WHITHER THE LOST WHITE EAGLES OF EUROPE AND AMERICA?

On Easter Monday 2013, 
my dear mother, Mary Shuker, passed away. 

So today, on Easter Monday 2014, 
I am dedicating this ShukerNature blog post to her.

God bless you, little Mom - 

I shall always love you, miss you, 
and wish that you were here with me still.

Computer-created representation of a white eagle in mountain darkness (© Dr Karl Shuker)

To misquote Oscar Wilde: To lose one white eagle may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.

In the annals of ornithology, only two types of white eagle have been reported – one in Europe, and one in North America. Both, however, are long vanished, not only from our planet but also from contemporary records. Indeed, even their erstwhile existence is known from only the most sparse and fragmentary details, and has been largely forgotten for centuries - until now. I first learned of these birds from their tantalisingly short entries in Extinct Birds (2012) by Julian P. Hume and Michael Walters, and was determined to find out more about them. Consequently, after having spent much time painstakingly tracing and collating it, I now have pleasure in documenting here the very scattered, disparate history of what appear to have once been a pair of real and extremely impressive but highly mysterious raptors, of unconfirmed taxonomic status, which were lost to the world before any physical trace of their former presence had been obtained for scientific examination.

The earliest documentation of the European white eagle appears to occur in the writings of the 13^th-Century German Dominican friar and Catholic bishop Albertus Magnus. His words were reiterated three centuries later in a couple of brief references in the year 1555.  The first of these was by Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), who documented it on p. 199 of his Avium Natura (1555), the bird tome in his celebrated five-volume, 45,000-plus-page encyclopaedia Historiae Animalium (published 1551-1558). He referred to it as Aquila alba sive Cygne ('the white or swan eagle'), and Aquila alba subsequently became its official binomial name in taxonomic nomenclature. Similarly, French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517-1564) referred to this bird as the 'aigle toute blanche' ('all-white eagle') on p. 89 of his L'Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux (1555). Following Gesner's lead, Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) termed it Aquila alba seu cycnea on p. 231 of his Ornithologiae, hoc est de Avibus Historia (1599).

An illustration of the European white eagle from 1790

On p. 63 of his Onomasticon Zoicon: Plerorumque Animalium Differentias et Nomina Propria Pluribus Linguis Exponens (1668), Somerset-born natural history writer Walter Charleton (1619-1707) called it the white eagle. And it was Aquila alba to Poland's Reverend Gabriel Rzaczynski (1664-1737) on p. 299 of his tome Historia Naturalis Curiosa Regni Poloniae (1721), who also referred to it as Aquila Cygnea Aldrovandi in a subsequent publication of 1745 entitled Auctarium Historiae Naturalis Regni Poloniae Magnique Ducatus Lituaniae Annexarumque Provinciarum in Puncta. Five years later, Jacob T. Klein summarised it on p. 42 of his Historiae Avium Prodromus cum Praefatione de Ordine Animalium in Genere (1750). In 1760, French zoologist Mathurin J. Brisson (1723-1806) documented Aquila alba on p. 424 of his tome Ornithologia, sive Synopsis Methodica Sistens Avium Divisionem in Ordines, Sectiones, Genera, Species, Ipsarumque Varietates. Acclaimed French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) also alluded to white eagles in his multi-volume magnum opus Histoire Naturelle (1749-1788).

English ornithologist John Latham (1740-1837) documented this raptor in three separate publications – calling it the white eagle on p. 36 of his famous treatise A General Synopsis of Birds (1781), applying to it the taxonomic binomial name Falco cygneus on p. 14 of his Index Ornithologicus (1790), and commenting upon what he believed its status to be in his General History of Birds (1822). Meanwhile, on p. 257 of his own version (published in 1788) of Linnaeus's pioneering taxonomic work Systema Naturae, German naturalist Johann F. Gmelin (1748-1804) had christened it Falco albus (but as the genus Falco was subsequently limited to falcons, this was later reverted to Aquila alba by other writers).  In 1809, English zoologist George Shaw (1751-1813) dubbed it Falco cygneus after Latham on p. 76 of the bird volume in his sixteen-volume series General Zoology (1809-1826).

And this seems to be the full (or at the very least the major) extent of the European white eagle's formal documentation in the scientific literature – but what did these various accounts actually say about it? Sadly, the answer to that question is…very little indeed. Moreover, as was typical back in those far-distant days, each work did little (if anything) more than simply regurgitate what had been published in the previous ones. So here is a summary of the sparse, salient details gathered from these sources.

Gesner's illustration of the golden eagle

Albertus Magnus stated that the European white eagle preys upon rabbits, hares, and sometimes fishes too, and that it inhabits the Alps, as well as the rocks bordering the Rhine, where, according to the Rev. Gabriel Rzaczynski, it builds its nests. Brisson stated that it is as large as the familiar golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos, but is entirely white - as white as snow. Rzaczynski noted that it has a 9-ft wingspan, and likened its white plumage to that of a swan. He also claimed that a specimen had been killed in Poland and its body shown to the country's monarch, John II Casimir Vasa ((but its subsequent fate is apparently unknown). Due to its fish-eating proclivities, Aldrovandi suggested that it may be more closely related to the osprey than to any eagle (but there are a number of eagle species famed for their piscivorous behaviour).

