Archive for extinction
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Contemplating California Condors
By a Guest • March 31, 2012 • 1 commentAuthor Sherrida Woodley finds inspiration at the intersection of avians and extinction. The dearly departed Passenger Pigeon plays a pivotal role in her award-winning bio-thriller, Quick Fall of Light. The newest bird on the brink to capture her fertile imagination is the California Condor, on which she graciously shares her research and ruminations: Sometimes [...]
New Zealand Storm-petrels; Back from the Dead
By Duncan • September 28, 2011 • 3 commentsThere are few stories in ornithology I enjoy more than those of a Lazarus taxon, a species thought to be extinct being found alive and well in some hidden part of the world. There is a depressing finality about extinction, but knowing when for certain something is extinct is an imprecise science and on occasion we’ve gotten it spectacularly wrong. Jerdon’s [...]
Rev. Bachman’s Lost Warbler
By Nate • May 10, 2011 • 10 commentsRightly or wrongly, there’s an hierarchy of extinct birds in North America, in the United States in particular. Each offers a portrait of a nation at a crossroads, a series of Aesop’s Fables for a nascent environmental movement whose themes become more or less relevant in the public mindset depending on what issues need to [...]
Mining for moa
By Duncan • January 5, 2011 • 2 commentsNo moa, no moa In old Ao-tea-roa Can’t get ’em They’ve et ’em They’re gone and there ain’t no moa’ New Zealand folk song. At the time of Maori settlement in New Zealand, New Zealand’s bird fauna had been impacted by the arrival one thousand years earlier of rats, but those impacts had been focused [...]
Enter the Rat
By Duncan • December 22, 2010 • 4 comments“The only mammal present is the harmless Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans” Gordon Williams, 1962 “the Pacific rat was the only factor in the extinction of a large percentage of New Zealand’s small vertebrate fauna over the last 2000 years” Trevor Holdaway & Richard Worthy, 2002 The Pacific rat, or Polynesian rat, or kiore, was, on [...]
12,000 Birds
By Duncan • December 8, 2010 • 9 comments“Islands are where species go to die.” David Quammen, Song of the Dodo 12,000 birds. No doubt to many readers it has a familiar yet jarring ring to it. There are 10,000 birds, right? Well, 10,417 if the split-happy IOC World Bird List is to be believed. Other checklists go under, or over, but they [...]
