by Scott Leslie
Active during the day, blue iguanas live in rocky areas in dry scrub habitat in the interior of the island, where they find shelter in holes between rocks and in tree cavities. They used to also live near the coast, but that habitat has been eaten up by hotels and houses. Leaves, seeds, and flowers account for almost its entire diet; only rarely are small invertebrate animals eaten. About 50 of Grand Cayman’s native wild plants are found on the blue iguana’s menu, and dozens of cultivated species.
The Blue Iguana Recovery Program (BIRP), was launched in 2002. This partnership of several conservation organizations and the Cayman government had a tall order as they embarked on a project to save the nearly extinct lizard. Captive-bred young iguanas were allowed to grow for two years to give them a head start before being released into the wild. Under the volunteer leadership of Fred Burton since it began, BIRP has managed to increase the population of blue iguanas in the wild to an astonishing 250 animals living in two protected habitats on the island. So successful is the reintroduction of the lizard into these areas that adding too many more would tip the scale into an unsustainable overpopulation of the animals. Yet the project was in jeopardy of stalling in its tracks. BIRP needed more good habitat if it was going to reach its goal of 1,000 blue iguanas in the wild, living in a strong, self-sustaining population. In 2009, the government of Grand Cayman came to the rescue by giving nearly 80 hectares of its own land to be protected as blue iguana habitat. According to BIRP, if just a little more prime habitat that lies next door could be added to this, the blue iguana could very well reach a healthy, self-sustaining number in the not too distant future.
16. William Strachey, A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas (London, 1625).
17. One of the most serious threats to songbird populations worldwide is domestic and feral house cats. In the United States alone, estimates range from 500 million to over 1 billion songbirds are killed every year by nearly 100 million house cats. It’s a good idea to keep Fluffy indoors, for the sake of the birds.
EPILOGUE
Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster … One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.—LOREN EISELEY
The once-abundant little Franklin’s bumblebee lives in an area between northern California and southern Oregon, sandwiched betwixt the Sierra Cascade and the Coast Mountains. It has the smallest geographical range of any bumblebee anywhere, and the smallest population. In 1998, only 94 Franklin’s bumblebees were counted across their range. By 2004 and 2005, none were seen, despite extensive surveys. The year 2006 brought a glimmer of hope for the species with the sighting of a single bee. The promise was short-lived, however, for no Franklin’s bumblebees have been seen since. Other bee species are still relatively common in the areas where the Franklin had once lived, so the cause for its decline is a bit of a mystery.
Because pesticide use and habitat destruction don’t appear to have severely affected other bees in the area, the sudden collapse of this species may be owing to an exotic disease imported into the country on commercial domestic European bumblebees. Used for pollinating greenhouse tomatoes and peppers, some of these insects may have escaped into the wild, transmitting the disease to the native Franklin’s bumblebee, which would likely have little resistance to it.
Some might say that, as dreadful as the loss of any single species would be, it wouldn’t have any real, tangible impact on us. This may be true, for one species. But think of an airplane wing. Lose one of its rivets and the plane won’t crash. Yet a little water seeps into the empty hole, then freezes and expands, forcing apart a little bit of the sheet-metal joint, putting extra strain on surrounding rivets until they break. And so on. The process continues until sooner or later the wing falls off and the plane crashes. Species are like rivets, wings ecosystems, planes biospheres. In the words of ecologist Aldo Leopold, “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.” The possible loss of Franklin’s bumblebee, one of these “rivets,” tells just this story.
While dinosaurs were thundering across the land 130 million years ago, the flowering plants had just begun their rapid ascent to the throne of the plant kingdom. This “grassroots” revolution would change the face of our planet forever. The flowering plants, or angiosperms as they are known, would quickly wrap the globe in a multi-hued cloak of green. In a geological blink of an eye, they became the dominant life forms on land. Broad-leafed trees, herbs, flowers, shrubs, bushes, and grasses dominated the earth by the time dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.
Scientists are still puzzled over exactly why angiosperms came to dominate so quickly. Even Charles Darwin said they were “an abominable mystery.” The latest thinking, however, is that the flowering plants only took off once they had evolved a pollinating relationship with bees, butterflies, beetles, birds, bats, and many others. This gave angiosperms an efficient way to reproduce, and a leg up on the more primitive conifers and ferns, which depended on the random movement of wind and water to distribute their seeds.