All of the European white eagle's early chroniclers presumed it to be a valid, distinct race in its own right. However, Buffon deemed all white eagles to be nothing more than varieties of the golden eagle. Conversely, although he included Buffon's opinion in his own coverage of the European white eagle within his 1781 publication, Latham decided to follow Brisson's stance in categorising it as a separate species – but by 1822 he had changed his mind, labelling it as merely a colour variety of the golden eagle after all.

Not that it mattered much by then anyway, except in a strictly academic sense, because sightings of the European white eagle were no longer being reported. Indeed, in his 1809 bird volume, Shaw had already noted that "it does not appear to be known to modern naturalists". Tragically, this pallid-plumed, winged prince of the alpine mountains had gone, forever. No records exist regarding the reason for its disappearance, but such a spectacular bird would unquestionably have been a major target for hunters, seeking to add its immaculate form to their trophies (a comparable fate befell the white tiger in India). If, as does seem likely, it existed as a discrete, self-perpetuating population of a distinct colour morph of the golden eagle, presumably either albinistic or (more probably) leucistic, and therefore the physical expression of a recessive mutant allele, it would not have been common to begin with, so would have been unable to withstand persecution for any notable length of time. Occasionally, a freak partially-white specimen of the golden eagle is reported today, usually in North America, but not from any self-perpetuating white population.

A partially-white (leucistic) golden eagle sighted in Colorado in July 2008 (© Constance Hass - inclusion here strictly on Fair Use/non-commercial basis only)

I am not aware of any preserved specimens of the European white eagle, and the present ShukerNature post is the most comprehensive documentation of this hitherto all-but-forgotten mystery bird ever written.

As for America's equivalent: This is – or was – the Louisiana white eagle Aquila candidus, also known as the conciliating eagle. It was originally documented by Antoine-Simon le Page du Pratz (1695?-1775) in his tome Histoire de la Louisiane (1758). Although born in Europe, this noted ethnographer, historian, and naturalist had lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734, where he had befriended the leaders of the Natchez nation there and had also learned their language. On p. 75 of his work, he referred to a white eagle that was smaller and rarer than the golden eagle, but more handsome, being almost entirely white – only the tips of its wings' quills were black. These quills were purchased at high prices by the Natchez people, who valued them greatly and apparently used them to compose the fan section of their symbol of peace, known as the calumet or pipe of peace (a very long reed ornamented with feathers).

On p. 197 of the second (bird) volume in his two-volume treatise Arctic Zoology (1785), documenting the mammals and birds of North America, Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) merely paraphrased Du Pratz's documentation of the Louisiana white eagle. So too did Latham in his 1781 tome. On p. 258 of his version of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, Gmelin accorded this raptor the taxonomic binomial name Falco candidus, whereas in 1809 George Shaw dubbed it Falco conciliator on p. 77 of the bird volume in his General Zoology.

Hand-coloured engraving from 1840 of an adult bald eagle

But what was this enigmatic bird, which, just like its European equivalent, has long since disappeared, both physically and figuratively? Its last notable mention was by English ornithologist Hugh E. Strickland (1811-1853), who included it in his posthumously-published book Ornithological Synonyms (1855). Here he listed its name as a synonym of the bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus, and questioned the accuracy of du Pratz's original account of it. Yet other zoological descriptions included by du Pratz in his book were accurate, so why shouldn’t his account of the Louisiana white eagle have been too? French naturalist Charles-Nicholas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751-1812) speculated that the Louisiana white eagle and the European white eagle were one and the same form, but du Pratz claimed that the former raptor was smaller than the golden eagle, whereas according to Brisson the European white eagle was the same size as the golden eagle. If these claims were correct, this indicates that the two white eagles were distinct from one another.

Worth noting is that a few confirmed specimens of white or mostly white bald eagle have been documented in modern times, but not a small, self-perpetuating population of them, which seems to have been true with the Louisiana white eagle. Certainly, Du Pratz did state that this latter raptor was rare; and in view of how valuable its feathers were, it may well have gone the same way as other birds whose handsome plumes attracted similarly unwelcome attention - such as the New Zealand huia (click here for more details) and the Hawaiian mamo, for instance.

Whatever the answer, the world is surely a poorer place without the sight of a magnificent white eagle soaring skyward among the lofty peaks of some stark mountain, like a pale feathered phantom whose mighty pinions bear it ever higher toward that great Empyrean above.

Nor are they the only mystery eagles on record. Remind me, another time, to recall for you the tiger eagle of Latvia, or the fierce eagle of Astrakhan, or the Macarran eagle of South America. And don't forget to click here for my extensive ShukerNature documentation of Washington's eagle – the most controversial lost eagle of all.


UPDATE: 3 April 2017

Facebook friend and crypto-correspondent Bob Deis (co-editor of the awesome book Cryptozoology Anthology: Strange and Mysterious Creatures in Men's Adventure Magazines) very kindly brought to my attention today an additional mention of the North American white eagle that I hadn't previously encountered. It consists of a short account by American ornithologist and artist John Cassin in his book Illustrations of the Birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and Russian America (1856). After reiterating the information provided by du Pratz in his own volume, Cassin then suggested that perhaps:

If not an albino [eagle], there is a possibility that it is a species of a group of white hawks, of rather large size, which are principally found in South America, and one species of which (Buteo Ghiesbreetii Dubus,) is known to inhabit Mexico. The latter would agree very well with Du Pratz's description, so far as it goes.

