The Song of the Dodo

"It’s a great treatment of someone who, at the time it was written, was a long overlooked figure in biology, and that’s Alfred Russell Wallace. It was probably reading The Song of the Dodo that helped me to rediscover Wallace myself. Wallace’s work on islands in the Malay archipelago in the 19th century was fundamental to him coming up with similar ideas to Darwin about evolution. He went island hopping across that archipelago – visiting islands like Borneo, Sumatra, Lombok, Bali. He put in thousands of miles and dozens of crossings trying to understand the distribution of plants and animals there. More broadly, the book covers the role that islands have played in our thinking about how nature works, all the way up to the current issues and debates of the time. Quammen describes how pioneering biologists and ecologists are using islands as laboratories to try to figure out fundamental questions such as how many species can live in a particular place. It’s a great hybrid of rich history and contemporary science. The book has another aspect to it, though, which is how the fate of those islands has been a harbinger of things to come. Many of these islands have been damaged, or spoiled, essentially, by humans in one way or another – that’s why the book is called The Song of the Dodo . Without ramming it down your throat, there’s a profound message there about the future of nature as well. I’m hopeful for two reasons. First I don’t think there’s an alternative. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling attitude, so I don’t think that’s the way to go. But I’m also optimistic because, although nothing happens as fast as we’d like it to, we know lots more now than 30 or 40 years ago. We also have a lot of success stories that just aren’t talked about much. When we protect species or places they can really rebound. There are lots of examples of this from sea otters, elephant seals and whales to bald eagles, wolves and bears. In The Serengeti Rules , I describe my own experience of the Gorongosa reserve in Mozambique. That place was given up for dead, but in a decade it has undergone a tremendous transformation in terms of wildlife. You hear a lot of gloom and doom in the media, echoing ‘Isn’t humanity stupid, doing all these stupid things?’ But there are a lot of people working hard to change that narrative. It’s not that the alarm and grim forecasting is unfounded, but there is another side to the picture, which is that nature is incredibly resilient and, given a chance, she can rebound on a timescale that is surprising. We see that in the oceans when we protect fisheries, we see that on the land. We need a change of mindset to take ecological health seriously, and a change of mindset to say, we can do this. We’re not powerless, and it’s not too late."

"The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. I read the book when it came out more than 10 years ago. It is superb. David is a very scholarly but brilliant journalist who can tell scientific stories with the kind of panache you’d expect from a novelist. The Song of the Dodo is now a classic. It’s about island biogeography, about Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and how their theories are demonstrated in closed ecosystems. That is, Darwin’s famous study of the finches of the Galapagos – how in a closed ecosystem, like an island, any animals arriving or introduced will have unforeseen consequences on that ecosystem. For instance, on the island I’ve written about in When The Killing’s Done, Santa Cruz island, we have a scrub blue jay there, related to our blue jay here [in the American mainland], only because of the principles of island geography it is one third larger and much bluer. It’s a different subspecies because it’s in a different environment, and it grew larger because it had less competitors. By the same token we have the island fox, which is the size of a house cat. It became a dwarf variety for the same reasons. It didn’t have enough resources to grow bigger. Quammen’s book talks about this kind of thing on islands around the world. One of the stories he tells is of the Komodo dragon on Komodo island. This is a monitor lizard that has grown to gigantic proportions. It’s so wonderful how nature works outside of our agency. It’s theorised that it originally fed on the dwarf elephant. Of course, those things are long extinct, so what is it eating now? Deer. Deer introduced by humankind. It’s a very fascinating book and it tells you all about Darwin’s and Alfred Lord Russell’s theories about evolution, especially as applied to island biogeography. Yes, he tells the entire story of the dodo quite beautifully. Well, you know all about it from your reading of Alice in Wonderland . The dodo was related to the pigeon. Flight is very expensive, to be able to fly costs a lot of calories. Birds fly to escape enemies. On the island of Mauritius the dodo did not have any enemies, so it grew much larger and lost the ability to fly. It was utterly defenceless when people first came to the island and it was quickly decimated. Can you imagine? Sailing ships came by looking for food, having eaten dried fish and salt pork for months, and here is this huge, fat, delicious pigeon standing there looking at them. There is also a term for island animals – naïve. That is, they are naïve of predation so they are rather tame. This is true of the foxes on Santa Cruz island to this day. No-one has hunted them, no-one has disturbed them, they have no natural enemies, nothing eats them so they are almost tame. They ate the dodos, but people also introduced pigs and dogs, and the pigs and dogs took care of what people didn’t. The pigs in particular ate the eggs."

"I don’t think anyone has described the fragmentation of nature in the modern world as brilliantly as Quammen. He likens an ecosystem to a Persian carpet. Cut a beautiful, complex carpet into tiny squares, he says, and you get not tiny carpets, but a lot of useless scraps of material fraying at the edges. That’s what we’ve done to our ecosystems. For the most part, nature now exists only in tiny pockets, oases in a biological desert, fraying at the edges. Species that exist in these little Noah’s arks are increasingly vulnerable to assault by pollution, climate change and predators. Populations that – unlike birds or flying insects – are unable to move and mingle with other populations suffer from genetic impoverishment. This is what happens on small islands in mid-ocean. Islands are where species most commonly go extinct. Quammen’s wondrous peregrination of islands takes us on a journey of evolutions and extinctions in order to illustrate how like islands our continents have become."