Darwin may not have figured out why flowering plants had taken over the world so quickly, but he did understand the unique relationships between plants and pollinators. In 1862, he saw a museum specimen of the Madagascar star orchid. This flower was unusual in that it had a tube, 25 centimetres long, at the bottom of which sat a pool of rich nectar. He predicted there must be a moth living in Madagascar with a proboscis of roughly the same length that pollinated the orchid. Forty-one years later he was proven right when the moth wielding such an appendage was discovered. There are many such exclusive bonds between one plant and one pollinator species. Most pollinators aren’t choosy at all, however, and will visit a variety of flowering plants. Wild bees, the most important group of pollinators on earth, are mostly generalists.
Watch any bumblebee buzzing in a meadow. She (the workers are always females) feverishly zips from one flower to the next, poking her body into each in search of nectar. Every time she does this, some pollen sticks to the fuzz on her body. This gets delivered from the last plant’s male stamen to the female stigma of the next flower, completing the reproductive cycle. This act is repeated countless times every day around the world and keeps the engine of life humming along.
Although we’ve exploited domestic honeybees for thousands of years to pollinate our crops, wild pollinators are an unappreciated economic engine of our civilization. Their “free” contributions to global ecosystems are estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars every year, worldwide. But this is about something much more important than money.
Banish pollinators from your garden and your flowers won’t bloom; remove them from the fields and there’ll be no vegetables, from the orchards and we go without fruit; wipe them from a region and the ecosystem will collapse; exterminate them completely and the lives of 75 percent of all flowering plants would soon grind to a halt. And what ultimately depends on flowering plants? Most terrestrial organisms, including us. What’s more, this symbiosis between pollinators and plants is only the most obvious of the interdependencies among living things and the environment. More and more, we learn of an ever-widening web of mutually necessary, but often subtle, distant, and unseen linkages between the earth’s organisms.
We must—quickly—appreciate our kinship with the world’s myriad living things to engender a wider compassion that includes active concern. Albert Schweitzer expressed such a relationship with animals and plants in his philosophy of “reverence for life” when he wrote, “I am life, which wills to live, in the midst of life, which wills to live.”18 Ultimately, the realization of such empathy for the non-human living things that are members of the earth’s community may be the only way to engender the compassion we need to save them. And even if, by chance, Homo sapiens somehow physically survive in the absence of Franklin’s bumblebees, fabulous green sphinx moths, Pacific right wh
ales, Amur leopards, Devils Hole pupfish, California condors, Sulu hornbills, Cayman blue iguanas, Yunnan box turtles, Wyoming toads, Catalina mahogany, and the millions of other species that crawl, creep, fly, run, swim, and flower around us, could we survive the loneliness?
If Franklin’s bumblebees are still pollinating flowers in the meadows of northern California and southern Oregon, and we try our best to save them, at least we’ll have made another decision in favour of the future of life.
In this book, you’ve read about just a small sample of what has been accomplished by people the world over who have shown genuine compassion for the non-human living things we share this planet with. People whose goal is to prevent them (and by extension, maybe even ourselves) from becoming extinct, a finality so powerfully described by Father Thomas Berry, the late American Catholic priest and eco-theologian:
Extinction is a difficult concept to grasp. It is an eternal concept. It is not at all like killing individual lifeforms that can be renewed through normal processes of reproduction. Nor is it simply diminishing numbers. Nor is it damage that can somehow be remedied or for which some substitute can be found. Nor is it something that simply affects our own generation. Nor is it something that can be remedied by some supernatural power. It is rather an absolute and final act for which there is no remedy on earth or in heaven. A species once extinct is gone forever.19
18. Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics: The Philosophy of Civilization II, 3rd ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1946), 242.
19. Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 9.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RECOMMENDED READING
Ackerman, Diane. The Rarest of the Rare. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Askins, Robert A. Restoring North America’s Birds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Audubon, John James. Audubon’s Birds of America. Popular ed. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
Beletsky, Les. Collins Birds of the World. London: HarperCollins, 2006.
Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
Bodsworth, Fred. Last of the Curlews. London: Longman, 1955.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The Birds of North America Online. http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Penguin Putnam/New American Library/Mentor, 1958.
———. The Voyage of a Naturalist Round the World in H.M.S. “Beagle.” London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1860.
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin, 1988.
———. The Greatest Show on Earth. New York: Free Press, 2009.
Day, David. Noah’s Choice. London: Penguin, 1991.
Ehrlich, Paul R. The Machinery of Nature. New York: Touchstone, 1986.
Ehrlich, Paul R., David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye. The Birder’s Handbook. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Eldredge, Niles. The Miner’s Canary. New York: Prentice Hall, 1991.