The species alluded to above by Cassin is nowadays known as the white hawk Pseudastur albicollis, currently classified as a member of the buzzard/hawk subfamily Buteoninae, whose northernmost subspecies, P. a. ghiesbreghti, is indeed native southern Mexico as well as upper Central America. Moreover, apart from black portions of its wings and tail, it is entirely white, thereby certainly drawing comparison with the mysterious North American white eagle as described by du Platz, and its smaller size is initially reminiscent of his description of the latter mystery bird too, although with a mere 22-in confirmed maximum length the white hawk is much smaller than any typical North American eagle.

The white hawk, subspecies ghiesbreghti (© Autosafari/Wikipedia - CC BY 2.5 licence)

Consequently, although there are certain morphological similarities, and perhaps in earlier times it may conceivably have ranged as far north as the southern USA states, the notable size discrepancy between the known white hawk and the unknown white eagle casts a not inconsiderable shadow of doubt over Cassin's suggestion that the former raptor could be the taxonomic identity of the latter one, as it seems difficult to believe that eyewitnesses would deem a barely 2-ft-long hawk to be an eagle. In my opinion, therefore, the mystery of what is, or was, the North American white eagle ultimately remains unresolved.

Beautiful painting of an adult bald eagle in soaring flight (© William Rebsamen)

REMEMBERING THE HUIA – HISTORY AND MYSTERIES OF THE BIRD WITH TWO BEAKS

The most famous huia painting, prepared by celebrated bird artist Johannes G. Keulemans for the 2nd edition (1888) of Sir Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand

Deriving its name from its distinctive melodious call, the huia Heteralocha acutirostris was a member of a small family of birds found only in New Zealand and referred to as wattlebirds. A crow-sized species whose glossy black plumage disclosed a deep green sheen when viewed at certain angles in sunlight, it was instantly characterized by its pair of bright orange facial wattles, its elegant tail plumes with broad tips decorated by a wide band of sparkling white (tinged with rufous in young birds), and - above all else - by the truly exceptional, extraordinary nature of its ivory-coloured beak, for unlike virtually all other birds (see below) the huia had not one beak but two.

Female (top) and male (bottom) huia heads, by John Gould, 1837-1838

Indeed, when first scientifically described in 1836, by eminent ornithologist and bird painter John Gould, the male and female huias appeared so dissimilar in form that he mistakenly named and designated them as two separate species – Neomorpha crassirostris (the male huia) and Neomorpha acutirostris (the female huia)

A pair of huias – the male with a straight beak, the female with a curved beak; colour plate from 1860, based upon John Gould's original painting of 1848

This is not as surprising as it might otherwise seem, because whereas the male huia’s beak was short and straight, used for chiselling out grubs (especially those of Prionoplus reticularis, a longhorn beetle commonly called the huhu) from decayed wood as a woodpecker does, the female’s was long and curved gracefully downward, enabling her to secure grubs from deep woody crevices that her mate’s short beak could not reach.

Huhu grubs (Charlotte Simmonds/Wikipedia)

Many animal species exhibit some degree of sexual dimorphism, but in birds this usually involves plumage or body size. The huia’s drastic departure from that tradition, by possessing a sexually dimorphic beak, established it as a species of immense scientific worth, which made its extinction all the more tragic. (Recently, it has been shown that a second vanished species of bird, the Réunion crested starling Fregilupus varius, extinct since 1837, also sported a sexually dimorphic beak, but not to such a pronounced degree as in the huia.)

Keulemans's painting of the Réunion crested starling

Never the most common of birds, the huia inhabited beech and podocarp forests, and was apparently confined to North Island’s Ruahine, Tararua, Rimutaka, and Kaimanawa mountain ranges, with occasional reports from the Wairarapa Valley too. (Supposed sightings of huias from the woody country near Massacre Bay in South Island’s Province of Nelson were never substantiated.) Yet although it had been hunted for generations by the Maoris, who greatly prized its attractive tail feathers for their chiefs’ head-dresses, its numbers seemingly did not suffer unduly until the coming of the Europeans.

Their arrival, however, was accompanied by all manner of serious threats to the huia's survival. These included: the accompanying introduction of Western species that endangered the huia by preying upon it, competing with it for food, and exposing it to various diseases hitherto unknown there; large-scale procurement of huia specimens for museums and private collections; destruction of its forest homelands for cultivation and grazing; and ultimately the widespread wearing of huia plumes by all Maoris (regardless of status) and by members of European high society.

A pair of mounted huias at Germany's Museum für Naturkunde (Haplochromis/Wikipedia)

There could be only one outcome. The last fully verified sighting of this species was made on 28 December 1907, when W.W. Smith spotted two males and a female. Since then, the huia has been officially categorised as extinct – but is it? We'll return to this tantalizing subject a little later.

Meanwhile:

ALBINO HUIAS, RED-TAILED HUIAS, AND THE FORGOTTEN HUIA-ARIKI

It is not widely known that the familiar glossy-black huia with a white-banded tail is not the only variety of huia on record.

