The Vanished Multitudes in the Penny Press!

The May-June issue of Audubon has a cover story, “From Billions to None” by Barry Yeoman, that takes advantage of a centennial anniversary in its own way every bit as saddening as that of the opening of the First World War: the death in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 of Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon.

Yeoman does a smart, concise job of describing the mind-bogglingly huge flocks of passenger pigeons that once darkened the skies of America, and he also does fine reporting about the holocaust of murder that overtook even such enormous numbers:

Even as the pigeons’ numbers crashed, “there was virtually no effort to save them,” says Joel Greenberg, a research associate with Chicago’s Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Field Museum. “People just slaughtered them more intensely. They killed them until the very end.”

But for all the strong prose and excellent reporting in Yeoman’s piece, my bet is that only one paragraph will garner responses from readers:

The most controversial effort inspired by the extinction is a plan to bring the passenger pigeon back to life. In 2012 Long Now Foundation president Stewart Brand (a futurist best known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog) and genetic entrepreneur Ryan Phelan cofounded Revive & Restore, a project that plans to use the tools of molecular biology to resurrect extinct animals. The project’s “flagship” species is the passenger pigeon, which Brand learned about from his mother when he was growing up in Illinois. Revive & Restore hopes to start with the band-tailed pigeon, a close relative, and “change its genome into the closest thing to the genetic code of the passenger pigeon that we can make,” says research consultant Ben Novak. The resulting creature will not have descended from the original species. “[But] if I give it to a team of scientists who have no idea that it was bio-engineered, and I say, ‘Classify this,’ if it looks and behaves like a passenger pigeon, the natural historians are going to say, ‘This is Ectopistes migratorius.’ And if the genome plops right next to all the other passenger pigeon genomes you’ve sequenced from history, then the geneticist will have to say, ‘This is a passenger pigeon. It’s not a band-tailed pigeon.’”

It amazes me, whenever such delusional sentiments crop up in the accounts of the Penny Press. Of course such bizarrely reconstituted quasi-birds won’t be passenger pigeons, no matter what scientific experts might say while peering context-free into their microscopes. And even if those quasi-birds could be genetically manipulated to be identical to the birds humanity wiped out, what about their celebrated numbers? Those numbers can’t possibly be reconstituted – modern farmers, ranchers, and city-dwellers, to say nothing of the air traffic industry wouldn’t stand for billion-strong flocks of anything. And how do we know that billion-strong flocks weren’t an integral part of being a passenger pigeon? And how would those reconstituted passenger pigeons know what it meant to be a passenger pigeon?

It’s as one of Yeoman’s sources says: ecosystems move on.

(Happily, there are plenty of living, breathing ecosystems featured in this great issue, including an article on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula that concentrates on the wildlife being threatened there; the article is full of wonderful photos, including one of a yellow-headed caracara cleaning the ear of a supine and quite visibly blissful tapir … an oddly familiar-looking creature ….)