with a name (Lonesome George) and made him a modern “poster child” for extinction. Here he was, living proof (at least for awhile) that there is such a thing as a last representative of a species.

We have a name for them, “endlings”—a fraternity with far too many members as it is. Martha the Passenger Pigeon was a member (1914), as was Benjamin the Tasmanian tiger (1936), and Celia the Pyrenean ibex (2000). But we remember Lonesome George not only because he was the “last” but because he was just here, dying in the early morning of June 24, 2012.

T he cause of death: heart failure.

W hich admittedly, provides my heart some relief, particularly given the frequency in which we humans are the cause. Though Lonesome George’s heart failure is merely what scientists call a “proximate cause” of his species’ extinction. Had my son stepped on the last grasshopper, his step would have served as a proximate cause, too. In both of these examples, no single incident is responsible for the extinction of the species on the whole. Extinction is always more complicated than a heart attack or a stomped shoe, and to understand it fully, we must consider also the “ultimate causes” that precipitate a species’ demise.

In the case of the Pinta Island tortoise, I’m afraid we humans have a bit of blood on our hands after all. Or at least 17th century humans do, namely those who killed 200,000 or so for meat, thereby dramatically diminishing the tortoises’ total population. Add an abundance of habitat-damaging feral goats into the mix, and those remaining tortoises never stood a chance.

Except for Lonesome George, who persisted for 102 years. What did he do with himself? I wonder. How did he pass the time?

A nd equally baffling: How does a creature that sleeps 16 hours a day—well, I guess that’s how he passed the time—go undetected for over half a century?

Had no human ever stumbled upon that snoozing behemoth anywhere on Pinta Island? Had nobody spotted a shell-like rock that was actually a rock-like shell?

Of course, it’s hard to spot a creature that so often changes form, though less so when the “changes” are a result of our perception. Born a tortoise, Lonesome George soon became our symbol, and then, our spectacle, too.

I’ll concede that I am at least a little complicit in encouraging this latter transformation. But who doesn’t want to see the last of a species? To catch a glimpse when the glimpsing is good? To snap a selfie, post a picture, snag a souvenir?

W hen face-to-face with the last of any creature, doesn’t some small part of us hope to be the last face it sees? Isn’t that the story we most want to tell our grandchildren? Not that we saved the last, but that we saw it last, and to trust us when we say it was beautiful.

In the case of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, we know the last man to have seen it—or at least the last man in America with a confirmed sighting of the alleged last. This dubious honor goes to wildlife artist Don Eckelberry, who in the spring of 1944 was sent to the Singer Tract in Louisiana to draw a few pre-post-mortem sketches of what was believed to be the last of her kind. And there he found her, later describing how “her big wings cleav[ed] the air in strong, direct flight,” as she “alighted with one magnificent upward swoop.”

I, too, want desperately to find her, though since most scientists are in agreement that she’s gone (the species, that is), I know my odds are pretty slim—less than one in 15,625 according to a 2012 report in Conservation Biology. I increase my odds by taking a safer approach. I call up the Field Museum, tell them I’m writing a book on extinct birds (it’s the truth), and ask if I can see an Ivory-bill or two.

Sure, they reply.

Months later, when I arrive at the museum, I’m greeted by 33-year-old research assistant Josh Engel, who’s gracious enough to show me in drawers what I’ll never see in the wild.

He leads me to the elevator, presses the button for the “staff-only” third floor, and then, after a brief tour, directs me to the bird collections room.

Upon entering the room, the first specimen I see is hardly a specimen at all.

It’s a bust of a Dodo, its head cocked curiously toward me.

“ You don’t have any of these guys, do you?” I joke, knowing full well that the bird’s extinction predates modern preservation techniques.

“ Unfortunately no,” Josh says, handing me a pair of purple gloves as we move toward the cabinets. “But I think we’ve got a few other specimens you might find interesting.”

Stay calm, Hollars, I remind myself as we move toward the drawers, but even I know that’s wishful thinking. How am I supposed to stay calm, after all, given the many months I’d been dreaming of this bird? The many mornings I’d woken to its carmine crest, its bill of ivory, its image fading the moment I opened my eyes.

“ This is sort of our show-and-tell drawer,” Josh says, snapping me back to attention as he reaches for his keys. “It’s what we like to show visitors.”

He pulls the drawer, and the room bursts alive with color.

T here is the pink of the Roseate Spoonbill, the green of the Carolina Parakeet. And nearby, an array of blue and red-feathered birds the likes of which I’ve never seen. Placed belly up alongside the Carolina Parakeet is a rosy-chested male Passenger Pigeon, while in the far right corner of the drawer rests another bird—this one with an unmistakable ivory-colored bill.

“ So we’ve got a few extinct birds in here,” Josh says, pointing them out one after the other. “The Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker...”

There he is, I think, eyeing the bird and maintaining my composure all at once.

Josh takes the Ivory-bill specimen and places it in my hands.

“Here you go,” he says.

Suddenly I am holding him, my hands trembling beneath my purple gloves.

“Can you…would you mind snapping a photo?” I ask.

Josh takes my phone and begins snapping as I pose alongside that bird.

One day, I think, I’ll show my grandchildren.

My extended photo shoot with the Ivory-bill confirms me as a fan boy of the highest order. But it’s more complicated than that. This is my moment of quiet reckoning, my real-life anagnorisis.

I’m in love with a bird, I realize. But I’m also mourning the bird that I love.

T he photos keep coming— click, click—though after awhile, as I peer down at that lifeless thing, my smile becomes difficult to maintain.

Do not be alarmed: the tone is about to change. It has to. Because my faux-field guide doesn’t appear to be working as it should. Or rather, it’s working precisely as a field guide should: by introducing readers to species. But what good is an introduction if we know we’ll never meet?

T hankfully, field guides can serve another purpose, too, and when feeling particularly helpless, I often find myself flipping through them, desperate for some visual reminder of all that still remains. When that doesn’t work I turn to the dictionary, hopeful that words might offer a few clues to our behavior.

A nd one day, words actually do.

“Homo sapien,” I learn, comes from the Latin for “wise person.”

“Ecology,” I learn moments later, comes from the Greek for “study of house.”

T he irony being that if we were, in fact, wise people then perhaps we might more fully study our house. Or at least realize that we are not alone in living in it.

I’m reminded of a quotation from Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold who wrote that man is but “a fellow voyager with other creatures in the Odyssey of evolution, and that his captaincy of the adventuring ship conveys the power, but not necessarily the right, to discard at will among the crew.”

T here is some comfort here; after all, we’d never dare sink ourselves. But what if I told you we’d sprung a leak?

Or that our house was on fire?

W hat would it take for us to care about the death of a grasshopper?