| michael by michael kors |
In September 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon--a bird that, in Audubon's day, was the most populous bird on earth--died at the Cincinnati Zoo. The last wild bird had been shot by a boy some years earlier in Ohio. Martha's death made national news, and, when she died, her body was frozen into a 300- pound block of ice by the Cincinnati Ice Company, stopping time when it was already too late. The bird was sent by train to Washington, D.C., to take up posthumous residence at the Smithsonian where it became a sort of stuffed celebrity, lent out from time to time for fund-raisers in Cincinnati or celebrations in San Diego.
Four years later, the last Carolina parakeet died in the same zoo. The news was more muted, and the bird itself far less well known. I imagine that, after the slaughter of World War I, the death of a bird, even an entire species, could hardly register in the same way on the national consciousness. Our own world, certainly, has its share of human horror and political distractions.
But our technology, which of course plays a role in extinction, also can play an opposite role, in the same way that the Florida Everglades are essentially maintained by pumps and sluices built by the Army Corps of Engineers that, 100 years ago, all but destroyed the Everglades. Recently, I published a tribute in the Los Angeles Times to the Carolina parakeet on the ninetieth anniversary of its extinction--only to receive an e-mail from a scientist at the San Diego Zoo, telling me about the po'ouli, a Hawaiian bird I had never heard of. The last po'ouli died at the Maui Bird Conservation Center at 11:45 p.m. on November 26, 2004. Needless to say, the disappearance of the bird was not national news. Audubon never painted the bird; it was only discovered 35 years ago.