For instance, several beautiful albinistic specimens are preserved in various museums, their snowy plumage and pale wattles rendering them almost as a photographic negative of their typical ebony-plumed counterparts. One such specimen, an adult female, was painted in the company of a pair of normal adult huias by celebrated bird artist Johannes G. Keulemans. This beautiful water colour was published in c.1900.

Keulemans's painting of an albinistic female huia and a normal pair

It is well documented that immature huias sometimes exhibited a rufous tinge to their tail's white band. However, Maoris sometimes specifically referred to a 'red-tailed huia' in the adult state too, by which they may have been alluding to specimens retaining this rufous tinge of the white tail band into maturity.

Far more intriguing, however, is the so-called huia-ariki (translated as 'chiefly huia') – a nowadays-forgotten yet extremely distinctive huia variant, whose plumage was decidedly different from that of the normal form. The principal source of information concerning the huia-ariki is Sir Walter Lowry Buller's magnificent and still-definitive work A History of the Birds of New Zealand. Here is what he wrote about it in the 2nd edition (1888):

The most remarkable variety, however, is that known to the Maoris as a Huia-ariki. I have never seen but one of these birds, of which I have already published the following notice*:—

[* = Trans. New-Zealand Instit. 1878, vol. xi. p. 370.]

“I have received from Captain Mair some feathers which, in colour, have much the appearance of the soft grey plumage of Apteryx oweni [nowadays termed Apteryx owenii, the little-spotted kiwi], but which are in reality from the body of a Huia, being of extremely soft texture. I hope to receive the skin for examination, but in the meantime I will give a quotation from the letter forwarding the feathers:—Old Hapuku, on his death-bed, sent for Mr. F. E. Hamlin, and presented him with a great taonga. This has just been shown to me. It is the skin of a very peculiar Huia, an albino I suppose, called by the Hawke’s Bay natives ‘Te Ariki.’ I send you a few feathers. The whole skin is of the same soft dappled colour, but the feathers are longer and softer. The bill is nearly straight, strong, and of full length. The wattles are of a pale canary-colour. The centre tail-feather is the usual black and white, while the others on each side are of a beautiful grey colour. These birds are well known to the Huia-hunting natives of Hawke’s Bay; and to possess an ‘Ariki’ skin one must be a great chief. The specimen I have described was obtained in the Ruahine mountains.”

The skin was afterwards sent to me, for examination, and was exhibited at a Meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society. It is that of a male bird of the first-year. The whole of the body-plumage is brownish black, obscurely banded or transversely rayed with grey; on the head and neck the plumage is darker, shading into the normal glossy black on the forehead, face, and throat. The tail-feathers are very prettily marked: with the exception of the middle one, which is of the normal character in its apical portion, they are blackish brown, irregularly barred and fasciated with different shades of grey, and with a terminal band of white; the under tail-coverts, also, are largely tipped with white, indicating adolescence.

I have on file a number of examples of freak brown specimens belonging to species whose plumage is normally black, such as crows and certain other corvids. And in some cases, these brown specimens also exhibit a degree of banding or fasciation. This aberrant colouration and patterning was genetically induced in those birds, so presumably the huia-ariki arose from the expression of an analogous – or even homologous - mutant allele in the huia. However, the softer, longer nature of the feathers themselves in the huia-ariki suggests that another mutant allele may also have been involved, unless there was a single, pleiotropic (i.e. multi-potent) allele responsible, affecting separate aspects of this variant's phenotype. I wonder if there is an illustration of the huia-ariki? It would be fascinating to see what this remarkable form looked like, rather than having to rely only upon a verbal description.

A sketch from 1888 of a huia with an aberrant upper mandible

Also on record are a few huia specimens with distorted beaks, such as the bizarre example illustrated above.

POST-1907 SURVIVAL OF THE HUIA?

The huia’s morphology is unique. No other bird in New Zealand, whether native or introduced, can be readily confused with it - which is why the sizeable number of alleged post-1907 huia sightings has attracted notable scientific interest. Their most detailed documentation is presented in William I. Phillipps’s The Book of the Huia (1963). A noted expert on New Zealand’s avifauna, Phillipps listed 23 such sightings, and learnt that as recently as the 1920s eyewitness reports of black birds with orange wattles and white-tipped tails regularly emerged from the huia’s former haunts.

The Book of the Huia, by William I. Phillipps

Although none were by professional ornithologists, a number of these sightings are sufficiently convincing to give cautious cause for optimism that this unmistakeable species still survived at that time. An official huia search was carried out in 1924, and although no huia were seen, signs of this species’ existence were observed. Moreover, a much more recent event, one that greatly impressed Phillipps, occurred on 12 October 1961, featuring Margaret Hutchinson.

As I learnt from Ron Scarlett of South Island’s Canterbury Museum, when Hutchinson arrived for a six-month stay in New Zealand in 1961 she visited the museum first of all, before travelling on to North Island; she interviewed at length its then Assistant Director, Graham Turbott, regarding the huia, as she seemed most interested in this species. After reaching North Island, she spent October at the Lake House Hotel, Waikaremoana, in the Urewera State Forest, where she was studying the native bush (forest).

