| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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| reviews Extinction's Shadow Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals, photographs by Rosamond Purcell, text by the staff of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, NY, 1999, 159 pp., $20.00 paper. The Condor's Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America, by David S. Wilcove. W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, NY, 1999, 339 pp., $24.95 cloth. As a beautiful object, Rosamond Purcell's Swift as a Shadow is at odds with its depressing subject matter: extinct and endangered animals. It is like receiving terrible news on wonderful, strange, and haunting stationery. Purcell went to the National Museum of Natural History in Holland (holder of the world's most extensive collection of extinct species), where she photographed specimens in a very loose and unscientific way. For instance, she set up two extinct Gould's mice on what appears to be a iron manhole cover. They look like they are running through mottled urban sunlight, a lively little beam glinting off a glass eye. But of course they, and their kind, are as dead as doornails; extinction has closed their coffin and nailed it shut. Yet here they are, having a day out on the town. Some of the specimens, especially those taxidermied by preparators who had not seen their subjects (or even photographs of them) alive, have bizarre and almost comical appearances. Monkeys are reaching out in what Purcell describes as a begging pose more like those of hurdy-gurdy assistants than wild creatures. The golden lion tamarin looks ghoulish. All of the primates are scary looking, perhaps because we are so attuned to subtle strains in human faces and, by extension, those of our closest relatives. The cover image is of a kereru, a New Zealand pigeon last seen on Norfolk Island in 1801. The bird is lying face down in a box. Tissue paper and red velvet frame the picture as if the bird were a Red-Envelope Christmas present hastily returned to its package and tucked back under the tree. Is this cute? Funny? Grotesque? Tragic? Well, it's all of these things. Purcell speeds up the rpm of the earnest dirge usually played for extinct and endangered creatures and then runs it through the distorting synthesizer of her imagination. I suspect this book will make a lot of people uncomfortable: it is downright spooky, where other photographers have dared only to be reverential. But the book drives home the immense difference between the living and the dead, a difference magnified when death is also extinction. A fitting and edifying partner to Purcell's book is one with another shadowy title. The Condor's Shadow, by David Wilcove, senior ecologist at the Environmental Defense fund, doesn't exactly fit into the earnest dirge category either. But it comes a lot closer to what we're used to. Touted as an update of Peter Matthiessen's conservation classic, Wildlife in America, The Condor's Shadow tries to summarize where we are today in the conservation of American species and their habitats. It is a thoroughly researched but accessible chronicle and will go some distance toward correcting what Wilcove calls the "greatest impediment to a lasting conservation ethic in America," that is, the "generational amnesia" that keeps each new era from taking to heart what was lost from the environments of its predecessers. One thousand two-hundred plants and animals are currently on the federal endangered species list. But that number represents only a small percentage of the species at risk of extinction in the United States today. Wilcove estimates the total to be closer to 16,000 species. Of those 1,200 listed species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that ten percent are increasing in number, 27 percent remain constant, 33 percent are in decline, and 31 percent are not well enough studied (if they are studied at all) to evaluate. If Wilcove is correct about the 16,000 species, and if the same percentages hold for them as for the listed species, that means that at the very least more than 5,000 North American endangered species are slipping toward the fate of Purcell's luckless specimens. Though Wilcove's book works the numbers, its greater strength is in the detailed stories it tells about how the "five horsemen of environmental apocalypse" (overkill, habitat destruction, introduction of exotic species, the diseases carried by those exotics, and air and water pollution) are wasting nature's masterworks. Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, by Robert Michael Pyle. Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY, 1999, 307 pp., $24.00 cloth. Trying to keep up with mating monarch butterflies from their lofty purchase, writes Robert Michael Pyle, would require a unique craft combining "the traits of a helicoptor, a Stealth jet, and a weather balloon with the grace of a swift and the weight of a single feather." Confined to ground transport, Pyle settles for his Honda Civic--packed with adhesive wing tags, a supply of Pacific Northwest microbrewed beer, and a homemade butterfly net named "Marsha"-for a two-month journey during which Pyle covers over 9,400 miles from British Columbia to Michoacan, letting the monarchs mostly dictate his meandering route. Readers of Pyle's earlier work know his gift for evocative description. Of the monarchs' Mexican mating frenzy, he writes, "Spotting a darker-veined, russet female, the paler male pounces in midair. He attempts to ride, to skyjack the usually smaller female, often taking her to the ground. There, among the needles and duff, he forces her onto her back if he can, and immediately copulates with her. Then he carries her into a tree in a postnuptial flight." As a child in Denver, Pyle watched monarchs fly in both directions over the Continental Divide, and he uses his journey as a chance to test the received wisdom that monarchs bred east of the Rockies winter in Mexico, while those on the west side of the mountains come to California. After much effort, he learns that at least some western monarchs also make the journey beyond the Monterey Peninsula all the way to Mexico's montane forests. Both California and Mexican monarch populations have been officially recognized as threatened phenomena--migrations in danger of dramatic depletion--in a region of pesticide-laced orchards, herbicide-fringed highways, and fewer patches of milkweed to sustain the insects on their great trek. And, Pyle points out, Californians must make peace with eucalyptus and other exotic trees that now comprise some of the best roosting groves for migrating monarchs. Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates. Zoland Books, Cambridge, MA, 1999, 372 pp., $27.00 cloth. When told about my passion for butterfly collecting, friends of my family usually reacted with an amused "Oh, like Nabokov!" Thus, I knew of the man long before I read his first book. This interest in lepidoptery, which I happened to share with the celebrated Russian-American author, was otherwise perceived as a bizarre extravagance: butterflies were no more than symbols of uselessness and frivolous beauty in the struggling Soviet society. Years later, following Vladimir Nabokov's footsteps, I left Russia to study butterflies at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. At the time, I often discussed my work with Russian intellectuals, dwellers of the Upper West Side, and Nabokov also frequently came up in the conversation. He was viewed as one of them, a student of the human soul. "But could he really be serious about such nonsense as butterflies!?" A new book by Kurt Johnson of the American Museum of Natural History and Steve Coates of The The New York Times answers, Yes, Nabokov was very serious about butterflies. "I have never thought of letters as a career," wrote Nabokov, most famous for his novel Lolita. "I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum," his quotation continues in the opening passage of Nabokov's Blues. Although the authors thoroughly dissect Nabokov's contributions to butterfly studies, obscure to most of his readers, they do so in the context of Nabokov's times and the evolution of scientific knowledge. Although this book is largely about lepidoptery, Nabokov's life, art, and science are exquisitely woven into it. The authors employ Nabokov's interviews, letters to scientific journals, and personal correspondence to reveal his opinions about the science of taxonomy. Nabokov compared biological and typological species concepts; he considered the importance of butterfly collecting and its impact on conservation; and he evaluated the importance of different structures, from sexual organs to chromosomes, for the classification of butterflies. The book establishes Nabokov's place in the scientific hierarchy through detailed analysis of his work on a group of small blue butterflies (the family Lycaenidae), to which the authors refer, somewhat freely, as Nabokov's Blues. Stories from Nabokov's life are peppered throughout the book, so those who are not familiar with Brian Boyd's colossal two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov, will find Nabokov's Blues a fine, if more modest, reference on the subject. Johnson's passion for his science and the force of his personality charge the writing, which is expertly channeled by writer and editor Coates. |
Spring 2000
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