by Scott Leslie
100
UNDER
100
THE RACE TO SAVE THE WORLD’s
RAREST LIVING THINGS
SCOTT LESLIE
FOREWORD BY STUART PIMM
In memory of Beverly Ann Leslie
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
A NOTE ON THE IUCN (INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR CONSERVATION OF NATURE)
SPECIES FEATURED IN THIS BOOK
PART ONE: TROUBLE WITH THE NUMBERS: UNDER 100
OUR CLOSEST KIN: MAMMALS
FRAYING FEATHERS: BIRDS
RAVAGED AND RARE: REPTILES
AMBUSHED: AMPHIBIANS
TROUBLED WATERS: FISH
UNEXPECTED ENDANGERMENT: INSECTS
LOST FROM THE FOREST: ENDANGERED TREES AND OTHER PLANTS
PART TWO: LIVING BY THE GRACE OF HUMANITY: GONE FROM THE WILD BUT NOT EXTINCT
PART THREE: COMEBACKS: UNDER 100 AND BACK AGAIN
EPILOGUE
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RECOMMENDED READING
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Photo Insert
About the Author
HOW YOU CAN HELP
PHOTO CREDITS
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
They have such strange names. Wollemi pine. Gilbert’s potoroo. Greater bamboo lemur. Iranian Gorgan Mountain salamander. Nene. Bachman’s warbler. And they’re so unfamiliar, too. These aren’t species most of us know. Is anything really at stake as they hang on to survival by only a thread?
The answer is an emphatic yes. Some of the species are intrinsically beautiful. All of them live in special places. Their declines shout out at our carelessness with our planet. And, some show that we can bring species back from the very edge, that we need not, indeed must not, accept extinction as an option.
I saw my first Iberian lynx after midnight at the Coto Doñana in Spain, walking along the edge of a lake in the light of a full moon. The memory is still vivid. It looked at me just as cats do, with complete contempt, for it belonged there and I didn’t. Cats appeal to us in deeply interesting ways. It was a lovely animal.
So, too, are Przewalski’s horses, though I’ve only seen them in zoos, where they are everyone’s favourites. Lemurs, too, are appealing. Most mammals are, but being cute isn’t enough.
What unites the creatures, both large and small, in this book is where they live. The seven billion of us are destroying our forests and grasslands—almost all terrestrial habitats—and making a mess of rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Habitat destruction is the major cause of species extinction. Not all habitats are equal. Some are very much more vulnerable to our actions than others. The species mentioned herein teach us that.
I saw my first nene at Slimbridge, a successful captive breeding facility in England, a world away from their homes in the Hawaiian Islands. The nene I remember most were wild ones—a small flock that descended through the mist as I hiked across Haleakala on Maui. They landed in front of me as grey fog gave way to brilliant blue skies and revealed the surreal purples, yellows, and browns of the caldera. Wild, remote, beautiful—and how can anything live in such a strange place? These birds and more than 100 others, 1,000 species of plants, and countless insects once thrived only in the Hawaiian Islands, adapted to those unique conditions. Note the past tense: so many Hawaiian species are now extinct.
I watched the movie Avatar and enjoyed its creativity but spent the next day watching pteropods—snails that literally fly with their feet through the ocean. Biological diversity—”biodiversity” for short—is far stranger than fiction!
Iran conjures up an image of deserts and, when I was there, the memory of days on rough, dusty roads. We crossed northward from the deserts of eastern Iran toward the Caspian Sea. In minutes, wet air replaced dry, and lush moist forests took over. In a cave nearby was the Gorgan Mountain salamander, living in a pool, in a sliver of wet forest south of the Caspian, in the middle of deserts and grasslands that stretch 16,000 kilometres from the Sahara to Mongolia.
Nature has amazing inventiveness and recognizes the places where these species live as being exceptional. Alas, this book’s species are rare because we do not. So many of them are on the edge because we have been careless. The Guam rail used to be common. Then a snake accidentally introduced to Guam ate it—and all the other birds on Guam—to extinction. Goats ate the vegetation off Floreana Island in the Galapagos, so the mockingbird that lived there survives only on small offshore islets. This mockingbird was one of four species, each living on a different island, that made Darwin first think about adaptation in the Theory of Evolution.
That so many aquatic species are included in this book testifies to the wretched state of the world’s rivers and lakes. Not even the world’s oceans are pristine.
Right whales were “right” because they were close to shore, easy to kill, and floated when harpooned. They almost disappeared because we lacked the wisdom to manage them sustainably. Or, for that matter, to anticipate that there is now a flourishing whaling industry where people shoot whales with digital cameras, not harpoons, and it generates more income than the first whaling industry ever did.
That the Amsterdam albatross, living on a remote island in the southern Indian Ocean, is in this book is further testimony to our human abilities to destroy nature in even the most lonely parts of the planet.
