Talk Birdy to Me by Jonathan Rosen
On the extinction of species.
Post Date Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Recently, I wandered through "Audubon's Aviary," an exhibit at the New York Historical Society featuring watercolors by John James Audubon of birds that have, since Audubon painted them in the first half of the nineteenth century, become endangered or extinct. It was the right place to think about loss and the natural world. But, although death was everywhere apparent in the show, it was not a lugubrious place: Cries of birds--whooping crane, crested caracara--were piped in, and video images of actual birds appeared on a screen. And, of course, there were Audubon's grand paintings, part of his vast enterprise to paint in life-size every bird in America. His paintings, and the exhibition, made me think of a line in Randall Jarrell's poem about the mockingbird:
He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one's the mockingbird? Which one's the world?
Audubon was famous for animating his bird subjects--the terrified bobwhite quail scattering before the talons of a red-shouldered hawk look like panic- stricken pogrom victims and make you forget that, before being given such dramatic life, they were shot and posed by Audubon himself, who also had killed the killer hawk. Audubon killed in order to capture. A Bewick's wren, sitting innocently on the branch of an elm, was, according to Audubon, shot "standing ... in the position in which you now see it."
Death is everywhere in Audubon's work, but there are different kinds of death. His painting of a pair of Eskimo curlews has a strangely prophetic quality. In Audubon's painting, the female bird is dead--not shot or visibly maimed but simply dead--the only time Audubon painted a dead bird whose cause of death was not apparent. The dead bird lies stretched on the ground, her pale underparts exposed. The male bird looks sideways at its dead mate, with a kind of avian astonishment. There were huge flocks of Eskimo curlews in the 1870s, but, as the passenger pigeon diminished, it was turned to as a market bird, and, 20 years later, the bird was essentially gone. The last official sighting was in the 1960s; today, it is presumed extinct.
Does it matter? What claim should this bird, or any other missing creature, have on our conscience? Extinction is nothing new; there are more extinct species than extant ones. We ourselves stand on the bones of superseded primate ancestors. Extinction is hardly a phenomenon only of modern industrial civilization; it is widely believed that the woolly mammoth was hunted to extinction by Neolithic man, and I learned from a book about avian extinction called Hope is the Thing with Feathers that "prehistoric islanders in the Pacific killed off some 2,000 bird species, diminishing by one-fifth the global number through a variety of activities, including habitat destruction."
But there is something about the disappearance of animals in the modern age that is different. I would not presume to know the mental state of those prehistoric islanders, but I can't help but imagine they were not conscious of the end they were causing. Edward O. Wilson, the great biologist, has speculated that, having evolved in the midst of abundance whose limit we could never fathom, we are all but programmed to go at nature with an exterminating fury necessary for our own survival that, until quite recently--when modern technology amplified human will to an equally unfathomable degree--had few lasting consequences.
more...
http://tnr.com/environmentenergy/story.html?id=c2bf6413-d780-4810-bb3e-67e2edf81ead
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