The Song of the Dodo [Paperback]

David Quammen can't tell us about the song of the dodo because it's a too late. The bird is extinct - they were all exterminated by 1690. Dodos were an island species - a big, flightless sort of pigeon. Sailors despised their apparent 'stupidity'. This stupidity or 'tameness', as we might also mistakenly think of it, is now recognised by modern naturalists as the naivety of animals that live on islands, which results from having no previous experience of predators. They didn't know they should avoid people or run away when approached, so it didn't take long to kill enough of them to ensure their extinction. Introduced species helped to bang the last few nails into the dodos' coffin lid. David Quammen could hardly have chosen a more symbolic creature than the dodo, for the title of his book on "island biogeography in an age of extinctions".

The author has a nice, laid-back writing style and has arranged some uncomfortable facts into an easy read. Here's an example. The voracious appetites of growing populations and industry put our natural environment under enormous pressure and cause habitats to be destroyed or divided into smaller and smaller pieces. So he asks us to imagine a fine Persian carpet - then to imagine it being chopped into pieces. What would happen? The edges would unravel and the bits that were left wouldn't be nearly so useful or so beautiful as the whole carpet had been. That's what happens to ecosystems when they're chopped into small pieces, like 'islands'. They unravel and decay. Island biogeography used to be just about proper islands - the sort that are surrounded by water - but it's now applicable to the islands scattered within continents. Continents have been criss-crossed by roads and rails, buried under cities, industrial estates, farms, quarries and so on, leaving tiny pockets of natural habitat isolated from other natural areas, like islands in a sea of agriculture or urban sprawl. From the point of view of the animals and vegetation that still manage to exist in these 'island' patches, the surrounding areas amount to a barren waste that cannot be crossed.

Quammen is understandably critical of the destructiveness of our species. He refers to the 'background' rate of extinction and the 'normal' rate of extinction, meaning: what the rate of extinction would be if it were not being driven by Homo sapiens. He says, for instance, it's estimated that the rate of extinction of birds and mammals alone, is about one hundred times the background level. And if that figure isn't staggering enough, he points out that Edward O Wilson's studies suggest the current loss of rainforest species, particularly invertebrates, is "at least a thousand times above normal". Quammen believes it would take this planet's ecosystems ten or perhaps even twenty million years to recover to previous high levels of diversity, if our species were to stop driving up extinction. He says that the difference between a normal extinction rate and the present human driven extinction rate is like the difference between having a pilot light permanently burning in the basement furnace and the house being on fire.

It's a big book (almost 700 pages), packed with interesting stories and information. There are ripping yarns (all true and documented!) about the intrepid chaps who started it all: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. And there are stories of the scientists who are working on island biogeography today, that are just as hair raising. I recommend this book to everyone who's interested in natural history and the environment.

Spring 1997. An active volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat forced thousands to flee the island. Britain is gripped by the worst drought in two centuries. The koala population in Australia is exploding. Brooklyn's trees are being eaten by the Asian long-horned beetle. If you see no relationship among these events, read David Quammen's superb book, "The Song of the Dodo," and learn about island biogeography, "the study of the facts and patterns of species distribution."

When most people look at animals they only see the animals--tigers, tortoises, hornbills, rhinos and so on. They never ask why an animal is the way it is or how it got that way; where it came from and what it is like. Few wonder why animals are where they are and why they're not where they're not. Quammen does, so he takes readers on an intriguing and fascinating tour of island biogeography that relates the history of famous early biologists from Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Hooker to biogeographers of today like Michael Soulé and Edward O. Wilson.

Quammen's bibliography is 23 pages of references in very tiny type. Fortunately, despite years spent researching Dodo, Quammen wasn't content to spend all his time reading dry academic papers and obscure texts. Instead he broke out his hiking boots and retraced the steps of some of these explorers. He describes his personal experiences colorfully with analogies, anecdotes and descriptions. If you've been to some of the places he describes, you feel like you ought to go back to see through opened eyes. If you haven't been there, you feel like you ought to go--with Quammen's book in your backpack. Here's his description of Komodo dragons being fed a goat carcass by rangers on Komodo Island in Indonesia.

"They snarf and chomp. They gorge. They thrash, they scuffle, they tug and twist. They stir up one helluva ruckus. Within a few seconds they have composed themselves at its axis; elbow to elbow, jaws locked on the meat, tails swinging, they resemble a monstrous nine-pointed starfish. Their round-snouted faces, which looked as gentle and dim as a basset hound's until just a moment ago, have gone smeary with blood. When the goat rips in half, they split into two mobs over the severed halves and the tussling continues. They have each seized a mouthful but the mouthfuls are still held together, barely, by bone and sinew. They wrestle. They lunge for new jaw-grips and clamp down, straining greedily against the tensile limits of the mangled goat.

Much of Dodo is a long tale of complex ecological concepts woven together so that those explored in the beginning are introduced again later. Quammen's observations, historical and personal, are part text, part story. Some are humorous; some are tragic. Plan to read the book at least twice. You may want to start a notebook.

Then, when you finish reading The Song of the Dodo, you might want to take your children to a zoo or natural history museum to show them endangered and threatened animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians insects and plants. You may want to explain that some of these species probably won't be around when their children's children--your grandchildren--are adults. Some species may become extinct in your lifetime. None will ever evolve to fill the void left by extinction. There will be no new rhinos, elephants, grizzlies, gorillas, tigers or anything else.

According to island biogeographers, what islands are good at, whether surrounded by water, farmland or urbanization, is extinction. Parks and preserves just aren't large enough. Nowhere is large enough. You are living among tomorrow's dodos. Some are within a few miles of you.

The Song of the Dodo belongs on every true environmentalist's bookshelf, alongside Aldo Leopold's "Sand County Almanac" and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." It should be required reading in any college course that touches on the subject of environment. Quammen, who twice won the National Magazine Award for his writing in Outside magazine, deserves a far more prestigious award for this book.

(This book review first appeared as an article at http://www.suite101.com in the Environment section.)

I read this book whilst on holiday in western France in 1992. It completely blew me away. Up until that point I never imagined that a book dealing with very complex scientific ideas could be so entertaining. The story is beautiful but heartbreaking, according to Quammen natural habitats have been so fractured and reduced on the mainlands of the world that new species of large land mammals will never again emerge. The story of evolution on island habitats is fascinating and large chunks of travel writing nicley break up the scientific discourse. All in all a remarkable book.