On 12 October, Hutchinson spent the day at a smaller lake called Waikareiti, three miles further on from her hotel, and set amidst New Zealand beech woodland. She had been sitting by the track leading to the lake, watching some large, red-and-green native parrots called kakas pecking dead wood off a tree, when suddenly, as she was looking across a small valley nearby, she saw a bird fly up the middle of it, and disappear into some beeches. It was of similar size to the kaka (17-19 in) but was of slighter build, and its plumage was black, except for the white-banded tip of its tail. In the field-guide that she later consulted, the picture most closely matching her bird was the huia’s.

19th-Century engraving depicting a pair of huias

As she noted in an article published in the RSPB’s Birds magazine (September-October 1970), Hutchinson recounted her sighting not only to William Phillipps but also to Dr R.A. Falla (then Director of Wellington’s Dominion Museum), another major authority on New Zealand birds. Both men were sufficiently impressed to deem it likely that she had genuinely seen a huia; in The Book of the Huia, Phillipps goes so far as to conclude: “...there appears to be little doubt she did see a huia”.

However, we must also consider the possibility that Hutchinson’s evident interest in this species actually conspired against her. Could a combination of excitement and surprise at the bird’s brief and unexpected debut have ‘transformed’ it (albeit unconsciously) in her eyes from its true identity (some still-surviving species, such as a tui) into a huia? In short, could her huia have been an illusion, created unconsciously by an innate desire to see one? The human brain can play some quite extraordinary tricks on our eyes, often ‘filling in’ details that are not actually there, or modifying the appearance of an object to accord with some subconscious thought or memory - and all without the person concerned even realising what is happening.

A mounted female huia (Fritz Geller/Grimm,Wikipedia)

More recently, in 1991, Copenhagen University zoologist Lars Thomas, who has a longstanding interest in cryptozoology, also claimed to have seen a huia, while visiting North Island’s Pureora Forest.

Yet if the huia really does still survive, why has it not been formally rediscovered by now? In a foreword to Phillipps’s book, Falla noted that even at best, New Zealand’s bush is not overly conducive to easy birdwatching, requiring such a sustained effort to explore the multitude of potential hideaways for birds that there is rarely enough time to carry out detailed observations at any one given spot, so that all-too-many of its birds are not sighted at all. Having spent quite some time birdwatching in New Zealand during 2006, I can certainly vouch for this.

A New Zealand postage stamp issued in 1898 featuring a pair of huias

If the huia is alive, it has probably retreated into areas that even by the bush’s standards are quite inaccessible, and thus less readily disturbed. Indeed, over the years a number of people have informed Ron Scarlett of possible huia sightings in the remoter regions of the Kaimanawa range, so that he deems it possible that the species still survives here. Moreover, as Hutchinson revealed in her article, careful analysis of the post-1907 reports documented by Phillipps do seem to indicate a movement northwards — away from the huia’s most favoured former provenance, the Tarawera Range (now divided up by agricultural cultivation), and into a wilder, mountainous forest region (much less accessible to humans), perhaps as far as the Urewera State Forest after all.

Equally, Ron Scarlett has identified subfossil huia bones from moa-hunter middens on the Taranaki coast, and from limestone caves in the Mahoenui area, lying on the border of North Taranaki and South Auckland, and much further north than the huia’s known modern-day distribution. Could this region’s more remote portions be another putative retreat of surviving huias?

Perhaps some huias took refuge in certain northern areas less readily reached by humans during their species’ last stand in its favoured territory. In addition, there might be areas that have always housed a resident huia population, wholly unknown to the Europeans, so that this truly unique species - New Zealand’s handsome and quite astonishing bird with two beaks - still survives after all.

RESURRECTING THE HUIA? SEND IN THE CLONES!

The extraordinary ingenuity of practical techniques employed in the field of molecular biology may eventually render superfluous searches in the field for officially extinct species in the hope of rediscovering them. Some scientists are already anticipating a time when extinct species may be resurrected in the laboratory instead - by cloning, using DNA extracted from preserved tissues. Indeed, the huia is one 'classic' extinct bird that may well become the focus of just such an attempt in the not-too-distant future.

Keulemans's painting of a huia pair within the 1st edition (1873) of Sir Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand

In July 1999, a conference attended by biologists, bioethicists, and Maori representatives was held in New Zealand to discuss the exciting possibility of reviving the huia by cloning, using DNA samples retained in museums' taxiderm specimens. Cyberuni, a firm based in New Zealand and California, is offering to help fund the project if suitable DNA samples can be found. Even so, some researchers have objected to the plan, claiming that the huia's extinction was a natural process demonstrating its unviability as a species.

In reality, however, a major part of this bird's decline was due to over-hunting for its prized tail plumes, to diseases carried by non-native species introduced to New Zealand by Europeans, and to stuffed specimens being too zealously sought by museums and private collectors. Consequently, if the huia could be restored, humanity would merely be redressing the balance.

A New Zealand postage stamp issued in 1996 featuring a pair of huias

THE MISSING MENAGERIE – CREATURES CURSED BY THE STAMP OF EXTINCTION

Following on from my two most recent ShukerNature blog posts (click here and here to view them), here is a third one that once again links a couple of my greatest interests – natural history and philately.

Thanks to my trio of definitive books documenting them (The Lost Ark, 1993; The New Zoo, 2002; and The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals, 2012), I am more readily associated with zoological arrivals and revivals than I am with extinct and endangered species.