Above all, this book is about hope. Yes, there is bad news, for most endangered species don’t even get a mention here. Many may be unknown. We may drive many species to extinction before ever giving them names. Yet there are successes. I have seen nene in the wild. With colleagues, I released the first captive-bred Guam rail back into the wild. With other ecotourists, I’ve watched right whales and whooping cranes, been thrilled by the story of the crested ibis, inspired by the man who saved the cahow, and will get to see Przewalski’s horse in the wild one day.
Extinctions at the present rate—my research shows them running at 100 to 1,000 times faster than expected—are unacceptable. This book also shows that they are not inevitable.
—Stuart Pimm
Dr. Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University. For his work in conservation, he was awarded the 2006 Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 2010 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.
INTRODUCTION
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again. —WILLIAM BEEBE
“Dead as a dodo.” “Gone the way of the dodo.” This giant flightless pigeon has become synonymous with failure. Such clichés imply that the bird couldn’t cut it in an evolutionary sense; it was unfit, and didn’t deserve to survive, so its extinction is somehow acceptable. But the reality is that the dodo (like all organisms in healthy, natural ecosystems) was anything but unfit. In fact, archeological evidence tells us the one-metre-tall birds were once incredibly abundant on their 600-square-kilometre island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
Evolution had done its job well with the dodo, adapting it beautifully to its environment. It thrived in harmony with its surroundings, reaching a peak population of possibly a half million birds; this is the epitome of a successful species, not a failed one. But time was not on its side. Having lived for millennia without natural predators, dodos had no need of an instinctive fear of anything, so they we
re very tame. This made them easy pickings for the first humans they had ever encountered, Portuguese sailors who stopped by the island in the early 16th century to gather food for the onward leg of their journeys.
Following on the heels of the Portuguese, who never permanently settled Mauritius, the Dutch arrived in 1638, staying for good. With them came rats, pigs, cats, and dogs, a marauding army of dodo destruction loosed from the holds of ships onto a pristine tropical island that was set with a sumptuous buffet of easy-to-obtain food. The decline of the dodo was swift. By 1680, it was gone for good, done in not by its own shortcomings but by unnatural forces against which it had no defence. Such a fate has befallen many other species in the past and likely will more in the future. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Even against tremendous odds, extinctions aren’t inevitable, as you will discover in these stories of the world’s rarest living things.
Inhabiting every continent and coming in every size, shape, and colour, the 100 species and subspecies in this book range from a bumblebee to a 50-tonne whale, from a diminutive orchid to a tree 40 metres tall. With current populations in the double or even single digits, these mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, trees, and flowers teeter on the brink of extinction (as you will see, a few lucky ones have made stunning comebacks—because somebody cared—and now number over 100). Though just a tiny sliver of the millions of species in existence, their loss would diminish the value of life on earth.
The narratives associated with these rarest-of-the-rare beings are often unexpected and bizarre: a Victorian naturalist bronco-busting an ancient reptile; China’s Great Leap Forward; Russian piracy on the high seas; a flock of birds guiding Christopher Columbus to a New World; a “mythical” giant marsupial; the criminal madness of a French scientist; a peek over a wall that saved a species—nearly all of them taking place in far-flung, exotic, and often threatened places. Of course, as they have with all the earth’s living things, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, natural climate change, asteroid impacts, and disease, in concert with natural selection, have also played a part in the evolutionary paths of these organisms throughout the ages.
Now a new era of life on earth has begun. It is known as the Anthropocene (the age of Homo sapiens), and it indicates our role as the dominant global force, surpassing all natural ones. The seven billion of us are driving the decline of an immense variety of living things through habitat destruction, pollution, overhunting, overfishing, invasive species, and man-made climate change. So, as with the dodo, let’s not blame the species themselves.
Back on Mauritius, the loss of the dodo in 1680 was just the beginning of a spate of extinctions. Other species would soon disappear, 13 in all: two giant tortoises, a giant skink, a blind snake, two ducks, a parrot and a parakeet, a night heron, and an owl, among others, would eventually be wiped out as a result of hunting, introduced predators, and forest destruction. Things weren’t much better for those species that did survive. For example, not so long ago, the populations of the Mauritius kestrel, the pink pigeon, and the echo parakeet could each be counted on one’s fingers and toes (on one hand, in the case of the kestrel). Three living treasures were poised to disappear from the world forever.
Speaking of treasures, most of us recognize how precious the ones that have been created by humanity throughout history are. As a civilization, we’ve toiled to preserve and protect many great works, such as the Angkor Wats and the Mona Lisas of the world, not to mention countless pieces of art, literature, music, and artifacts which have meaning for us. As grim as the loss of any one of these would be, however, we could recreate it, at least in facsimile, within our lifetimes. But living things are treasures of a different kind, the result of thousands, millions, or billions of years of evolution (and they are equally precious if you believe they are God’s creations). We cannot recreate even the simplest single-celled organism, and we certainly can’t wait around for nature to make another one for us. So, why not preserve and protect threatened living masterpieces as we would our own? This is exactly what some people on Mauritius and many others around the world are doing. And because of it, the future is looking brighter for the island’s kestrel, pink pigeon, and echo parakeet, plus a host of the earth’s other animals and plants.
