As with the film footage of the last known imperial woodpecker or the remains of the last passenger pigeon, seeing video of the final member of any animal’s kind is sad and eerie, and a good reminder of how fragile our planet and its life-forms are. So it is with this 1934 footage below of [...]
Posts Tagged ‘extinction’
The Right Whale Encounter
The most rare of all large whales, right whales were given their common name by whalers, who identified them as the “right whales” to kill. At fifty feet long and weighing seventy tons, right whales were hunted for their plentiful oil and baleen, which could be made into corsets, buggy whips, and parasol ribs. During [...]
Could Save-the-Environment Messages Use a Little Selfishness?
As someone who loves wild, natural places, you’ve heard plenty of dire environmental alerts and communications. There are more tigers in people’s backyards than there are tigers in the wild. Rhinos are being poached to the point of extinction. The last Galápagos giant tortoise from Pinta Island has passed away. Plant species are disappearing at [...]
Will Arctic Animals Be Able to Outrun a Tundra Turning to Forest?
Hear the phrase “global warming,” and you immediately picture your hometown with a hotter climate. You imagine a line of more southerly plants marching northward to where you live. In turn, as they advance, you can mentally see the plant species you’re now used to packing up, so to speak, and moving away from you [...]
Lonesome George, I Will Miss You
Lonesome George died this past Sunday morning. His caretaker, Fausto Llerena, found the giant tortoise’s remains stretched out in his corral, facing his watering hole, at the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos Islands. I didn’t know George personally, but I grew up knowing about him. [...]
