View From The Shed by Shaun Finnie - BACK FROM THE DEAD

BACK FROM THE DEAD

Brace yourself. Today’s blog is a highly technical one which also strays into areas of ethics and philosophy where I rarely dip a toe. You might want to grab a cuppa and get comfortable. But before we get to science, let’s begin with a story.

Once upon a time, there was a landmass that would soon be named North America. Bison roamed the land, cars didn’t, and the skies belonged to the birds and not the aeroplanes. Some of these birds were very tasty. The native people knew that and ate them, because they were also very plentiful. So plentiful in fact that they could flock in the billions. If a flock passed over, the skies would go as dark as night time. Their collective wingbeats felt like a mighty wind and chilled the air beneath them. And just like pigeons that we see in our towns and woodlands, they liked to murmurate. Imagine a flock that large swooping and diving in ever-changing murmuration patterns before descending to roost. It’s enough to make me wish that film had been invented a century earlier.

But by the time cinema was invented, they were gone. America had been ‘civilised’ and the tasty Passenger Pigeon (for that was what the bird was called) was an easy source of protein for the settlers. Pigeon meat went well with the corn and maize that they were trying to grow. But the huge number of birds ate so much of their crop that ‘something had to be done’. They were destroyed on an industrial scale to protect the humans’ foodstuff. And deforestation to provide homes for people inadvertently meant that there were fewer homes for the birds. Does that last line still ring true, even today?

Eventually, by 1800, there were no Passenger Pigeons left in the wild. They’d gone from many billions to zero in just a few short decades. Thanks, Columbus. The last pair, George and Martha, died in a zoo a few years later. Here’s a picture of them, preserved for posterity.

Unless you’re around 250 (and even I’m not that old), the closest bird you might have seen to a live Passenger Pigeon is a Turtle Dove - but only if you’ve been very lucky. Their own population has plummeted dramatically in recent decades. This species is perilously close to suffering the same fate as the Passenger Pigeon for very similar reasons - hunting, farming methods and the removal of its home. All man-made issues. But maybe there’s a way that we can see a few Passenger Pigeons take to the air again? Here comes the science bit.

There’s a bird called the Band-Tailed Pigeon. It basically looks like a thin feral pigeon but genetically it’s very, very close to the extinct Passenger. It’s now possible to  genetically engineer these birds so that their sperm and eggs now contain the Passenger Pigeon DNA instead of that of Band-Taileds. There are plenty of dead Passengers in museums and collections around the world so gathering the DNA is simple enough (that’s a relative term). All you need to do is to overwrite the Band-Tail’s own reproductive DNA with that of the Passenger. I make it sound ridiculously easy. It isn’t. Don’t try this at home. If you create enough of these ‘hybrid’ birds and they mate, their offspring should, in theory, be a new generation of Passenger Pigeon - the first in three centuries. And that’s where science is, right now. The theory is sound and experiments have begun. It is now possible to ‘make’ a Passenger Pigeon.

This isn’t cloning. We’re not talking about bringing back an individual lost loved pet. And anyway cloning isn’t an option where birds are concerned. I’ve tried hard to understand it but I'm definitely not a biologist and it’s complicated, even for them. All I know is that cloning doesn’t work on birds. Trust me, I’m a writer. I tell stories for a living.

And it’s a huge step on from rewilding (the definition of which includes ‘the reintroduction by relocation of a species into an area where it once lived naturally’). That’s a whole different or maybe overlapping philosophical and ethical conundrum.

Let’s assume that, maybe in our lifetime or perhaps as far ahead as our grandchildren’s, Passenger Pigeons are able to take to the air once more. The inevitable question would be, “What’s next?” We’d inevitably move on to mammals next, probably the Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger - a striped marsupial from Australia. Film exists of these creatures so their demise was not that long ago. 

If this works, not only could we bring almost any extinct species back from the dead - even dinosaurs! - but we could also safeguard those that are critically endangered. Imagine a world where humans could create as many Bitterns or Turtle Doves as we believe are needed to make the population safe again.

And there’s the rub; it’s all created and ruled by humans. We choose if a creature should be saved or recreated. We decide how many and where they should live. We are extremely close to having this capability, but do we have the right? 

The Passenger Pigeon, like so many other species, is not seen in our skies today because it was hunted to extinction by people. In other cases that extinction was brought about because the creature’s habitat has been destroyed to make way for something that we, the people, say we ‘need’. The land, seas and skies are becoming desolate as mankind tightens his/her grip on the planet, taking everything without regard for any other creature. Yet if we bring a creature back, how are we to tackle the reasons that caused its extinction in the first place? Humans will still do what humans will do - at the expense of all others.

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. But what if doing the thing redresses a wrong that we committed generations before? Should we?

Over to you.