On The Wing

Extinction

Posted on November 14

I found a sad little picture of a dried Xerces Blue corpse online, and beside it was a photo of the fat French entomologist Boisduval. He supposedly “discovered” the Xerces Blue, though I imagine it existed long before the robust man found it. (I think someone sent him the specimen, but I’d rather imagine history with him discovering it in the wild.) Boisduval was dressed in a long coat and shirtsleeves, typical of mid-nineteenth-century attire. He looked proud and confident as he leaned unnaturally against an oversized leather wingback, as though he were Napoleon.

Let me paint the picture for you: a fat French man trampling through the coastal lupine with a net chasing a butterfly no larger than an inch across. The butterfly coasts low above the ground looking for nectar or a salt puddle. He catches it, admires it, impales it with a pin, and declares it a relative Persian king of long ago, naturally. In reality it probably went like this: a fat French man opens a package with said dead butterfly inside, impales it on a pin, and declares it Xerces. Did he see himself in the butterfly and want to draw a connection between his own lineage and the name Xerces? Perhaps he just wanted to lengthen his own name: Jean Baptiste Alphonse Dechauffour de Boisduval. To him, it probably would have been folly to name a discovery after anything less than a crown, and Monarch was already taken.

I learned about the Xerces Blue’s last flight recently. It was last seen on San Francisco’s Presidio in 1941. I wonder if W. H. Lange, the last recorded person to see the Xerces Blue almost one hundred years after Boisduval’s “discovery,” knew he was witnessing its last flight. Perhaps he caught the last lonely butterfly, the omega Xerces, as it searched for companions that no longer existed. His habitat was gone, no eggs were laid, and that was that. The more construction in San Francisco encroached upon the Xerces’ land, the fewer flowers were available to drink, and the fewer eggs it laid for the next season. The Xerces Blue was unique in that it was a sub-species that only lived in that one small location; studying it would have offered some insights into evolutionary theory.

I see ghosts all around me. From our escape from Cobalt to our drive south to Florida, to my family’s new home, I see them. They crowd me. There in Cobalt it was the Singh Blue and the endangered Karner. Here in Florida, it’s the Miami Blue that’s vulnerable, and the Schaus’ Swallowtail is nearing extinction. In the history of the planet Earth, scientists have identified five mass extinctions. These vast annihilations of species have killed around ninety percent of all living creatures on the planet. Some extinction is natural, or caused by a massive cataclysmic event like a meteor. However, hunting a species to death (buffalo, Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing, gray wolf, etc.) or destroying habitats through slash-and-burn agriculture is not natural. The rate of our CO2 emissions has altered the planet’s atmosphere. Climate change is natural, yes. Our acceleration of a natural process is not. Some scientists believe that we are upon our sixth extinction. I don’t know about this. That no one will ever see another Xerces Blue drinking nectar from the lupine is a loss for us all. All I know is what I see. And what I see are ghosts.