Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Strigiformes
Conservation status: Not listed
There is no rest except on these branching moments.
Rumi
The Xenoglaux, or long-whiskered owlet, is not especially beautiful or wise. It does not catch prey in spectacular manner, and its cry – a single, deep, husky almost disyllabic woh, once every three seconds or so – is not particularly melodious. Its plumage – dull brown, and whiskery around the beak – is nothing special. Almost all the features that make it remarkable – excellent vision, feathers engineered for silent flight, and zygodactylous feet (pairs of front- and back-facing claws that act like strong claspers; I wish I had them myself ) – are ones it shares with virtually all other owls. It is exceptionally small for an owl – including tail feathers, shorter than your hand – but it is not the smallest; that fame belongs to the Elf Owl of North America.
Still, the Xenoglaux is not without charm. With large, orange-brown eyes and yellow-white eyebrows, this tiny being is more reminiscent of a cross between a tarsier and a wren than an owl. Its diminutive size is an excellent adaptation to its unusual habitat, the cloud forests high in the mountains of Peru. Here, the slopes are drenched in fog almost continuously, and the vegetation varies from tall trees at the lower end of its range (which is about 1,800 metres) to ‘elfin’, or miniature ones at the upper end (which is about 2,300 metres). The wet conditions favour thick ground cover, while the trees are clothed with epiphytes: a garden gone wild in every dimension. The owl likes to stay well hidden in the understory and midstory, waiting patiently before it hops or swoops through a narrow gap to surprise insects, rodents and other small prey.
Xenoglaux is also remarkable for its elusiveness and rarity. It was discovered in 1976 and only photographed for the first time in 2010. There were probably never very many of them but today there may be fewer than 250 individuals alive and the species is endangered because its remaining areas of suitable habitat are being cleared for timber, agriculture and to secure ownership of the land. This makes it a ‘typical’ endangered bird: from Xenoglaux to the Cerulean warbler, habitat loss or degradation is the main threat for around three-quarters of endangered birds.
Tropical cloud forests and the lowland rainforests downstream of them contain a greater variety of life forms than anywhere else on Earth. A typical square kilometre of montane or lowland primary rainforest in Peru (or Congo, or Borneo) can contain more different species of tree than all the land in the northern hemisphere outside the tropics, an area four million times larger. The ratio is similar for animal life. So tropical deforestation is a matter of huge concern if one believes that the sheer diversity of living things and the rarity of many of them, is of value. But there are more utilitarian reasons to care. Cloud forests extract more water from the air than falls as rain, with the result that in addition to supporting extraordinary flora and fauna themselves they also provide significantly more water to ecosystems and people downstream than would otherwise be the case. The additional moisture, known as occult precipitation, is intercepted by vegetation that is adapted to extract it from the air. Lowland rainforests, in turn, also influence temperature and water availability in surrounding regions. And they are, of course, huge reservoirs of carbon, and clearing and draining them is one of the largest additional sources of greenhouse gas caused by human activity after the burning of fossil fuels. Deforestation in the Amazon basin alone may account for 2 or even 5 per cent of total global emissions.
In 2008 the Peruvian Government announced that it would reduce logging of virgin forest nationwide to zero by 2020 while also ensuring that the needs of the Peruvian people for economic development are met. This is a very ambitious goal given the limited resources available for conservation and the forces militating against it. But, if achieved, it would be a significant contribution to the protection of plant and animal diversity for the whole world. Peru’s sixty million forested hectares – the fourth largest area of tropical rainforest after Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia – contain more than 10 per cent of all bird species on Earth, and comparable proportions of other terrestrial animal and plant life.
Even if the forces opposed to forest conservation in Peru and other tropical countries are overcome there are the impacts of climate change to contend with. Just what these will be is extremely uncertain. At the time of writing the good news is that even if, as now seems likely, the global average temperature rises by more than 4°C this century, there may still be a chance of navigating away from a ‘tipping point’ where most or all of the Amazon rainforest dies back and is replaced by open woodland, scrub, savannah and even desert. This rainforest – an important and continuous part of Earth system functioning since the Cretaceous – is probably not yet history. But we are gambling for high stakes.
