SYMHC Classics: Endlings

Published Aug 19, 2023, 1:00 PM

The 2018 episode covers the day the last known Carolina parakeet died at the Cincinnati Zoo, as well as the stories of two other endlings, to see how abundant species can quickly become extinct.

Happy Saturday. Last week's episode on Very Old Animals kept reminding me of our previous episode on endlings. That's a word that's been coined to describe the last known surviving members of a species. So we're bringing our episode out on some endlings as Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally came out on February twenty first, twenty eighteen in Joy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. On February twenty first, nineteen eighteen, a bird named Incas died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Incas was a Carolina parakeet and his mate, Lady Jane, had died the year before. They were the last of their species. In the nineteen nineties, physician Robert Webster of Jasper, Georgia coined a name for the last living member of a species, which was endling, and so the word he realized the need for while he was treating a patient who told him that she was the last living member of her family line. Endling isn't in Merriam Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary as of when we recording the show, but it's been picked up by museums and journals and magazines and their discussions of last animals, especially ones that people cared enough about to name and then write about them when they died. So a few other examples of these endlings are booming. Ben the heath hen who was last seen on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts on March eleventh, nineteen thirty two. Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, died on September seventh, nineteen thirty six at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. And some of these are really recent. Tufie, who was the last known RABS fringe limbed tree frog, died on September twenty sixteen at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Frog Pod Laboratory for Amphibian Conservation. So since we're coming up on the centennial of its extinction today, we're going to talk about the Carolina parakeet, along with two other endlings who were marked, the Passenger pigeon and Lonesome George, the Penta Island tortoise. Just in case not clear this episode would get the I think they've changed the way they do these ratings, but it used to be at doesthdog dye dot com. There would be a sad face of a dog. Yeah. If the dog died this this would have like all sad faces. This whole episode is about animals dying. Yeah. Uh. Once upon a time, Eastern North America had its own native parrot species Consis carolinensis, better known as the Carolina parakeet, or sometimes the Carolina parrot. A subspecies Counterropsis carolinensis ludovicianis, was sometimes known as the Louisiana parakeet, but in writings about them, they're generally grouped together, just as the Carolina parakeet. It is not clear who coined the term Carolina parakeet, but it was some time after the Carolina Colony was chartered in sixteen sixty three. The birds first mentions in writing date back to the fifteen eighties, obviously without the Carolina moniker as part of them. In sixteen twelve, William Stratchy described them this way in the History of Travel into Virginia, Britanna. Quote parakeitos. I have seen many in the winter and known diverse killed. Yet they be a foul most swift of wing, Their wings and breasts are of a greenish color with forked tails. Their heads some crimson, some yellow, some orange, tawny, very beautiful. You'll just have to imagine the seventeenth century spelling of that passage, because it's delightful. It is, and it's one of those green examples that reminds me of the episode we did about how language shifts and the rules are made up, uh huh, because there's some fast and loose spelling that changes from mention to mention there, and I love it. My favorite is that they are very beau t y f ull It's like the way little kids say beautiful. Of course, North America's indigenous people already had their own names for these birds, and they're represented in indigenous art going back to prehistory, including in pipes and calcite and hematite ornaments. Their feathers and other parts were also used in native clothing and ornaments. Most sources describe the bird's range as covering almost all of the eastern United States, but research that was published in twenty seventeen suggests that the Carolina and Louisiana subspecies really had smaller ranges that didn't really overlap each other very much. According to this research, Carolina parakeets lived all through Florida and then in coastal regions from Texas up to Virginia. Louisiana parakeets lived in the central part of the country in a squarish blob with the southwest corner in central Texas and the northeast corner in central Ohio. These were bright green birds, roughly twelve inches or thirty centimeters long. Juveniles were green all over, and as they matured their heads turned yellow, with little reddish orange masks along their eyes, running down beside their beaks, and across the tops of their heads. In the words of James Hall, writing in eighteen thirty eight, they were quote a bird of beautiful plumage, but very bad character. But their character probably got a lot worse after the arrival of European colonists in North America. I really yearned to know what gave the bad care. Were they just sassy? Were they really about food? That's the next thing that we're talking about. I like it. It's like a far side cartoon, right with like the birds from the wrong side of the tracks kind of thing. In my head. That's how this plays out Carolina parakeets ate fruit plants, some insects, and a lot of seeds, and they were particularly fond of cocklebar seeds. So cocklebars are native to North America, but they're invasive in other parts of the world, and even in North America, these plants are annoying since they're covered in prickly, clinging seed pods. Cockle Bars didn't really run rampant in pre colonial forests, but once colonists started clearing those forests for farmlands, they thrived in the disturbed soil. The plants themselves could choke out crops and make them difficult to harvest, and the burrs could ruin sheep's wool and cause problems for other livestock. Cocklebar seeds contain a glucoside