Gone, and some are forgotten

I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.

As far as we know Earth is the only place with life in the universe. At any rate, we can be sure that it is the only place ever to have provided a home for Tyrannosaurus rex, passenger pigeons, a beetle called Aglyptinus agathidioides and the golden toad.

Those four species don’t have much in common except they are all extinct.

The Earth has been through five great extinction events and the one in which T. rex and the other dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago was the last one. Some scientists say that we are in the sixth global extinction event right now – and it’s all down to us.

The passenger pigeon was the commonest bird on Earth in the late 19^th century – there were perhaps as many as nine billion of them living in the woodlands of the eastern USA and Canada. Their enormous colonies were harvested, or plundered, and train loads of passenger pigeons made their ways back east to New York, Philadelphia and Washington as cheap food. It seemed inconceivable that such an abundant species could ever be diminished, let alone go extinct, and yet by 1914 there was just one passenger pigeon left; a bird called Martha who lived in Cincinnati Zoo and whose death on 1 September 1914 was global news.

The extinction of Aglyptinus agathidioides was not big news but it did go extinct in the UK. This tiny beetle is only known from being found in a moorhen’s nest in Potter’s Bar in 1912 and despite entomologists looking for it, it has never been seen alive since it was discovered on the day The Titanic sank. 

The beautiful golden toad was discovered in the Monteverde cloud forests of Costa Rica in 1966 but has not been seen, despite searches, since 15 May 1989. Its demise is thought to be climate-related; drier conditions may have led to loss of the temporary pools they used for breeding and a greater incidence of fungal diseases.

The loss of a pigeon, a beetle and a toad may not add up to much in themselves but the bigger picture is striking. The IUCN Red Lists chart the number of species threatened with extinction. For birds the figure is around 12% (one in eight of the world’s 10,000 or so bird species) but for other groups, such as amphibians, the figure is much higher (c40%) and for most life on earth (including the beetles) we really don’t have the figures. But for those species we do know well extinction rates are increasing as habitat destruction, over exploitation, introduced species and pollution (including climate change) take their toll.

Considering this is, as far as we know, the only place in the universe where life exists, we aren’t doing a great job of protecting it. It’s not the most uplifting story to tell and it should be nagging away at the minds of those who assemble in Rio in 18 days’ time. But it’s really not all gloomy news and over the next 18 days there will be a series of ‘good news’ stories to lighten the mood!

One species that might not make it to 2020 (the year targeted by governments around the world to stop the loss of wildlife) is the Spoon-billed sandpiper. With your help we can continue to fund a captive breeding programme so we can reintroduce birds to the wild in the future. This work is being undertaken in partnership with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birds Russia, Birdlife International and the BTO and you can help by making a donation today.

Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference.  His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB.  Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.