So now, by way of contrast and compensation, this present ShukerNature blog post surveys a varied selection of the most famous and extraordinary residents of Nature’s missing menagerie of vanished creatures. Although they are represented nowadays only by lifeless museum specimens and a few faded photographs, their original beauty and grandeur is recaptured for all time in numerous modern-day works of art – including, as selected from my own personal collection of wildlife-themed postage stamps and presented here, an eyecatching gallery of the philatelic variety.


AS DEAD AS THE DODO

By popular zoological convention, an animal is said to have become extinct in historical times if it died out after 1681 AD. However, this is not an arbitrary date. On the contrary, 1681 is the official year of demise for the most famous modern-day extinct species of all – the dodo Raphus cucullatus of Mauritius. ‘As dead as the dodo’ is a popular contemporary expression of extinction or general obsolescence, but the dodo was once very much alive. This giant hook-beaked relative of doves and pigeons had survived untroubled by other species for countless ages on its island home in the Indian Ocean, and, as a result of having no need to flee from anything, had gradually lost the power of flight, becoming ever larger until it was the size of a turkey.


Size, however, was not the only characteristic that the dodo shared with the turkey. Like the latter bird, it was not overly encumbered with brainpower, and its flesh, though not tasty, was at least palatable. These two attributes would spell its inevitable doom if ever it were to encounter humankind – and finally, after Mauritius had enjoyed centuries of secure isolation, this is precisely what happened.


During the early 16th Century, Portuguese sailors began visiting the island, using it as a stop-over location for supplying their ships with food during long oceanic voyages. The dodo, trusting and edible, was a prime target. Later, the Portugese were replaced by the Dutch, who in 1644 established Mauritius as a Dutch colony. By now, the slaughter of dodos had become almost a sport in terms of popularity among the colonists, and its inevitable demise was hastened by persecution from various non-native species introduced here by humans, most notably the rat, dog, cat, monkey, and pig.


By the end of the 17th Century, less than 200 years since the island’s first visitation by Europeans, Mauritius had lost its most iconic inhabitant (and several of its other exotic endemic birds would also be exterminated in the years that followed). The dodo was no more, and the age of modern-day extinction had begun.




THE PASSING OF THE PASSENGER PIGEON

During the next three centuries, a host of other pigeons, doves, and even a swan-sized dodo relative called the Rodrigues solitaire would be wiped out in remote localities all over the world, but no such extinction would be more surprising – indeed, scarcely believable - than that of the passenger pigeon Ectopistes migratorius. Not only was this handsome species native to the North American continent (as opposed to some far-flung tropical isle only lately reached for the first time by humankind), but it was once incomprehensibly numerous. In fact, as recently as the 19th Century it was deemed to be the most abundant bird that had ever existed anywhere on the planet – its single species accounting for almost 40% of North America’s entire bird population. The following incident demonstrates this well.


One autumn day in 1813, while travelling on a wagon from his Ohio River home to Louisville, Kentucky, around 88 km away, the great American bird painter John James Audubon (who famously painted this now-lost species) witnessed a stupendous flock of passenger pigeons flying overhead in a colossal mass, which so filled the sky above that in his own words: “[the] light of noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse”. So immense was the flock that when he arrived at Louisville at sunset, it was still passing overhead - an unbroken, seemingly never-ending cloud of life that according to conservative estimates must have contained well over one billion pigeons!


It will come as no surprise, sadly, to learn that the sight of such unimaginable numbers triggered in every sense an insatiable bloodlust among the sporting fraternity of America, and hunters would shoot endlessly at these massive migrations of pigeons, a single bullet often bringing down multiple birds. On and on the slaughter continued, year after year, decade after decade (around a billion pigeons were killed during a single hunt held in 1878 close to Petoskey, Michigan), as it seemed impossible even to contemplate that any depredation, however sustained, would affect the numbers of this innumerable bird – but it did.


Astonishingly, by the end of the 19th Century, the most abundant bird that had ever been had become, in relative terms, a rarity, but even worse was to follow. Less than a quarter of a million pigeons remained, all contained within a single great nesting flock in Ohio - which was almost totally destroyed when a massive hunting party descended upon it, leaving no more than 5000 birds alive.


Too late it was realised that this uniquely prolific species needed enormous numbers for successful reproduction. The sparse quantity that now remained was insufficient, and so the passenger pigeon plummeted headlong into the abyss of extinction. The last known wild specimen was shot in Ohio in 1900, and on 1 September 1914, at the grand old age of 29, the last passenger pigeon in the world, a lone female called Martha Washington, died in her cage at Cincinnati Zoo, and in so doing marked the death of an entire species – one that had once seemed indestructible. The unthinkable had happened – the passenger pigeon was extinct.


Incredibly, only four years after Martha’s death, a second very significant North American species also met its untimely end in the very same zoo, when in 1918 the world’s last Carolina parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis died here. Although nowhere near as numerous as the passenger pigeon, this highly attractive yellow-headed, green-bodied species – the U.S.A.’s only native species of parrot – had once been a common sight through much of the continent’s eastern and southern regions, but it was irresistibly attracted to the fruit of farmers’ orchards and the grain of their fields, and so, like the pigeon, it was doomed.


