Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals. - Brief Article - Review - book review

by B.S.

Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals by Rosamond Purcell; Houghton Mifflin, $20

A number of unfortunate creatures never made it to this new millennium. Consider Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, who, writes Rosamond Purcell, "died in his cage in the Cincinnati Zoo on February 21, 1918, only six months after the death of Lady Jane, his companion of 32 years."

Purcell conducts a belated wake for the Carolina parakeet and some 60 other wildlife species with brief accounts of their demise and color photographs of each one's mortal remains--stuffed museum specimens, skeletal reconstructions, sometimes only bones. She mourns the paradise parrot, the glaucous macaw, the pig-footed bandicoot, and the Jamaican giant galliwisp, along with the better-known passenger pigeon and dodo, all laid low by humans wrecking their habitats, introducing predators and diseases, or just hunting them down.

Viewing the animals frozen in mummylike poses evokes shame at the annihilation of a menagerie so interesting, gorgeous, and, yes, friendly. Sheer hospitality doomed many, like the Falkland dog. "When Darwin visited Falkland in 1833," Purcell writes, "he feared that the Falkland dog's extreme tameness might lead to its extinction. He was right. Encouraged by a booming market for dog fur, traders lured the trusting animals by holding a piece of meat in one hand and a knife in the other."

Granted, some colonizers had a knack for appreciation, like the Frenchman Francois Leguat, who celebrated the Indian Ocean's big flightless bird, the Rodriguez solitaire: "They walk with such stately form and good grace that one cannot help admiring and loving them." But utilitarian brutality usually prevailed. The great auks, Purcell reports, were "hunted for their feathers ... and to loosen their plumage the birds were boiled in large cauldrons over fires fed by oil from auks killed before them."

Also included are photos of some of today's endangered species, like the Pacific islands' birdwing butterfly, which so entranced the great naturalist Alfred Wallace that he found himself "gazing, lost in admiration, at the velvet black and brilliant green of its wings, seven inches across, its golden body and crimson breast." Purcell's book vividly shows why we must choose such ecstasy over exploitation.