that's toxic to mammals, but Carolina parakeets love to grab one with a claw, eat the seeds out of the middle of it, and then drop the prickly part on the ground. Carolina parakeets love of these seeds made them useful for cocklebar control and for control of the similarly annoying sand spur, which they also liked to eat. But European Colonists also were planting orchards of fruit trees, and the parakeets treated these crops exactly the same way that they treated cocklebers. They grabbed the fruit with a foot, pecked the seeds out of it, and then threw the ruined fruit down on the ground. That is their bad character, litterbugs. They're wasteful. I somehow feel guilty also joking about it. Extinct species. I'm gonna put this away now. Carolina parakeets went after cultivated fields of corn and other grains as well, spoiling more food than they ate. John James Audubon described them as covering fields of stacked grains so completely that they looked like a bright carpet on top of all this crop destruction. Carolina parakeets were highly social, gregarious birds that traveled in huge, noisy flocks and left lots of droppings behind, so a lot of colonists thought they were an enormous nuisance. Farmers hunted them aggressively to keep them away from crops, and people also hunted them for food and for their feathers. That very vibrant, beautiful plumage made them really popular among milliners. The bird's own behavior also made them easy targets. They congregated in large flocks, and they would fly off at the sound of gunfire, but then all the birds would return to the same spot, especially if they heard one of their own injured. There By the early nineteenth century, the Carolina parakeet's numbers were in obvious decline. John J. Audubon published his Birds of America in installments from eighteen twenty seven to eighteen thirty eight, and in that book he described the decline as recent. He said that they had been plentiful twenty five years before. In this drop in population can't really be pinned on just one cause. In addition to the relentless hunting, the birds lost huge amounts of habitats through deforestation, especially after the Cotton gin made cotton a profitable crop in the South. It's also possible that the birds were forced out of nesting sites after the introduction of bees to North America. There was never a formal study of these birds in the wild, so there is a bit of debate about whether they nested in hollow trees like honey bees do, or if they built nests out of sticks, or if they possibly did some of both. In the last few decades of their existence, Carolina parakeets were viewed as much less of a nuisance. Their numbers had dropped to the point that their control of cocklebers outweighed their potential damage to crops. Farmers were more inclined to just let them be, which may have ultimately led to their extinction. We really don't know what tipped the scale from a reduced population to one that was actively dying out, but one theory is that Carolina parakeets contracted a viral disease from domesticated poultry, and that only would have been possible after they were allowed to hang around farms instead of being shot on site. In nineteen oh four, the last known wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Okachobee County, Florida. Carolina parakeets were easy to keep his pets, although they could not be trained to talk. Breeding pairs and small groups also lived in zoos on both sides of the Atlantic until the early twentieth century, and they had been bred in captivity since eighteen seventy seven. There wasn't any sort of organized breeding program to try to repopulate the species or create a genetically diverse breeding pool at the Cincinnati Zoo. Incas and Lady Jane produced several eggs, but they tended to throw them out of the nest and they weren't retrieved or incubated. After Incas's death on February twenty first, nineteen eighteen, it took a while to confirm that the species really was extinct. The official determination came in nineteen thirty nine, following a National Audubon Society search of South Carolina after a purported siding there. None of these reported sidings were ever substantiated, and a few of them turned out to be feral parrots or parakeets that had previously been somebody's pets and had wound up out in the wild. I grew up in North Carolin, and I always as a child having heard about the Carolina parakeet, the fact that I was from North Carolina and that they were from North Carolina, and when the name Carolina parakeet meant that they were my personal species of parakeet that was now extinct, and I was very put out about that. And when Incas died, it was purportedly in the same cage where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had also died, and we're going to talk about Martha and passenger pigeons in general after we first paused for a little sponsor break. Passenger pigeons or Ectoscopies migratoris used to be the most common bird in what's now the United States. Their winter range stretched from eastern Canada down to Florida. It went all across the Mississippi River, covering more than half of the continent. Their breeding range was a smaller hocket, primarily around the Great Lakes and what's now New York. Male passenger pigeons were blue gray with a rosy pink throat and chest. They were about sixteen and a half inches that's about forty two centimeters in length, and females were slightly smaller and not as distinctively colored. They were closer to brown gray than blue gray, and they had more subdued coloring on their throat and chest. They looked enough like mourning doves that this often led to cases of mistaken identity, although passenger pigeons were usually a couple of inches larger than mourning doves. They ate nuts, acorns, seeds, and berries, along with some worms and insects. In the spring, and summer. So when we say the most common bird, it's estimated that before European arrival in North America, there were between three and five billion of them, that is, billion with a bee, making up between twenty five and forty percent of all the birds. In the places where they lived. They formed a noise ormous colonies, with up to one hundred nests in an individual tree. Sometimes so many birds would nest in a tree that branches would snap off of it or the tree itself would fall. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, missionary Gabriel Sagarteadat described their numbers as infinite multitudes, and Cotton Mather wrote about mile wide flocks that took hours to pass overhead. Here's how John J. Audubon described a flock he saw in eighteen thirteen quote, the air was literally filled with pigeons. The light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse. The dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of the wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose. An eighteen fifty five account from Columbus, Ohio described the local response to the passing of an enormous pigeon flock quote, children screamed and ran for a home, Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted, a few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped onto their knees and prayed. According to this account, this flock's passage took two hours. There have been a number of remarks about, like, we don't have any kind of pictures or I mean obviously not video quite at that point showing how dramatic these flocks of birds were. But like the over and over, they're described as literally blotting out the sun and just waiting for hours and hours as this massive flock of birds that blotted out the sun flew over and left droppings everywhere. Yeah, I think the fact that people responded as though the apocalypse was nine is a pretty good indicator of how significant this bird flight was. Uh. This eighteen fifty five account is somewhat surprising because the passenger pigeon had a pretty similar trajectory to the Carolina parakeet, and by eighteen fifty five their numbers were noticeably declining. This decline came primarily from over hunting. Passenger pigeons formed such enormous flocks that they vastly outnumbered animal predators, so normal predation and even some hunting by humans wasn't enough to really reduce their numbers. But the passenger pigeon could not overcome industrialization and are rapidly increasing human population in the nineteenth century. To technologies were a huge part of the end of the species, the telegraph and the railroad. The telegraph made it easy to send word of where passenger pigeons were roosting, and the railroad made it possible to ship huge barrels of pigeons around the country to use as a cheap source of meat. There were no conservation laws restricting how people hunted passenger pigeons or how many could be killed, so people hunted them at their nesting sites, and they killed massively unsustainable numbers in one go. One eighteen seventy eight hunt in Michigan took fifty thousand birds a day from their nesting site. As we said earlier, people had been noticing that the pigeon population was dropping as early as the eighteen fifties. People were still hunting these pigeons in massive numbers decades after they noticed their decline. States began passing laws to try to protect the passenger pigeon, including outlawing hunting near their nesting areas and in one case, closing the pigeon hunting season entirely. In nineteen hundred, President William McKinley signed the Lacey Act, which was the nation's first federal conservation law meant to protect fish and wildlife. One of the motivations for passing the Lacy Act was the plummeting stock of passenger pigeons, and it made it illegal to poach pigeons from one state with the intent of selling them in another. This was far too late for the passenger pigeon, though by this point some states where the birds had been widespread hadn't spotted one in years. The last confirmed sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was on March twenty fourth, nineteen hundred, in Pike County, Ohio, almost two months to the day before the passage of the Lacy Act. Ornithologists mounted organized searches, including offering up a reward of fifteen hundred dollars to anyone who could find a passenger pigeon between nineteen oh nine and nineteen twelve, but none were found. By the nineteen teens, the birds were extinct in the wild, and the only captive populations were in three zoos, the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, the Milwaukee Zoo, and the Cincinnati Zoo. Attempts to set up a breeding program failed because the bird's highly social nature meant that they just didn't breed well in captivity. Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons, was born in the Brookfield Zoo and then donated to Cincinnati. She was named after Martha Washington and her later years, her keepers had to keep lowering her perch as she became less able to fly, so they basically had to get it low enough that she could just climb up there. The last male passenger pigeon died at the zoo on July tenth, nineteen ten, and then Martha died on September one, nineteen fourteen, at the age of about twenty nine. After her death, Martha was packed in a three hundred pound block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian by train. Taxidermist Nelson Wood mounted her remains and her internal organs are part of the Smithsonian's wet collections. Martha is still part of the Smithsonian collection as well, although she is not usually on display because she is so delicate and very valuable. There's also a passenger pigeon memorial at the Cincinnati Zoo. Our last endling was also preserved through taxidermy. Couldn't confirm whether Incas was or not, and we will get to that last story after one more quick sponsor break. The Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador are famous for their diversity of plant and animal life, with a lot of species that are unique to each individual island. Charles Darwin conducted research there during the second voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, which contributed to his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Giant tortoises are one of the most famous animals found in the Galapagos. Galapago in Spanish means turtle, and there are fifteen different species which fall into two primary categories, domed and saddlebacked. Pinta Island tortoises were saddlebacked tortoises with the shape of their shell allowing them to stretch their heads up to reach for food. This was also a form of communication among the tortoises. They would stretch their heads up as far as possible when settling disputes. These tortoises were, as their name suggests, found on Pinta Island. Penta Island as a shield volcano, and it's the northernmost island of the Galapagos, so for whalers