RAIDERS OF THE LOST AUK

Another famous vanished species is the great auk Pinguinus impennis. This large flightless black-and-white seabird from the northern hemisphere was superficially reminiscent of the southern hemisphere’s familiar penguins, but its link with them does not end there – because the great auk was the original penguin, the latter name having been initially bestowed upon this puffin-allied species. Only later was it applied by those European sailors first penetrating Antarctic waters to the wholly-unrelated birds that they encountered there and which retain it today, long after the original penguin’s extermination.


The great auk once existed in tens of millions, nesting on the rocky coastal areas of islands on both sides of the North Atlantic, but it was in America that it first met its end. Its feathers were prized for use in eider-downs and feather beds, its flesh was tasty and therefore much sought-after by sailing vessels, and collectors coveted its eggs, and so this imposing but helpless bird was massacred in countless numbers. On Funk Island off Newfoundland, for example, its precious nesting grounds were frequently raided and mercilessly desecrated. Thousands of auks were captured alive and cooped together in great enclosures like domestic fowl until it was their time to be slaughtered en masse by being clubbed to death and then thrown into furnaces, enabling their feathers to be more readily removed from their bodies. By the second decade of the 19th Century, the great auk was merely a memory in North America.


In Europe, its major stronghold was the Icelandic coast, but great auks even existed around the more northerly islands of Scotland, most notably St Kilda but also visiting the Orkneys, with one particularly famous Orcadian pair being nicknamed the King and Queen. Sadly, however, they were no safer from hunting here than they had been in the New World. Moreover, it was especially ironic that as this species became rarer, it became ever more persecuted by museum collectors - anxious to add specimens and eggs to their collections before it died out! The last known great auks constituted a pair clubbed to death (and their egg smashed) on the Icelandic island of Eldey on 3 June 1844.


For a few decades thereafter, some quite convincing reports of lone living specimens emerged from various remote far-northern European localities, but none was confirmed. Reports emanating from Norway’s Lofoten Islands during the 1920s and 1930s were duly investigated, only to discover that the birds in question were actually released Antarctic penguins. And a supposed great auk spied in the Orkneys during the 1980s that attracted considerable media attention owed more to a clever publicity campaign for a certain brand of whisky than it did to any unexpected resurrection of the lost auk.


ONE BIRD, TWO BEAKS

The great auk was not the only species hastened into extinction by the mercenary actions of museum curators. Moving from the North Atlantic to the North Island, of New Zealand, the huia Heteralocha acutirostris was a large predominantly black-plumaged bird whose long broad tail’s tip bore a striking white horizontal band, and its cheeks sported a pair of bright orange wattles. Indeed, it was a member of a small family of birds known as wattlebirds, found only in New Zealand.


What singled the huia out from all other birds, however, was its beak – or, rather, its beaks. Uniquely, the beak of the male huia was totally different in shape from that of the female huia - the former’s was short and straight, the latter’s was long and downward-curving. A pair would work together when seeking the wood-inhabiting grubs on which they fed – the male using his hard, sharp beak to chisel through rotting bark in search of the grubs, and the female then hooking them out with her more delicate, curved beak.


Tragically, however, this unparalleled avian teamwork would soon come to an end – when the species itself died out. Traditionally, the huia’s eyecatching tail feathers had been used in ceremonial Maori head-dresses, but when Europeans arrived their usual unwelcome contingent of rats and cats lost no time in decimating the endemic bird population of New Zealand, and the huia proved to be particularly vulnerable not just to predation by these and other alien species but also to various diseases associated with them. And as with the great auk, once the huia’s numbers crashed, museum curators who realised that they held few specimens of this extraordinary species soon made known their requirement for more, thereby sounding the death knell for this highly endangered bird.


The last known huia was sighted in 1907, and although, as documented in my book Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), a few unconfirmed sightings have been made since, including one by Danish zoologist Lars Thomas as recently as 1991, until further notice the huia remains yet another tragic inhabitant of the missing menagerie.


THE SORRY SAGA OF A SEA COW

Birds are not the only species to have lost some of their most dramatic members either. Three of the most spectacular mammals to have disappeared since the dodo are Steller’s sea cow Hydrodamalis (=Rhytina) gigas, the quagga Equus burchelli quagga, and the thylacine (Tasmanian wolf) Thylacinus cynocephalus.

Scientifically discovered in 1741 by Russian naturalist Georg Steller, during the Bering Expedition to the icy waters of far-eastern Russia’s North Pacific, and duly named after him, Steller’s sea cow measured approximately 8 m long. This made it by far the largest member of the taxonomic order of mammals known as sirenians, named after the fondly-held belief that sightings by sailors of some of the smaller species, known as manatees and dugongs, had inspired the belief in mermaids or sirens.


When his ship was wrecked on the coast of one of the Bering Sea’s previously-uncharted Commander Islands, Steller had plenty of time to observe in detail these enormous but wholly inoffensive, herbivorous mammals that grazed upon seaweed and gave voice to loud, lugubrious groans. Among the countless discoveries that he made about them was that their flesh was delicious – a fact not lost upon the various expeditions that arrived here in the years to come. So much so, in fact, that by 1768, a mere 27 years after the first one had been seen by Steller, the last of his eponymous sea cows was killed, and the mournful song of this strange mega-mermaid was forever stilled.