The idea of the tipping point, popularized in 2000 in a bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell, who applied it to everything from fashions in running shoes to the rate of teen suicides, was adopted by some climate scientists and ecologists in the first decade of the new century. The Earth systems scientist Tim Lenton and others identified six major ecosystems that, if pushed beyond a certain point, could unravel, resulting in climatic regimes unknown in the Holocene (the relatively stable period that favoured the rise of agriculture and industrial civilization). In addition to Amazon dieback, these included: the death of vast northern forests, resulting in large releases of carbon dioxide to drive further warming; the melting of polar sea ice and of much of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, leading to sea-level rise and further warming as more heat from the sun is absorbed rather than reflected back into space; severe disruption to the Indian and West African monsoon; disruption to the formation of Atlantic deep water near the Arctic Ocean (which is a component of the thermohaline circulation); and the loss of permafrost leading to potential Arctic methane release and the ‘clathrate gun’ effect (in which large quantities are released suddenly from permafrost and the seabed), driving further warming.
How well this analysis holds up remains to be seen. As has been stated, it’s possible that rapid dieback of forest in the Amazon basin may actually be one of the less likely scenarios. But even without dramatic and visible step changes such as this, we appear to be well in to a sixth extinction: a ‘perfect storm’ that destroys life’s diversity thousands of times faster than new species can evolve.
Do individual species matter? Even for those who take particular delight in rare and elusive creatures the answer is not always clear. In The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species, Scott Weidensaul wonders why he is so obsessed by a bird called the Cone-billed Tanager, which at the time had not been seen in over sixty years (and which was finally seen again two years after he wrote):
What makes the Cone-billed Tanager special is its mystery; should it ever reappear, it would become just another rare bird in a world already saddled with too many threatened organisms. It may be that we need icons of faith and aspiration, objects of great quixotic quests, more than we need reality.
Or this may be the worst kind of rationalistic bull. If we’d found the Tanager, no doubt I’d be writing an equally eloquent denouement on the joys of dreams realized, instead of dreams deferred.
In an essay on the absurd, the philosopher Thomas Nagel concludes that we shouldn’t worry too much if under the eye of eternity nothing matters because in that case that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our lives with irony instead of heroism or despair. That looks about right, so long as we do not take irony to mean that nothing matters to us. There comes a point, however unpredictable and unreasonable, when we cannot help but value, take a stand and love (or to fail, finally, to do so). We can recognize that what we value, stand by or love will inevitably be lost – that, as a Buddhist saying has it, a fragile cup that we see before us may look whole and perfect but in the larger scheme of things it is already broken. But that does not mean that our situation is without joy and even a little comedy.
In the Peruvian cloud forest, conservationists are working to protect the Xenoglaux and other unique species by securing 180,000 hectares in the Alto Mayo region against any threat of clearance, and establishing a new reserve in the Cordillera de Colán. Such reserves may or may not be sufficient to protect wildlife. As the climate changes, additional pressures are likely to come from changes in vegetation and from animals that currently thrive at lower elevations but are now looking for somewhere cooler. This will mean, at the least, a new mix of animals and plants in the reserves. Whether or not Xenoglaux will survive is not clear.
