Dodos Offer Humans A Lesson In Extinction

“The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions” by David Quammen (Scribner, 702 pages, $32.50)

No living human has heard the song of the dodo, the flightless, chubby, apparently stupid bird that lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius until Dutch sailors of the 1600s decided it tasted better than the ill-preserved fare their ships offered after weeks at sea.

No one will ever know the notes of its mating call, but science writer David Quammen has discovered the words of warning the dodo could have sung: The humans who ate all the dodos threaten to kill every plant and animal on the Earth, even themselves.

Quammen, who lives in Missoula, spent eight years traveling the world for this book, visiting from the Gulf of California to such still-remote areas as Mauritius, Madagascar and undeveloped islands of Indonesia. And although the book’s intent is to make accessible the “island biogeography” of the subtitle, its author proves an engaging storyteller, as in an incident on the Indonesian island of Komodo, where he and a conservation ranger went to see the giant carnivorous lizards called komodo dragons in the wild:

“… A very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles straight up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building. Lumps of rock crumble and fall. My jaw drops like the lid of a Dumpster.

“We watch the komodo go. Exactly how big is it? I couldn’t say. If not for the likelihood that I’ve been deluded by its aura of power and strength, I would tell you twelve feet, maybe fourteen, roughly four hundred pounds… . Nine feet and two hundred, then - but for God’s sake the beast is galloping up a cliff! “I raise my binoculars in time to see the komodo take the summit. It pauses there, a giant reptilian silhouette against the bright sky. Then it tops over, disappearing beyond view. At that moment I hear David scream as another big komodo charges out of its hiding place just behind us.

“Yaaaggh. We whirl, caught flat.”

The author, who obviously survived that encounter, puts human faces on his various guides and makes vivid the characters and plights of his animal subjects from the dodo of the title to the chuckawallas of the Gulf of California, the monkeys of Madagascar and the birds of paradise on the Indonesian island of Aru. More remarkably, he also makes real the adventures of the scientists who went before him, making Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin more than mere icons of evolution.

Islands have been laboratories for evolution since 1858, when Darwin and Wallace first introduced that science to the world. Both these naturalists relied upon the experiences of the unique animals of various islands to develop their theory of evolution.

The other heroes of the book are Edward O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur, whose 1967 book, “The Theory of Island Biogeography,” made clear the special nature of islands, taking biogeography, the study of the distribution of plants and animals across the world, from its roots as a collector’s science into the realm of mathematical predictability.

In fact, the book’s adventures serve as a particularly captivating way to explain the ideas of Wilson and MacArthur. This is science with the excitement left in.

In essence, the latter two scientists proved that islands can support fewer species than a similar mainland area, and those species are more likely to go extinct than those on the mainland. That such a theory can explain the extinction of the dodo and of the pygmy elephants that even larger komodos used to dine on is interesting in itself. But what makes the ideas of MacArthur and Wilson compelling is this, from the first chapter of their book:

“The same principles apply, and will apply to an accelerating extent in the future, to formerly continuous natural habitats now being broken up by the encroachment of civilization.”

In other words, all of the Earth is becoming a series of islands of wildlife cleft apart not by oceans of water but by the invading tide of human civilization, leaving each island vulnerable to extinctions.

The animal portraits Quammen paints along his treks make this warning not only plausible but also heartwrenching. The science he outlines makes the warning not only understandable but also urgent.

Quammen offers, however, no remedy for the disease of the Earth he diagnoses. A few lines at the end of the book offer small ideas familiar to anyone exposed to environmentalism. Of course, to ask for an easy remedy is to be more optimistic even than Quammen, who ends his travels happily reporting that the bird of paradise continues to thrive on Aru.

But what readers might reasonably have expected is photographs of the exotic places and animals the author visited on his journeys. That expectation goes unanswered: No pictures grace these pages. As fine a book as this is, pictures would have made it even better.

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