Farrand John, Jr., ed. The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of Animal Life. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982.
Feduccia, Alan. The Origin and Evolution of Birds. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Fortey, Richard. Life: An Unauthorised Biography. London: HarperCollins, 1997.
Gill, Frank. Ornithology. 2nd ed. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1995.
Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Hirschfeld, Erik, ed. Rare Birds Yearbook 2009. Shropshire, UK: MagDig Media, 2008.
International Union for Conservation of Nature. International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species. http://www.redlist.org.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.
Livingston, John A. Rogue Primate. Toronto: Key Porter, 1994.
———. The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981.
Lovejoy, Thomas, and Lee Hannah, eds. Climate Change and Biodiversity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
Luther Martin, Calvin. The Great Forgetting. Santa Fe, NM: K-Selected Books, 2010.
Marzluff, John M., and Rex Sallabanks. Avian Conservation. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.
Matthiessen, Peter. Wildlife in America. New York: Viking Press, 1959.
Mountfort, Guy. Rare Birds of the World. London: Collins, 1988.
Nielsen, John. Condor. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
Novacek, Michael. Terra. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007.
Payne, Roger. Among Whales. New York: Dell, 1995.
Peattie, Donald Culross. Flowering Earth. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1939.
Pimm, Stuart. A Scientist Audits the Earth. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Quammen, David. The Song of the Dodo. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Raup, David M. Extinction, Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Rowe, Stan. Home Place, Essays on Ecology. Rev. ed. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2002.
Skutch, Alexander F. Life Ascending. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
———. Origins of Nature’s Beauty. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Teale, Edwin Way. Green Treasury. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952.
Tudge, Colin. The Variety of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Tyson, Peter. The Eighth Continent. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. The Malay Archipelago. New York: Dover, 1962. Reprint of 1922 edition.
Weiner, Jonathan. The Beak of the Finch. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Wernert, Susan, ed. North American Wildlife. Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest Association, 1982.
Wilson, E.O. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
———. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
———. The Diversity of Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
———. The Future of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Aberdare mountains (Kenya), 47, 48–49, 193
Addax antelope, 196
Afghanistan, 41
Africanized bees, 203
African tulip tree, 74–75
African Union, 101
Agent Orange, 51
agriculture
clearing of land for, 28, 32–33, 40, 73, 84, 106, 123, 162–63, 189, 200, 258
draining of wetlands for, 115
extermination of species by farmers, 127, 128, 228, 241
pesticide run-off from, 59
Akbar (Mogul emperor), 39–40
Alabama River (U.S.), 166, 167
Alabama sturgeon, 13, 164–68
Alagoas antwren, 106
Alagoas curassow, 13, 107, 199–201
Alagoas foliage-gleaner, 106
‘alala (Hawaiian crow), 17, 204–7
Alaotra grebe, 121
albatrosses
Amsterdam, 13, 94–97
short-tailed, 21, 242–45
southern royal, 117–18
Aldabra, 211
alfalfa farming, 162–63
alligator, Chinese, 134
Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation (Qatar), 203
amazon, Puerto Rican, 20, 126–29
American Bird Conservancy, 82
American Museum of Natural
History, 33–34
amphibians, 149–56
Archey’s frog, 13, 149–52
armoured mistfrog, 14, 152–54
Iranian Gorgan mountain salamander, 17, 154–56
Kihansi spray toad, 149
Oaxacan fringe-limbed tree frog, 215–16
Rabb’s fringe-limbed tree frog, 20, 214–17
torrent frogs, 1
52–54
Wyoming toad, 22, 217–18
Amsterdam albatross, 13, 94–97
Amsterdam Island, 95
Amur leopard, 13, 37–39
Amur Leopard and Tiger Alliance (ALTA), 39
Amur tiger, 38
Anchor Island (New Zealand), 253
“ancient frogs,” 149–52
Andersen Air Force Base (Guam), 208, 209
Andrahona mountain forest (Madagascar), 31–32
angiosperms, 266–68
Anjouan Island, 99–102
Anjouan scops owl, 13, 99–102
Antananarivo botanical garden (Madagascar), 121
antelopes
Addax, 196
dorcas gazelle, 196
mountain bongo, 19, 47–50
scimitar-horned oryx, 21, 194–96
Anthropocene era, 3
Apache National Forest (U.S.), 46
apes. See primates
Appalachian mountains (U.S.), 180–81
Arakan forest turtle, 13, 141–42, 144–45
Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (U.S.), 241
Archey’s frog, 13, 149–52
Arctic tern, 97