Wonders of a lost world

Books editor MARGIE THOMSON looks at a stunning collaboration documenting just some of the species destroyed by the ravages of mankind in the past 500 years.

By now we know that the price of homo sapiens' ascendancy on the planet has been paid by the countless thousands of other species which have become extinct as people interfered with them and their habitats.

The tragedy is that events that were so locally cataclysmic as to wipe out entire species barely rate a footnote in the annals of human history, as Tim Flannery and illustrator Peter Schouten make clear in A Gap in Nature (Text Publishing, $59.95), a sparkling tribute to just some of the documentable species which have disappeared over the past 500 years.

For instance, following his famous 1777 exploration of Tahiti, Captain James Cook made the routine decision to moor at the island of Raiatea to scrub the bottoms of the Resolution and the Discovery.

During the 34 days of the stopover his crew collected two specimens of an appealing, yellow-breasted parakeet, whose stuffed skins still reside in museums in Vienna and London. It was lucky in a way that those unfortunate individuals were harvested or there would be no record that the species, known now as the Raiatea Parakeet, had ever existed, as it was never seen again. Unfortunately, as the ships were moored to the shore, it seems probable that rats, cockroaches and other vermin managed to escape on to the island, spelling doom for the parakeets.

Thus have many species been inadvertently lost. Others, like the huge, languorous Steller's Sea Cow, were hunted to extinction, brought close to extermination by Indians and other indigenous people from the mainland coasts of the North Pacific, then finished off completely by 1768, a mere 27 years after their rediscovery among the shallow bays and inlets of the remote Commander Islands.

They were extraordinary creatures which could weigh as much as 10 tonnes and hosted upon their thick, bark-like skins colonies of crustaceans which were found nowhere else, and which also presumably became extinct at the same time as the sea cow.

To read the only known account of this benign-looking mammal is to truly appreciate loss. "These animals live in herds together in the sea," observed botanist Georg Steller in 1741, "males and females usually going with one another, pushing the offspring before them all around the shore. These animals are busy with nothing but their food ... they are not in the least afraid of human beings ... they have an extraordinary love for one another, which extends so far that when one of them was cut into, all the others were intent on rescuing it and keeping it from being pulled ashore by closing a circle around it. Others tried to overturn the yawl. Some placed themselves on the rope or tried to draw the harpoon out of its body, in which indeed they were successful several times. We also observed that a male two days in a row came to its dead female on the shore and inquired about its condition ... "

In his introduction, Tim Flannery remarks that while it may seem a soul-destroying task to document species which have perished, in fact this project - shared to stunning effect with illustrator Peter Schouten - was one of the most exciting he has been involved in. "That's because it has allowed me to glimpse, in my imagination at least, a tiny flicker of the wonder of this lost world," he writes.

It is this wonder even more than any sense of anger or frustration at our wastefulness which predominates and infuses the reader. Which isn't to say he lets us off easily, but a sense of the wonder and diversity of the world is probably a necessary starting point for the vast job of preventing, as best we can, further extinctions, and possibly even our own.

An odd side-effect of the book is to give us back a sense of ourselves as a species. We are far more used to thinking of ourselves as belonging to a particular race or culture, as being part of an indigenous grouping, or inheritors of Europe's great colonising push through the other continents and regions of the world.

There is so much emotion attached to our cultural identity that we may even assume that our heritage as indigenous or coloniser excuses or implicates us in the decimation of other species.

This isn't, we discover, an entirely useful distinction, and it's sobering to learn that this present age of extinction began not with the industrial revolution or the European age of discovery, but 50,000 years ago, as we left our cradle in Africa and began to pour into every corner of the world, "precipitating other living forms into oblivion". Whether indigenous or colonising, we humans have all taken our toll.

However, with Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas in 1492, extinctions sped up, and over the next 500 years the world suffered innumerable "cascades" of extinction, as one led to another, and so on.

Flannery describes "awful cataclysms of extinction" that overwhelmed isolated islands such as our own, which previously had been home to spectacular biodiversity but which were profoundly affected by the introduction of predators such as people, rats and cats. Of course, the moa is our most famous extinct bird, and the book includes a terrific illustration of the Upland Moa, probably the last of around 11 species to succumb to extinction before the arrival of the Pakeha, thanks to its remote habitat in the snowy alpine regions of the South Island.

But since then the record has been no less devastating: "A single cat exterminated a whole genus of unique New Zealand birds, while rats carried off species by the dozen," Flannery says.

Of all the 103 species commemorated painstakingly here, none is so famous or symbolic as the Dodo of Mauritius. "Dead as a Dodo," we carelessly say. In fact, this bird - the largest pigeon species ever to have lived - was almost entirely lost to us. Flannery and Schouten have been painstaking in their efforts to accurately represent the species in this book, including only those species where physical remains (stuffed skins or fossils) or reasonably detailed drawings or descriptions existed.

The Dodo is able to be included thanks to the foresight of an anonymous person at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford who, in 1755, just as the last, rotting specimen was to be cast into the fire and destroyed, cut off its head and right foot. Rescued here again by Flannery and Schouten, this strange bird is dignified beyond the aphorism and, along with the other 102 creatures in these pages, is a reminder of "lost worlds that the modern age missed seeing by a whisker of time".