I once managed to see a Regent Honeyeater in the wild. It was not an adult in full plumage, but it was still clearly a member of that species. I tracked it down on the outskirts of Sydney, thanks to eBird. I still hope to see – and photograph – an adult in all its beauty but my chances are diminishing as the population shrinks.
About 90 per cent of the traditional woodland habitat of the Regent Honeyeater across south-eastern Australia has been destroyed to make way for agriculture, leading to a catastrophic population crash. There are only a few hundred surviving in the wild, scattered across fragmented woodlands in New South Wales and Victoria. But if habitat loss was not enough, research has shown that a flow-on, compounding effect has been a loss of cultural memory within the shrinking fragments of the dispersed population.
Observers have noticed that the song they often hear these days from wild Regent Honeyeaters is a truncated, diminished version of the original. Some are singing songs that sound more like other, more common species. Ornithologists argue that the explanation for this is incomplete learning by juveniles. As the population has become smaller and more sparsely distributed, juveniles born in the wild encounter far fewer adult male role models, meaning they have less opportunity to learn the exact details of the song through imitation. But females still yearn after the real thing, leading to a decline in breeding success within the population.
There is a captive breeding program for the Regent Honeyeater. Since 2008 more than 300 have been released into the wild. Conservationists hope that greater exposure of juveniles to the right song before they are released, and monitoring to ensure they learn it properly, will help arrest the decline. Fortunately, there are preserved recordings of the song as it was in past decades, and the youngsters will be regularly serenaded with it from loudspeakers to prepare them for their future life after release.
The operatic parts to this act of rescue relied on calling up voices of nature which were captured and preserved by an earlier generation of ornithologists. Now, from a scientific publication we can tell the stories of these heroes of science and of captive breeding and release. The anthropomorphic appeal of the narrative is the reason it is newsworthy. By contrast, the loss of habitat is a ‘same-old-thing’ story, even if it’s the core of the truth of the matter.
Captive breeding and release into the wild at a significant scale is a kind of intervention that leaves nagging doubts (at least in my mind) about the ‘wild’ status of the surviving population. When the interventions extend to teaching the right song, artifice is even more to the fore. We are re-stocking our countryside with our animal produce, once again owning it as ours. Ecosystem restoration at large is not the aim.
This is just one among many examples of the way in which contemporary species conservation and rescue efforts are earnest but superficial glosses on the depth and breadth of the contemporary mass extinction problem. The very focus on species rather than on habitats and ecosystems is an artefact of our conceptions of nature and of our ways of observing and cataloguing it, as much as it is a response to the objective facts of nature-in-decline.
Our larger-than-life, exaggerated focus on individual species extinctions as the touchstone of biodiversity loss crops up in the media and in general discourse all the time. Another recent example concerns butterflies. The Xerces Blue was last confirmed extant by a collector in California in 1941. This last observed individual met its end in the interests of science, but the species went extinct because of urban development around San Francisco, encroaching onto the coastal dunes where it lived. It was one of many species of look-alike ‘Blues’ – they occupy pages and pages in the Butterfly guides – and entomologists long argued over whether it was a ‘true’ species or a subspecies of another, more widely distributed species.
The news story was not so much about the extinction, the causes of which received a short mention in the first paragraph. The ‘story’ was a revival of the scientific dispute about the species status of the taxon. Using recently developed DNA techniques, a scientist had extracted DNA from a dead specimen in a drawer in the Field Museum in Chicago and analysed it for signs of its genetic distinctiveness. A photo of that museum specimen drawer with its impaled butterflies – over 200 of them – is a good indicator of the abundance of this species before its habitat was extinguished.
From the DNA analysis, the dead butterfly was declared a true species – Glaucopsyche xerces. But another scientist was quoted arguing that the DNA technique used for this analysis was not a reliable marker of species status. The ‘species question’ is once again raised in dispute. By the way, this second scientist was a member of a team that was researching the possibilities of genetic engineering to recover lost species.
The Xerces Blue depended on deerweed growing in the dunes for its survival. The New York Times article concluded with a brief paragraph about the deerweed: ‘And though the Xerces blue is long gone, the deerweed it once needed has recently been replanted in the sand dunes in the Presidio, awaiting a somewhat familiar future butterfly.’
So, the writer acknowledges the loss of natural habitat due to human disturbance as the bottom line of the extinction crisis. But of course, it is the species story, including the twist about the scientific disputes, and the pathos of the lonely deerweed waiting for the vanished butterfly, that are the actual focus, not the habitat loss. Indeed, the headline of the story – that this was the first butterfly known to have gone extinct in North America due to human activity – hinged on the assertion of the full species status by one group of the disputing scientists. In science as in politics, the perversities of human conflict make the best headlines.
One of the reasons we reify species is because we invented them; more than this, it is because we keep re-inventing them through increasingly refined methods of science (these ‘splits’ and ‘lumps’ are a perpetual headache for the birder and other amateur recorders of the world of nature). To say we invented species is, of course, not the whole picture. We didn’t make up the facts of variety and difference among life forms in nature, but the concept of ‘species’ as a way of describing this is all our own work. Creatures recognize their own kind – they don’t need a definition of species or a field guide to do this – but what they see as their own kind doesn’t always fit into our neat categories. Inter-species contact and hybridization is a much-observed phenomenon; conversely, isolation results in new processes of speciation. As species evolve in the changing landscape, the boundaries between them are reshaped and the variety sometimes contracts, sometimes expands.
Species are objects of fascination, of study, of manipulation and of gratification (the last, especially, for birders). Disputes and arguments over what is or is not ‘a species’ are always entertaining in a tedious kind of way. The result is that we tend to ignore the fate of the forest by obsessing about the trees. Individual species are much neater units of analysis and observation than are habitats or ecosystems at large. The particularity of the specific and of rarity is more noteworthy than the generality of variety and abundance, especially when the latter no longer pertains. And the generality of habitat destruction can be not only boring, but also depressing – hence, not a good read.
I don’t oppose species rescue, captive breeding, and other measures to preserve biodiversity by trying to halt the decline and disappearance of particular species. But I do worry that the amount of effort being devoted to these activities and the preponderant focus on them in the public discussion of the extinction crisis, while making for good publicity, distracts from the harder issues. We give these issues a wave, but mostly we just raise our hands in defeat at the scale of the challenge of reversing habitat destruction on the massive scale that it continues to occur. But maybe a few Regent Honeyeaters, battling on in a fragment of surviving habitat with the help of our captive breeding program and some music lessons, is the best we can manage.