who passed through the area, Penta Island was usually the first and last island they passed on their journey. From the seventeen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds, whalers hunted a lot of tortoises from Pinta Island to use as food, and as was the case with the Carolina parakeet, the tortoises own traits made them susceptible to this. Tortoises can live for an extended period without food or water. Whalers realized that this meant that they could capture live tortoises on the island and keep them alive on board their ships without a lot of effort, allowing them to have fresh tortoise meat in transit. It's hard to pinpoint how many tortoises were taken from Pinta Island, alone, but it's estimated that more than one hundred thousand tortoises were killed in the Galapagos in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the early twentieth century, researchers believed that the Penta Island tortoise was already extinct. At that time, the island's ecosystem was in pretty good condition apart from the absence of tortoises. But in nineteen fifty nine, some fishermen released three goats onto the island, hoping to use them as a food supply. When they passed through the area, as will surprise no one who has ever been around goats, they ran rampant over the island. They ate their way through a lot of the vegetation, and they produced lots and lots more goats. At that point, researchers concluded that if there had somehow been any tortoises left on Pensa Island, the feral goats would have destroyed their habitat completely. And yet, in nineteen seventy one, a Hungarian scientist who was on the island studying snails spotted a tortoise. The scientist's name and apologies if this is a butchering job was Yojev Vagvolji, and when he got back to Port, he reported what he had seen, and a year later Galapagos National Park rangers went to the island to look for themselves, and there they found one tortoise, and they took him to the Tortoise Center on Santa Cruz to keep him safe. The American media later started calling him Lonesome George, after TV comedian George Goebel, who had given himself that same nickname for decades. They tried to find a breeding partner for Lonesome George. They tried pairing him with other tortoise species, including two female wolf Volcano giant tortoises from Isabella Island. Later, DNA research revealed that Pensa Island tortoises might be more compatible with the Espanola tortoise. Two female Espanola tortoises from a breeding program were housed in George's corral, but none of the eggs that they produced were fertile. Lonesome George died on June twenty fourth, twenty twelve, and he was probably at least one hundred and that sounds like quite old, but he was actually on the younger side for a Pina Island tortoise. Those tortoises could live to be up to two hundred, but the average age was more like around one hundred and fifty and other than some weight gain which is common among tortoises in captivity. He had been in good health and his death was really unexpected. His unexpected death meant that his keepers were unprepared for preserving his body. The islands are remote and the temperature was around one hundred degrees fahrenheit or thirty eight celsius. They eventually secured enough plastic wrap to cover his entire body and a freezer to store him in lonesome George's remains were transported to the United States, where New Jersey taxidermists George Dante preserved them in a year long, thirty thousand dollars process that took five hundred hours of labor to complete. George spent some time on display at the American Museum of Natural History before being returned to Ecuador. There was a little bit of a dispute between the researchers and the Galopagos and the government of Ecuador about where he should be kept. Once he was returned. The government's argument was that a lot more people would be able to see him on display in the capital of Quito, and they also argued that there wasn't a facility in the Galopogos Islands that could guarantee precise enough temperature and humidity control. I mean, after an animal specimen is preserved through taxidermy like, that doesn't mean it stops decaying for the rest of time. Right, It's still tissue that's going to have to be preserved. So there is a bronze statue of George at Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz and the Galapagos instead. In nineteen ninety seven, the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Park Service launched Project Isabella, which was a massive conservation project meant to restore several islands that had been damaged through the introduction of non native plants and animals, and this included exterminating hundreds of thousands of feral goats. The work at Penta Islands started in nineteen ninety nine, and in two thousand and three the island was declared goat free. Fortunately, it appears that none of the island's plant species became extinct during the goat infestation, and May of twenty ten, thirty nine sterilized adult tortoises were released on the island to continue the restoration process. So basically, they're there to serve the purpose that tortoises fulfill in that ecology, but not to make more baby tortoises yet. I'm going to work on that part later in twenty fifteen, a breeding program was announced to try to bring back the Pinta Island tortoise, or at least a tortoise that is ninety five percent genetically similar. The starting point is a population of Isabella Island tortoises that had interbred with some Pinta Island tortoises that sailors throw overboard about one hundred years ago. There has also been talk of cloning Lonesome George himself, although that has of course raised a number of ethical questions, along with concerns that people won't care about protecting and daured animal species if we just clone them later. We said at the top of the show, or the top of this chapter of the show, that there were fifteen species of tortoise in the Galopogos, but now there are only ten. Some of those species were only saved from extinction through very careful breeding programs and other conservation efforts, and although they used to live elsewhere in the world, giant tortoises are now found only in the Galopogos and in the Aldabra atole in the Seychelles. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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