THE ZEBRA THAT LOST ITS STRIPES…AND ITS SURVIVAL

Named after the sound of its strange high-pitched whinny, the quagga of South Africa could more aptly be termed a quasi-zebra, for unlike the uniformly striped zebras familiar to one and all today, the quagga, uniquely, was striped only on its face, neck, and anterior forequarters – its flanks and hindquarters were wholly brown and unstriped, and its legs were predominantly white. Although still present in huge herds as late as the 1840s, during the next three decades the quagga was hunted in great numbers by the Boers for its hide and its meat. Its decimation in the wild was completed with the killing of the last known wild specimen in 1878. On account of its unusual appearance, a number of quaggas had been exhibited at various zoos, but in those pre-conservation days no attempt was made to breed this very interesting creature, so when the last captive specimen died at Amsterdam Zoo in 1883, the quagga was gone forever – or was it?


A fascinating captive breeding programme, the Quagga Project, pioneered by natural historian Reinhold Rau, has been underway since the 1990s in South Africa, attempting to recreate the quagga by selective breeding, using specimens of the plains zebra Equus burchelli (of which the quagga was a subspecies) with fewer stripes than normal. Some decidedly quagga-like individuals have already been engendered, but whether they share the original quagga’s genetic make-up rather than merely its outward form has yet to be determined.


THE ONCE AND FUTURE THYLACINE?

Another lost creature that may yet rise again like a veritable phoenix in stripes was – or is, or will be again? – the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf Thylacinus cynocephalus (popularly translated as ‘pouched dog with wolf’s head’, on account of its decidedly canine head and offspring-rearing pouch). Remarkably lupine in superficial external appearance (but wholly unrelated to real wolves and dogs), it was also known as the Tasmanian tiger due to its series of distinctive body and tail stripes. This very impressive creature was the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial (pouched mammal), and although confined in historical times to the island of Tasmania, only a couple of millennia ago it also thrived in mainland Australia, and formerly in New Guinea as well.


Yet despite its spectacular appearance, the thylacine won no fans among European settlers on Tasmania, especially those with farm livestock, whose lambs and sheep proved particularly tempting to this meat-eating mammal – although to be fair, more sheep were killed by introduced domestic dogs there than were ever killed by this island’s pouched counterparts. Nevertheless, in 1888, the Tasmanian government offered a bounty for every thylacine shot, and so, as had happened to all too many other species at other times elsewhere, the annihilation duly began. In 1936, when realisation of the fate awaiting what by now had been scientifically recognised as a priceless product of Antipodean evolution belatedly hit the Tasmanian government, it finally granted the thylacine full protection. The timing was impeccable – impeccably bad, that is, bearing in mind that the world’s last thylacine, a female specimen known somewhat oddly as Benjamin, died at Hobart Zoo just two months later; the last confirmed wild specimen had been shot in 1930.


Having said that, the thylacine has since earned itself the title of the world’s most common extinct animal, because seldom has a year gone by ever since without alleged sightings of specimens emerging from one region or another of Tasmania, and sometimes by very experienced, reliable eyewitnesses such as national park wardens. Consequently, some zoologists remain reluctant to deny categorically that the thylacine still survives, but without any physical, unequivocal evidence to hand, the case for its survival remains unresolved.


Like the quagga, however, plans are afoot to resurrect this fairly recently-extirpated enigma, but this time by means of cloning DNA extracted from various well-preserved museum specimens. Some Australian scientists are confident that the technology to accomplish this Jurassic Park scenario may soon be forthcoming, and that before much longer a living breathing thylacine will once more be a reality.


AND NOT FORGETTING…

Meanwhile, the extinct species described in this article are just a handful of the hundreds of truly exceptional creatures that have been wiped out since the dodo. Others include the colossal ostrich-like elephant bird of Madagascar Aepyornis maximus (end of the 18th Century), South Africa’s blaauwbok Hippotragus leucophaeus (1799; Africa's first large mammal to become extinct in historical times); the Labrador (pied) duck Camptorhynchus labradorius (1875; black-and-white North American waterfowl only distantly allied to other ducks); and the Falkland Islands fox Dusicyon australis (1876; wholly confined to this South Atlantic island group).


Over a dozen species of finch-related Hawaiian honeycreepers have become extinct in modern times too (including in 1898 the gorgeously-plumed mamo Drepanis pacifica), plus at least three different species of exotic black-and-yellow o-o birds (also Hawaiian, and named after their distinctive call).


Also extinct is the toolach Macropus greyi (1939; an exceptionally beautiful wallaby); the Caribbean monk seal Monachus tropicalis (1952; a specimen was once owned by Fidel Castro); and the all-white Chinese river dolphin or baiji Lipotes vexillifer (declared extinct in 2004, after having first been made known to western science as recently as 1918). And these are just a few from the disturbingly long list of species that have vanished since the dodo's own disappearance just over three centuries ago.


The cloning of a thylacine, or any other of the presently lost species documented here, would certainly be a marvel, but just because extinction might indeed become reversible in the up-and-coming future, we must never forget what destruction our ancestors have wrought upon the living world in the not-so-distant past, and we must ensure that such activity is never repeated anywhere in the present. Who knows – perhaps in the not-too-distant future extinction may no longer be forever, but it should never be at all.