MAURITIUS KESTREL
One of the great triumphs of 20th-century conservation has been the virtual resurrection of the Mauritius kestrel, a diminutive falcon found nowhere else on earth. Centuries of deforestation for sugar cane plantation and lumber had destroyed this tiny raptor’s habitat; introduced rats, crab-eating macaque monkeys, mongoose, and feral cats preyed on eggs and young; and finally, DDT sprayed in the 1950s and 1960s to combat malarial mosquitoes poisoned its body and thinned its eggshells. A species can only take so much, so by 1974 there were only four Mauritius kestrels left, just one of them female. It was considered the rarest bird in the world.
About the size of a blue jay, this forest-dwelling brown and white mottled falcon was probably never very abundant, given the limited area of its small island home. Its diet is similar to other species of kestrels around the world, eating a variety of small prey, including geckos, insects, songbirds, and introduced mice and shrews. The female lays two to five eggs in natural cavities in volcanic rock cliffs or in tree holes, which she incubates for about a month. Since its recovery, the Mauritius kestrel has also frequently nested in artificial nesting boxes that have been provided as part of the recovery effort.
The species might not have been saved had it not been for the dedicated work of Carl Jones, a Welsh conservationist first sent to the island by the International Council for Bird Preservation (now BirdLife International) in the late 1970s to close down their project to save the Mauritius kestrel. Pessimism about the fate of the bird was understandable: the effort had had little success since it began less than a decade earlier; the species was no better off. But once he arrived, Jones refused to give up on the kestrel, stayed in Mauritius, and began working with the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in 1985. They used a captive breeding technique new to Mauritius, known as double or multiple clutching, where the first clutch of eggs is taken from the nest to be artificially hatched and the young reared in captivity before being released into the wild. This forces the female to lay a second clutch, which she raises naturally, doubling her reproductive output. By the early 1990s, Jones and his Mauritian Wildlife Foundation had developed a successful captive breeding program.
Driven by his unflinching commitment to saving the species (even as a young boy in Wales he bred native kestrels), Jones helped increase its population from just 4 to over 200 in the early 1990s. Once again, the diminutive falcons could be seen flashing through what was left of the island’s subtropical evergreen forests—especially those in the Black River Gorges area in the southwest part of the island. So successful was the recovery effort that the captive breeding program was ended when the population reached a self-sustaining 300 birds in 1994, the same year the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the official global authority on threatened species and more commonly known as the IUCN, downlisted the species to the Vulnerable category of its Red List of Threatened Species.
Since then, the Mauritius kestrel has rebounded even farther on its own, and today the population stands at around the 1,000 mark, a number that biologists feel might be about the maximum sustainable, given the amount of suitable habitat left for the kestrels on the island. Future plans include translocating a number of birds to islands around Mauritius and to the island of Réunion, whose own endemic kestrel went extinct some 300 years ago. As for Carl Jones? He remained in Mauritius and would be a key factor in the survival of the pink pigeon and the echo parakeet.
PINK PIGEON
Despite the kestrel’s successful recovery, only 9 of the nearly 30 native bird species that once lived on Mauritius survived, so it was no time for Jones and the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to rest on their laurels. The once abundant pink pigeon suffered from the same habitat d
estruction, introduced pests, and DDT spraying as the little raptor. In fact, the two species appeared to have declined almost in lockstep. By the mid-19th century, the pink pigeon was already rare.
Similar in size and shape to the familiar rock pigeon found on city streets around the world, the Mauritius bird is named for its distinctive pink head, neck, belly, and legs. Like other members of the dove family, the species is vegetarian, eating the seeds, fruits, and buds of the island’s native plants. It is also a devoted parent, and both females and males incubate the eggs and feed the young. Although hunting was largely to blame for the extinction of its relative the dodo (also a pigeon, albeit a giant one), it appears to have played only a minor part in the pink pigeon’s decline because its flesh was thought to be poisonous. Indeed, the pink pigeon may have occasionally made people sick, since the bird itself ingested toxic seeds that were a natural part of its diet. Ironically, this may have saved the species from being hunted to extinction long ago. Nevertheless, it was listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. By 1990, there were only 10 pink pigeons left in the wild and time was running short. The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation did everything it could to help the species recover before it was too late.
The bird’s population began to grow as the result of eradicating rats that ate its eggs, providing supplemental food to overcome a shortage of fruit and seeds in its habitat, and ramping up the reproductive output of the species by starting a captive breeding program (including multiple clutching where eggs were removed to be incubated and reared in captivity by another more common pigeon species, forcing the pink pigeon female to lay another clutch, which she reared naturally). By 2000, its situation had improved enough that the IUCN downlisted it from critically endangered to endangered. Today, there are approximately 400 of the birds living in the forests of Mauritius, and about 150 living in captivity, in aviaries on Mauritius and in dozens of zoos worldwide.