The Saddest Sound In The World

Extinctions are to be expected – as a normal part of the natural order.

- Blue Sky Science With Mike Bruton

The saddest sound I ever heard was the plaintive call of the last remaining male kauaïõõ, a rare bird from Hawaii. He called in vain as all females of his species had gone extinct at the hand of humans.

In March 2004, I stared in awe at a skeleton of Steller’s sea cow in a museum in Brussels. It is a beautifully designed creature that our greed has put to the sword. This huge animal, 9m long and weighing 10 tonnes, is a relative of the dugong and was first mentioned by sailors in 1741. It was hunted to extinction by 1768, one of the quickest extinctions ever (the dodo’s took 67 years). It was only officially described as a new species in 1780, 12 years after its extinction!

It is not only rare species that have recently gone extinct but also super-abundant ones. There were hundreds of millions, probably billions, of passenger pigeons in North America before Europeans arrived. Giant flocks took hours to fly past, reminiscent of the enormous herds of springboks in South Africa. Hunting and habitat destruction decimated their numbers until the last passenger pigeon, ‘Martha’, died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Fossil and other evidence reveals that extinctions have occurred regularly, as well as in bursts, throughout prehistory. Every now and then, separated by hundreds of millions of years, there have been ‘mass extinctions’ when, over a relatively short period of time geologically speaking, a large proportion of species has disappeared forever. The best known (and last) extinction event happened about 65 million years ago in the Cretaceous period when a giant meteorite, about 15km wide, collided with the Earth and wiped out nearly three-quarters of all species, including the large dinosaurs on land, other reptiles in the air and oceans, and the ammonites.

Changing of the guard