Children are fascinated by dinosaurs. I used to imagine myself transported into the past, my imagination stimulated by Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. In my mind I would roam those ancient landscapes with the giant vegetarian brontosaurus, unharmed by the mighty tyrannosaur. I loved, too, mind-walking in the older world of the giant amphibians, that watery realm of swamps and huge ferns. And sometimes I dreamed of watching woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. But they were gone, and I had no time capsule. And there were no marvels of technology to re-create those creatures of long ago—as did the extraordinary BBC TV series Walking with Dinosaurs.
And then I learned, from one of my books, about the dodo. That extinction was very different from the loss of the dinosaurs. The dodo (and countless others) would still have been around, I discovered, but for modern Homo sapiens. Of course, our Stone Age ancestors had hunted and killed animals. I would later see evidence of this when I worked with Louis Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. But it was hard work for them with only their primitive stone tools. Moreover, the prey animals in Africa had evolved along with the predators that hunted them, and had developed myriad ways to escape being killed. How different when Captain Cook and his sailors killed the unsuspecting flightless dodos, feeling safe on their island with no instinct for flight—and so they were eaten to extinction.
When I was a child, more than seventy years ago, there was no television and no Internet to trap me in front of electronic screens. Instead I spent hours watching birds and insects in our garden, and reading books. Back then most of the animals that are so endangered today lived safely in as-yet-unlogged forests, undrained wetlands, and unpolluted fields and oceans. Yet even then, of course, large-scale slaughter of wildlife was taking place. The American bison herds were being decimated, wolves were being exterminated, and animals in their hundreds of thousands were being trapped and killed for their skins, their fur, their feathers—and for specimens to stuff for natural history museums. Big-game hunters were “bagging” and bragging about trophies. And passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction. For the most part, no one thought much about any of that, and anyway nature’s natural resources, to most people, seemed inexhaustible.
But gradually our human populations have grown, and the destruction of the natural world has intensified. One after the other, more and more of the extraordinarily varied life-forms of our planet have joined the dodo and the passenger pigeon. Mostly they are small creatures and plants, often endemic to a particular area of rain forest or other habitat that has been destroyed. But fish and birds have gone as well. And Miss Waldron’s red colobus was pronounced extinct in Ghana at the end of the last century. So much has gone even during the seventy-five years since I was born.
Will a nature-loving child born seventy-five years from now long to see a live elephant as I longed to see a woolly mammoth? Will she wish desperately for a time machine in order to experience a real rain forest and watch orangutans and tigers? Will she yearn to know a lost and mysterious deep-sea world of the great whales? And if, in seventy-five years, these animals exist only in digital libraries or as dusty museum specimens, how will she feel?
When I was a young girl, it was possible for me to forgive Captain Cook and the people of his era, for they had no idea of the direction we were heading (though they were unknowingly mapping out the path of the future). But at that time, the world was largely unexplored, its wonders undiscovered—and there were far fewer human beings. Still, if a child seventy-five years from now finds that most animals have gone from the earth, she will not be able to excuse the behavior of those who destroyed them. For she will know that they were lost not from a position of ignorance, but because the majority of humans simply did not care.
Fortunately, some people do care a great deal, and sometimes heroic efforts are being made to save and conserve threatened and endangered species. But for them, the list of extinct animals today would be much longer. I have been privileged to meet many of them, and in this book I look forward to introducing as many as I can, along with the animals, plants, and habitats to which they have devoted their lives.
The stories we are sharing in the first two parts show how complicated a business this conservation of wildlife is. For it is necessary to integrate research, protection in the wild, habitat restoration, captive breeding, and raising awareness in the local population. And there are restrictions—everything must be undertaken under the watchful eyes of government authorities. Also, it is inevitable that when passionate people with different perspectives try to work together, differences of opinion arise, and these opinions will be hotly defended—and although, through discussion and compromise, agreement will usually be reached, a good deal of time and effort may be wasted along the way. In the best-case scenario, organizations working to protect an animal and its environment cooperate for the good of the species, and the public volunteers its help.
Part 1 tells the stories of six mammal and bird species that actually became extinct in the wild. They were saved only through captive breeding with the goal of returning their progeny to the wild once their numbers had increased and areas of habitat had been set aside for their lasting protection. But the issue of captive breeding was—and still is—highly controversial. There are objections to such projects from those who feel last-minute solutions will not work, and are a waste of time and above all money. Fortunately the passionate biologists who worked to save the six species in this section refused to listen to them.