7749 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

THE ENDANGERED SPECIES LISTS: CHRONICLES OF EXTINCTION? by WILLIAM REFFALT Forone species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailorwho clubbed the last auk thought o f nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont's nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush's bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts. WHEN ALDO LEOPOLD PENNED "On a Monument to the Pigeon" in 1947, he conveyed a note of optimism. Now, forty-one years later, there are signs that his optimism was premature. Nearly seventy-four years have passed since the carefully re- corded demise of the last passenger pigeon, atwenty-nine-year- old Female residing in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. That same month, September 1914, chronicled the passing of the last captive Carolina parakeet as well. Their quiet deaths echoed the earlier extinction of the Labrador duck and great auk, re- awakening the nineteenth-century wave of concern inspired by the near extinction of the bison and the ominously increasing documentation of drastic declines in many other species. Yet even as America realized that its forests would never again feel the hurricane might of the pigeon profusion or witness the 77