December 2004
BOOKS
The Race to Save the Lord God Bird
Phillip Hoose
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20
Tasmanian Tiger: The Tragic Tale of how the World Lost Its Most Mysterious Predator
By David Owen
The Johns Hopkins University Press, $25
The giant ivory-billed woodpecker, which could peel a tree like a banana with its bone-white bill, once haunted the old-growth bottomlands of the American South but was last spotted in Cuba in 1987. The thylacine, a hyena-size marsupial predator with long jaws and a spectacular gape, roamed freely on the island of Tasmania until the Europeans arrived around 1800. The last documented specimen died in captivity in 1936.
Alas for these majestic creatures, their narrow ecological niches were no match for human greed. The ivorybill—dubbed the Lord God Bird because its almost three-foot wingspan led observers to exclaim “Lord God, what a bird!”—subsisted mainly on beetle grubs found under the bark of dead or injured trees and succumbed in part to a post–Civil War fad for ladies’ feathered hats. The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, so called for its striped fur, once sat atop a food chain isolated for millennia by miles of ocean. Colonial sheep farmers, blaming the thylacine for stock losses, crowded it out of its range. Irony pervades both tales. Many 19th-century naturalists, including John James Audubon, collected and killed hundreds of ivorybills in pursuit of their research. Likewise, bounty hunters in Tasmania sold thylacines to zoos as far away as London and New York, even though the animals never bred in captivity.
In their impassioned and strikingly parallel chronicles of loss, Phillip Hoose and David Owen reveal that scientists haven’t entirely given up on either creature. In 1999 the Australian Museum announced a complex plan to clone the thylacine with DNA extracted from a 140-year-old pup preserved in alcohol. In 2002 Cornell researchers used high-tech listening devices to search for signs of the ivorybill in a Louisiana swamp. The most promising evidence, loud ringing cracks first thought to be the ivorybill’s signature pecks, turned out with computer analysis to be nothing but rifle shots.
Paradoxically, the extinction of the Lord God Bird and the Tasmanian tiger spawned a conservation ethic that may have spared countless other species a similar fate. One ivorybill searcher, Richard Pough, helped found the Nature Conservancy, which has preserved 100 million acres of critical habitat worldwide. In Tasmania, remorse over the thylacine’s annihilation played a role in the decision to preserve over a quarter of the island as one of the world’s largest intact temperate wildernesses.
—Matthew Power
