I have a photograph, in a book, of a painting. All in all it is a pleasant, lifelike, but fairly ordinary wildlife painting, but it fills me with pain and regret. The original painting, which I saw many years ago, depicts the creatures life-size, which is perhaps why it made such an impact on me, even though I already knew their story when I first saw it.
There are seven birds – Passenger Pigeons. I smile because they look very similar to English wood pigeons, but these are North American birds. They sit, two of them preening, on the branch of an oak, and the background is a faint fuzz of indistinct oak leaves. They are really quite handsome, with olive green backs and blushing peach coloured throats. Their ruby eyes, framed by the steel-blue of their heads, stare out at me dispassionately from the double-page spread of the open book, and fill me with a deep and immeasurable sadness.
This picture, for me, is a symbol. These were once the most abundant birds ever to have existed. They numbered in billions. There are recorded accounts of flocks that blocked out the sun and took days to pass by. Their roosts covered tens of kilometres. Now there are none. Within just a few short decades at the end of the 19th. century they were all gone. Every last one. Their demise was brought about first by deforestation, and then by hunting on a colossal scale. They were shot because they ate grain and seeds and fruit. They were shot because they were good to eat. They were shot just because they were easy to shoot. They were as common as rats, and, so it was thought, as enduring. The last wild pigeon was killed sometime in 1900. People knew they were killing the last of their kind, but like the Easter Islanders chopping down their last tree, they did it anyway. The last lonely captive died in Cincinnati Zoo at 1pm on 1st. September 1914.
We will never know, now, what place this species held in the vast tangled cosmic tapestry of life, of which we too are a part. Its coloured thread is gone forever, never to be replaced.
I have felt ashamed many times in my life. Ashamed to be too rich, or too poor. Ashamed to have been unkind to a friend, or unloving to a relative. This picture, this symbol of all that is wrong with us, makes me feel ashamed to be human.
2014
(This picture, by Peter Schouten can be found in ‘A Gap in Nature’ 2001 by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten Published by Text Publishing ISBN: 1 876485 77 9.)
Nature Matters 