I was deep in the rainforest in Sarawak, one of the Malaysian states on the island of Borneo, when I saw ‘my’ owl. Following a nightmare of a conference under air conditioning and no natural light in the big city, I was on a press junket promoting a plan to extend and enhance protection to significant areas of Borneo’s remaining forests. We had spent the morning scrambling over steep ridges and looking, unsuccessfully, for the nests which orang-utans build in the trees every night. But now I was sitting beside a fast-moving stream and had become entranced by watching a sheet of water flowing over the flat surface of a rock in sunlight. Suddenly, and for no reason I was aware of, I looked up. High above on a branch was a fine, fierce-looking owl, much larger than Xenoglaux, staring at me. I could not identify the species – I am no birder – and there was no one nearby who could do so either, but that didn’t matter. For me, this was it: I felt that I was encountering the very spirit of the forest, the herald of something tremendous. With hindsight I can reflect rationally upon the encounter: that powerful body and those brilliant, fierce eyes were merely adaptations for hunting. No special intelligence lurked behind them. Indeed, owls are far from being the brightest of birds. But in the moment of meeting in the real world and in the memory I have of it, such thoughts were secondary to the overwhelming magnificence of the animal – an emblem of the vibrancy and power that life itself can achieve in a forest.
Owls have fascinated humans for as long as there is any record. The meanings attributed to them, however, have varied greatly at different times and in different places. Often, in Europe, China and elsewhere, they have been regarded as harbingers of evil. One of the most striking European works of art in the shadow of this tradition may be Francisco Goya’s etching in his Caprichos series, ‘The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters’, in which a sleeping human figure (perhaps the artist himself ) is mobbed by owls and bats with terrible eyes. At other times, owls were regarded as beneficent. In Shang-dynasty China, elaborate bronze wine vessels shaped like owls accompanied fortunate souls into the afterlife. In ancient Greece owls were associated with Athena (in Latin, Minerva), the goddess of wisdom. (‘Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly,’ wrote Hegel, suggesting that wisdom comes late in the day if it comes at all.) And some cultures seem to have seen both good and bad in owls at the same time. The Mochica culture of northern Peru attributed healing powers and wisdom to owls that they represented in gorgeous gold and ceramic objects, but also associated them with a warrior involved in ritual decapitation of the dead.
Perhaps the chief image for our time should be the most ancient: a horned owl depicted in the Chauvet Cave in France. Unlike many of the other animals shown in the cave such as reindeer, cave lions, panthers, wooly rhinos and wild horses, the horned owl is neither regionally or globally extinct. Like those others, we can only guess its meaning for those who painted it, but we do know that the continued survival of the species is in our hands.
‘The dream of reason produces monsters’ from the Caprichos by Francisco de Goya (1799).
The Sleat Peninsula, sometimes called the garden of the Isle of Skye, is mostly bog and moor. For much of the Quaternary era – that is, the last 2.6 million years – this land was covered by hundreds of metres of ice and virtually devoid of life. But for the last 11,000 years or so it has largely been ice-free, and for many thousands of years substantial parts of it were densely wooded in hazel, birch, ash, oak and other species. Then, from about 5,000 years ago, the combination of a change in climate to cooler and wetter conditions and the relentless and increasing demand for wood by human colonists reduced the woodlands over time to a few small pockets in relatively inaccessible places, until almost none remained. One of those that did, however, is a small woodland on the north shore of a loch hidden and inaccessible from any road. With a thick stand of big trunks next to the quiet water, and diverse, healthy trees climbing the hillside behind, this place is, by design or inattention, a sacred grove. Standing here on a still day, you only hear birdsong and the crash of a waterfall spilling through a little gorge above the opposite shore of the loch. Barn owls, Tawny owls, Long-eared owls and Short-eared owls, all of which are resident on Skye – and even, perhaps, the occasional Snowy owl visiting the island – hunt here.
The British Isles are likely to see less dramatic changes in climate than many other parts of the world in the twenty-first century. They could, potentially, be an ‘ark’ for some wild species from mainland Europe whose habitats will become less favourable to their survival. Land is precious, of course, so there will be huge challenges to making this actually happen. Still, like the few scraps of cloud forest in Peru that may be kept for Xenoglaux, fragments of these islands could become havens for numerous threatened species, including lynx and eagle. One could make a wager: that humans can protect and restore the beautiful and the mysterious, and create new possibilities for future flourishing.
