The Great Auk by John Gerrard Keulemans (extinct) in summer and winter plumage. Pinguinus impennis with young. Public Domain

Prologue

Tim Birkhead, a British ornithologist, introduced me to the extremely ancient and flightless sea bird, Auk, that made a living in the North Atlantic for millennia. Birkhead, who has written several other books about birds, published a timely history of the savage extirpation of Auk: The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife (New York: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2025).

Birkhead explained that hunters and poachers fought Auk so thoroughly and for so long that by 1840 Auk became extinct. The 19th century was an era of machines and extinction.

Why extinction?

Europeans and North Americans mechanized for industry and wars. Machines gave some comfort to their private and public lives. But machines helped the exploitation of other people and, primarily, the grabbing of the wealth of the tropical forests, rivers, mountains: land for farming, minerals from mining, wood from deforestation and wildlife for food and cruelty. The flightless Auk was caught in the deadly weapons of its pursuers and disappeared from the waters of North Atlantic – forever.

Fashion for women turned deadly for birds. According to an 1895 report, “One cause which threatens the existence of many species of birds, if it has not already produced the extermination of some, is the rage for wearing their feathers that now and again seizes civilized women, who take their ideas of dress from interested milliners of both sexes — persons who, having bought a large stock of what are known as “plumes,”‘ proceed to make a profit by declaring them to be in fashion.”

Acceleration of extinction

More than a century later, in the second decade of the 21st century, the situation was becoming a vast extinction of the birds of North America. In 2019, the American journal, Science, reported:

“Because birds are conspicuous and easy to identify and count, reliable records of their occurrence have been gathered over many decades in many parts of the world. Drawing on such data for North America… widespread population declines of birds over the past half-century, resulting in the cumulative loss of billions of breeding individuals across a wide range of species and habitats. They show that declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species—those once considered common and wide-spread are also diminished. These results have major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of birds and native ecosystems on which they depend.”

“The skies are emptying out,” according to a reporter. “There are 2.9 billion fewer birds taking wing now [in 2019] than there were 50 years ago.”

So, the dismal account of Birkhead for the anthropogenic disappearance of Auk fit our times. He mentioned the disappearance of dodo in 1693, passenger pigeon in 1914, and the Hawaiian Kaua’ I ‘O’ o about 1987. But Birkhead also spoke of an afterlife for Auk, perhaps because of the embarrassment of the killers of the “great” Auk. He suggests that:

῾῾The great auk’s extinction in 1844 coincided with a booming interest in natural history. Acquiring specimens of molluscshells, ferns, birds’ eggs and stuffed skins, often under the shady umbrella of science, provided opportunities for men (and it was mainly men) to compete. It allowed them to show off and sometimes to contribute to the growing body of natural history knowledge. Collecting became an obsession.”

“If what we’re worried about is extinction, “we’re the driving force,” said David Steadman, curator of ornithology at the Florida Museum of Science, who has done a vast amount of research on Caribbean birds. By destroying the environments where birds live, introducing alien predators and damaging the environment in other ways, humans gradually put birds, and of course other species, at risk. A hurricane or another disaster may deliver a final punch, but it is not the underlying cause of extinction. Christopher Elphick, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut… said development and sea level rise, both caused by humans, are the slow and sure killers.”

Exactly. Humans in the 19th century and the 21st century go on with their abominable exploitations of the natural world and through hunting and deforestation and giant cities filled with skyscrapers or the burning of fossil fuels upstage the planet’s beautiful birds, pushing them to extinction. The result is deformation of all that created civilization. If the satisfaction of hunters and petroleum companies prevails for much longer, civilization itself will become extinct.

Conclusion

Read The Great Auk. The story is dreadful but brings light out of darkness, inspiring us to stop the global cycle of tragedy and violence against birds and other valuable and irreplicable forms of life on Earth. Birkhead says we cannot outlaw extinction. He insists we reflect on the birds that humans drove to extinction. But doing something to stop or reverse extinction, he says, is a challenge depended on “big thinking, rather than fiddling while Rome burns, as we seem to be doing at present. We ourselves are being pitched towards an uncomfortable afterlife, something many of us can see but feel helpless to stop.”

I agree. The struggle for wisdom and civilization that protects birds, and other wildlife will not be easy. The entire industrialized agriculture has to be discarded for small-scale traditional / organic farming practices free of large petroleum-powered tractors, neurotoxins, carcinogens, and monocropping. Insects and birds must not face death in seeking food or shelter in the fields of farmers. There are insects that eat other insects. Radical transformation must also change transportation from petroleum-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles and electric public transportation by trams, trains and busses. Humans must also agree to stop killing each other by the mass slaughter of mechanized battles. Wars and the gigantic fleets of deadly aircrafts, warships, submarines, and drones are a colossal impetus for higher global temperatures, pushing the planet to deadly conditions for all life, including the life of the birds.

The post Big Thinking for the Survival of Birds appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed