The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species

by Scott Weidensaul

Overview

"A thoughtful examination of the machinery of extinction . . . By turns harrowing and elegiac, thrilling and informative." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Three or four times an hour, eighty or more times a day, a unique species of plant or animal vanishes forever. And yet, every so often one of these lost species resurfaces. "Having adventures most of us can only dream about" (The Times-Picayune), Scott Weidensaul pursues stories of loss and recovery, of endurance against the odds, and of surprising resurrections.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865476684
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/11/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	933,270
Product dimensions:	8.24(w) x 7.08(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Scott Weidensaul is the author of Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Mountains of the Heart. He lives in the Pennsylvania Appalachians.

Read an Excerpt

THE GHOST WITH TREMBLING WINGS
Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species

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By Scott Weidensaul

North Point Press

Copyright © 2002 Scott Weidensaul.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0374246645

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Chapter One

The overnight rain had stopped, leaving the forest heavy with moisture and the trail slick with mud. I moved down the path in the dim green predawn light, beneath palms and tall mahogany trees hung with vines, keeping half an eye on the ground—mindful that a snake, one of the big, venomous fer-de-lances that blend so well with fallen leaves, might be returning late from a night of hunting.

    The air was overflowing with bird songs, only a few of which I recognized; the clear, piercing whistles of rufous-throated solitaires, and the buzzy, hurry-up-and-wait melody of the tiny bananaquits, which flitted ahead of me like yellow insects. The path wound its way down into ravines, across small, clear jungle streams, and back up again, and wrapped around the base of sodden cliffs covered with ferns, from which choruses of tree frogs still called, unwilling to relinquish the night.

    After an hour of hiking, I rounded a bend and the forest fell away suddenly into a deep gash. I could finally see what I'd already known —that I was high on the side of a steep mountain, overlooking narrow valleys enclosed by craggy, tree-covered hills, their summits made indistinct by ragged gray clouds that whipped across them on the strong breeze.

    St. Lucia lies midway down the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, where the chain crooks like a bent finger toward Venezuela, 400 miles to the south. It is a volcanic island, heavily mountainous and covered in forest—the very picture of a tropical paradise, known through history as "the Helen of the Caribbean" for its natural beauty. Tourist resorts rim the coasts, while the interior is largely protected in a series of government forest reserves; unlike many of its neighbors in the Caribbean, St. Lucia has maintained much of its native habitat, making it an emerging mecca for ecotourism.

    The northeast trade winds, which blow almost constantly through the winter dry season, wicked the sweat from me as I settled down at the edge of the overlook for a rest, unslinging my binoculars. In 1994, when a hurricane swept the region, torrential rains loosened the soil, producing catastrophic landslides across the island. The damage was far less in the forest reserves, where the thick jungle held the soil in place better than farmland or scrub did, but this hillside had nevertheless torn loose, entombing hundred-foot-tall trees in a slurry of heavy mud that roared into the valley below. Now, years later, the dizzyingly steep wall of the old slide zone was covered with fresh green growth, edged by a few old canopy trees that somehow escaped the carnage and stood lonely and tall.

    A pair of large parrots, growling and squawking like preschoolers, flew out of the mist and down into the valley, blue and yellow flashing on their wings before they were swallowed by the trees. A broad-winged hawk wheeled overhead, giving a high, thin scream, then landed near the top of one of the tall trees and began to meticulously preen its feathers.

    Sometimes, in the forest, it pays to play a hunch. I don't know why, but as I watched the hawk, I froze, binoculars halfway to my eyes, then very slowly turned my head to look behind me. An agouti was emerging from the dark tunnel of the trail. It is hard to describe an agouti; to call it a rodent, however biologically accurate that may be, conveys an entirely inaccurate impression, for there was nothing at all furtive or slinky about it. It weighed about 10 pounds and was the size of a fox, and looked like a cross between a sleek guinea pig and a deer—slender legs, a solid, squared-off body with no visible tail, and large, dark eyes. It stopped and looked around, its Roman nose twitching, the low sun casting a green iridescence over its glossy brown fur.

    I had seen agoutis before in the rain forests of Central and South America, but only as indistinct shapes hurtling across the trail in the twilight or scuffling in the dark just beyond my flashlight beam. The head had a rabbitish look despite the small ears, and the hair around the rump was coarser and longer than the fine pelt on its neck and shoulders; when an agouti is alarmed, it flares this corona of bristles like a grass skirt.

    The agouti padded forward on its small pink feet until it was within a foot of the pack lying by my side. Only then did it seem to notice me, staring up with those luminous eyes. It did a graceful pirouette of a hop, stopping to look back as if in disbelief. It flared its rump hair, skittered a few more yards, and stopped once more to peer at me. Then it finally seemed to resolve things in its own mind, and trotted off with dignified deliberation.

    The enchantment broke, and I turned back to stare at the valleys and mountains spread below me, gauging my next move. I wasn't in the Caribbean to commune with rodents—I was there to solve a mystery. Somewhere down in that intensely green, intensely vertical landscape, a lost soul had been hiding for more than half a century. I was trying to find it.

Biologists estimate there are between 10 and 30 million species of living things on our planet, only a fraction of which have been described and catalogued. New species come to light every day, from obscure beetles to unknown birds and even a few large mammals. The two centers of this biological diversity are tropical ecosystems, which support almost incomprehensible numbers of plants and animals, and islands, which by their isolation promote the rapid evolution of unique life forms. Tropical islands, like those of the Caribbean, are thus doubly blessed by nature.

    Prior to European discovery, virtually every island in the Antilles held species that were found nowhere else in the world—endemics, as they are known. Hispaniola had to itself three species of shrew, two kinds of ground sloth (one of which weighed 150 pounds), seven species of chunky rodents called hutias, a squirrel-sized insectivore with a rat-like tail and an impossibly long, pointy snout known as a solenodon, as well as more than two dozen unique birds. Jamaica had roughly thirty endemic bird species, as well as a hutia, five endemic snakes, a unique tree frog, two species of endemic bats, an iguana, and several smaller lizards called galliwasps. Cuba, the biggest island in the Caribbean basin, had the greatest diversity of life, including half a dozen sloths, a 400 pounder among them, and more than two dozen endemic birds, one of which, the bee hummingbird, is, at a shade over 2 inches long, the world's smallest bird. (Cuba's natural wealth is a textbook example of the principles of biogeography, a main rule of which is that the larger an island, or the closer it lies to the mainland, the greater the diversity of life it will support. But the Antilles also showcase a corollary: The farther from the mainland an island is, the more uniquely evolved its flora and fauna tend to be.)

    Unfortunately, island species tend to be a bit less adaptable than their mainland counterparts, especially when confronted with new predators, and because of their limited range and population size, they are all the more susceptible to extinction. At the end of the last ice age, the West Indies were populated with an assortment of animals that would appear bizarre to modern eyes: giant ground sloths; rodents the size of small bears; several species of flightless owls on Cuba that were 3 feet tall, with long, heronlike legs for running down their prey; and a condor rivaling today's Andean condor in size. Many of these became extinct after the end of the ice age, 10,000 years ago, an extinction wave that intensified after Amerindians settled the islands, starting between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago. Paleontologists call these "first-contact extinctions," on the assumption that human hunting drove the losses. (But if humans took away, they also gave: agoutis like the one I saw were not native to the Caribbean but were apparently brought from South America by natives as a food supply.)

    The large, the flightless, the tasty, and the unwary winked out on island after island, a trend that repeated itself with smaller and fleeter species when Europeans began to colonize the region in the sixteenth century. For instance, at least fifteen or sixteen species of parrots, including eight species of large macaws, became extinct after 1600, most of them now known only from notations in the logbooks of early explorers, who found them as palatable in the pot as they were colorful in the air. One species, from St. Croix, is known from only a single bone. The Cuban macaw, a stunning bird nearly 2 feet long, with a red head and body and blue wings, lasted a bit longer, finally disappearing at the end of the nineteenth century

    St. Lucia is very small—only 27 miles long and, at its most expansive, just 14 wide, covering barely 240 square miles—and neighboring islands like St. Vincent and Martinique provided stepping-stones for colonizing wildlife. Consequently, its endemism rate is fairly low; there is a colorful ground lizard, a nonvenomous grass snake, a unique race of boa constrictor, and five species of endemic birds. The endangered St. Lucian parrot, or jacquot, which numbers barely five hundred individuals, is large and noisy, with a cobalt-blue face, a rich suffusion of red down the chest and belly, and splashes of blue, yellow, and red on the wings. There is the St. Lucian pewee, a species of flycatcher with a cinnamon breast, and a black-finch with bubblegum-pink legs. The St. Lucian oriole is vivid orange and black; like the parrot, it epitomizes the dazzle we expect from tropical birds.

    There is precious little dazzle to the fifth species on St. Lucia's list of endemic birds, the Semper's warbler, which may be the dullest tropical bird on Earth. It is notable not for its plumage (which is the color of oatmeal, and as exciting) or its song (which no one has ever described or recorded), but solely for its rarity.

    When the French and English first began squabbling over who got to keep St. Lucia—a disagreement that would last 150 years and see the island change hands fourteen times—Semper's warbler was fairly common in the lush mountain rain forests. It was first collected for science in the 1870s by a St. Lucian clergyman, the Reverend John E. Semper, and eventually named in his honor, though the Creole inhabitants of the island knew it long before as the pied blanc, or "white foot," because of its large, pale legs. The bird's scientific name acknowledges the same feature, merging the Greek words for "white feet" to create its genus name, Leucopeza.

    Semper's warbler is about 5 inches long and gray—dishwater gray, battleship gray, old-movie gray. Dull, bland, flat: even the adjectives that best describe it are monosyllabic and boring. It is the kind of creature that birders dismiss as an LBJ, a "little brown jobbie," but even that suggests too much pizzazz. And yet, despite its lackluster appearance, birders have been combing St. Lucia's forests in search of it for years —drawn not by looks, but by the cachet of extinction. For within a few decades following its discovery, Semper's warbler went from common to kaput.

    Judging by the number of specimens found in collections from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Semper's warbler must have been widespread, but by the late 1920s, the Caribbean ornithologist James Bond spent weeks looking for it without success. (This was the same James Bond whose name was later appropriated, with his permission, for Ian Fleming's fictional secret agent.) Some worried that the species was extinct, but kept on hunting. A single female was located in 1934 and promptly shot; at that time, stuffing a specimen for a collection was sometimes considered more important than preserving the living species.

    Stanley John, the St. Lucian who collected the 1934 specimen, spent further decades searching for the bird, which vanished for another twenty-seven years. On May 21, 1961, John spotted another left alive this time—along the eastern coast near the village of Louvet. Like all the other recorded sightings, it was found in virgin forest with a heavy understory of ferns; John and other hunters said the species made a "soft tuck-tick-tick-tuck" call, pumped its tail up and down when perched, and sometimes quivered its wings when flushed.

    Since then, Semper's warbler has been a cipher. Nothing is known of where, when, or how it built its nest, how many eggs it laid or what markings they bore, what the juvenile plumage looked like, or even what the male's song sounded like. Most important, nothing is known of its status—whether it is alive or dead. It has been written off on many occasions, only to pop up again in tantalizing but unsubstantiated reports.

    One sighting came in 1969, another in 1972, still others in 1989 and 1995. The trouble with sight records, of course, is the lack of any form of objective proof. The 1972 sighting, for instance, is largely dismissed by experts because the two people who claimed to have seen Semper's warbler were inexperienced with Caribbean birds in general and the area in which they said they saw it was completely unlike the habitat in which it had always been found. By contrast, the 1989 sighting was made by Donald Anthony, an experienced wildlife biologist in the St. Lucian Forestry Department, who was hiking on Gros Piton, a high, sharp spike of a mountain along the southeast coast. On the face of it, this would seem good proof of the species' survival—yet it was a quick, fleeting glimpse, and despite another twenty-six ascents of Gros Piton in the years that followed, Anthony has never seen another Semper's warbler, leaving some to wonder if his brief original sighting was a mistake.

    Why all the fuss over a dull little bird? Like a relative who isn't appreciated until she's gone, many creatures that were ignored, even vilified, in life become icons in the grand death of extinction. In the nineteenth century, mountain lions (also known as cougars or panthers) were hunted down with such vigor that they were exterminated in every state east of the Mississippi, except for a small population in Florida and perhaps some in the wilderness of New Brunswick. Within a generation of their extinction in the Appalachians, however, people began to report lion sightings in places like New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern highlands of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—reporting them not with the hatred once reserved for a large predator but with barely contained excitement.

    The question of whether or not cougars survive in the East illustrates many of the difficulties and subtle allure that go with such mysteries. The subspecies of the cougar that originally inhabited the Northeast, Puma concolor cougar, has been considered extinct since the early 1900s, even though it is officially listed as "endangered" under both the federal Endangered Species Act and CITES, the international treaty that covers threatened plants and animals; this status provides protection should a cougar miraculously reappear. And reappear they do—private organizations that track lion sightings in the East say they get hundreds of reports every year, some from people like foresters, game wardens, and biologists who are hard to dismiss as crackpots. Yet outside of New England, where Canadian cougars may have recolonized, there has been almost no physical evidence, like warm road-killed bodies or indisputable photographs. (There have been a few cougars that have been shot over the years, but close examination usually shows them to be of the Latin American subspecies common in captivity.)

    I live in the Appalachians, and I know people who claim to have seen cougars here. Some are friends of mine, sturdy, reliable people. The idea is incredibly seductive—the notion that these gentle mountains, long settled and so badly misused by people for centuries, could have reclaimed such a potent symbol of wilderness as the mountain lion. Sometimes, I think, we need to believe such things even when the evidence (or its absence) suggests we are deluding ourselves. Deep down in our overcivilized hearts, we need the world to be bigger, and more mysterious, and more exciting than it appears to be in the cold light of day—especially in this age, when the planet shrinks daily and no place seems truly remote or unknown. People keep looking for the long-extinct Bachman's warbler or the marsupial Tasmanian "tiger" for the same reasons that they go to mediums in hope of contacting dear, departed Aunt Louise. We're unwilling to accept that there isn't more to the world than what we can see.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE GHOST WITH TREMBLING WINGS by Scott Weidensaul. Copyright © 2002 by Scott Weidensaul. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

1.	The Ghost with Trembling Wings	3
2.	Proving a Negative	38
3.	Chance and Calculation	65
4.	The Noble Living	93
5.	The ABC's of Ghost Cats	123
6.	Cruising the Crypto-fringe	151
7.	The Brothers and the Bull	187
8.	Test-tube Babies	214
9.	The Tiger That Isn't	243
10.	Sweat Bees Ate Our Earwax	280
	Notes and Bibliography	311
	Acknowledgments	323
	Index	327

Editorial Reviews

Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species).” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“At the core of Weidensaul's book are fundamental questions about who we are, the state of our planet, and the faltering health of our ecosystems . . . [It] is as much about people as the animals they search for.” —Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe

“Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists—Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind—whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy.” —Janice P. Nimura, Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
This intriguing book looks at our fascination with lost and vanishing species, a perhaps inevitable result of this latest Age of Extinction. As Weidensaul points out, three to four species disappear each hour because of human environmental pressures. Many others dwell tenuously in a netherworld of vanishing habitat and unsubstantiated sightings. Perhaps the best-known case in the United States is that of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird that has essentially disappeared from swampy southern woodlands, victimized by logging of the old-growth forests it needs as habitat. Weidensaul recounts a century-long search for the bird by obsessed ornithologists, along with similar cases elsewhere in the world. He participated in several such missions himself, going to Santa Lucia in search of a plain-looking bird called Semper's warbler, last seen in 1961; and to New Zealand in quest of the Tasmanian tiger.

In particular, we tend to fixate on the potential disappearance of large species like tigers, elephants, and grizzly bears. People don't want to relinquish the hope that they persist: "an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," Weidensaul neatly summarizes. The obsessive hunts by researchers require massive expenditures of time, money, and effort -- but sometimes they lead to success. Still, "wishful thinking sometimes warps our ability to distinguish between reasonable hope and delusion." Great Britain is shaken each year by hundreds of supposed sightings of panthers that have supposedly escaped from private zoos. For Weidensaul, these doubtful claims persist because of an innate desire for mystery in a shrinking world: "People build these spectral beasts for themselves, from twilight, mist, and unspoken, unacknowledged yearning."

A long chapter recounts attempts to breed black-footed ferrets in the western United States. Watching the delicate laboratory process of inseminating the animals, Weidensaul wonders if the incredible effort of such work is fruitless. Then there are recent projects to reengineer vanished creatures, like the New Zealand moa, through the manipulation of preserved DNA. Weidensaul is suspicious of these efforts, for they plant "the comfortable but incorrect notion that there's a scientific quick fix even for something as permanent as extinction."

Some of the most poignant passages in The Ghost with Trembling Wings come when Weidensaul visits specimens of vanished birds in dusty museum collections, "looking with mingled sadness and reverence at the last earthly remains of a creature once vital and alive." But the book ends with flickers of hope, revived after he travels to Brazil in search of the cone-billed tanager. Much in the world remains unknown. The recent discoveries of new mammal species, like Myanmar's leaf deer, were major events -- reawakening our wonder at the world's treasures and reminding us of the urgent need to protect them. (Jonathan Cook)

bn.com

A lively, well-written account of the earth's rare, vanishing, extinct, problematical, and fantastical species of fauna (and flora . . .)

Peter Matthiessen

In search for vanishing and imaginary creatures, Weidensaul takes us deep into the terra incognita of our planet — and ourselves . . .

Tim Flannery

Approximately 30,000 species of animals and plants go extinct every year. Weidensaul's narrative concerns those rare occurrences when a supposedly extinct animal makes a surprise reappearance, and the much more frequent occasions when scientists or civilians only think they've sighted a vanished creature. His suspenseful naturalist detective stories take readers all over the globe to Madagascar, Indonesia, Peru, Costa Rica in search of these lost species. In the swamplands of Louisiana, the author and his guide brave swarming mosquitoes and deadly vipers to check out reports of an ivory-billed woodpecker. Weidensaul (Living on the Wind) recounts famous success stories, like the recovery of the coelacanth, a fish believed to be extinct for about 80 million years until fishermen landed one off the coast of South Africa in 1938, as well as various wild goose chases and his own obsessive search for the South American cone-billed tanager. Along the way, he shows how humans and nature have unwittingly conspired to condemn animals to oblivion, such as the dozens of Great Lakes fish species lost to overfishing and the inadvertent introduction of parasitic lampreys from canals built in the 19th century. For the most part, though, Weidensaul's gracefully written book strikes a hopeful note, reveling in the exhilaration of the searches themselves: the greatest gift these lost creatures give this too-fast, too-small, too-modern world [is] an opportunity for hope. Illus. and maps not seen by PW. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The earth is currently experiencing a massive extinction crisis, losing an estimated 30,000 unique species each year. Occasionally, a species formerly thought to be extinct reappears. In this text, naturalist Weidensaul recounts stories of the search for real and imagined lost species. Coverage includes the rediscovery of Gilbert's potoroo in western Australia in 1994, the hunt for the Loch Ness monster, and the efforts of scientists to recreate long-extinct animals in cloning laboratories. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Informed musings on humanity's relationship with nature and the extinction of animal species. Weidensaul, a devoted naturalist whose 1999 Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds was a Pulitzer finalist, guides the reader on a variety of lively quests for extinct or soon-to-be-extinct creatures. Indiana Jones-style, he seeks the rare Sempler's warbler on the lush Caribbean isle of St. Lucia, tracks panthers across the English countryside, and endures heat, mud, and scorpions in search of Tasmania's cone-billed tanager. Closer to home, he stalks the legendary ivorybilled woodpecker of bayou Louisiana. Weidensaul's globe-trotting also turns up a splendid menagerie of human characters-birders, biologists, anthropologists, adventurers, river guides, livestock farmers-some of whom surpass even the author in their passion for the intricate mysteries and delights of the natural world. Weidensaul is wise enough to know that the belief that hard-to-find species are still out there somewhere is as important as the reality. In this vein, he delves into the science of cryptozoology, the study of such shadowy creatures as the Himalayan yeti and the Loch Ness Monster, and offers a sympathetic explanation as to why such mythical creatures persist in the human imagination. He discusses the loss of fierce "apex predators" such as grizzlies, wolves, and cougars, and the concerns about their reappearance or reintroduction, and devotes equal attention to a myriad of other animals as common as ferrets and prairie dogs, or as obscure as the Australian thylacine. He also gives an overview of some of the new science affecting the extinction issue, such as cloning. Weidensaul is an authorwith a nuanced appreciation for his subject, an environmentalist's sense for the delicate balance between nature and human endeavor, and the ability to give vivid and lucid expression to his ideas. Like the best nature-writers, he succeeds at making scientific inquiry an adventure. Fascinating. A delight for anyone interested in bird life and issues of extinction and endangerment.

Kirkus Reviews