Four extinct North American birds, in ascending order of ATL save-ability.
1) The Great Auk. Weird-ass looking bird, basically Mother Nature's attempt to make a penguin out of a puffin. The only flightless seabird in the northern hemisphere. Large, agile swimmer -- basically, it /was/ a penguin, just built by evolution from different stock.
Found during medieval times along all North Atlantic coastlines, from Cape Cod to northern Spain -- auk colonies are mentioned in Germanic sagas and well attested in medieval writings, and middens show that coastal Indians used the American ones as a food source.
Reduced to Iceland and Canada by about 1700. Last ones killed off Iceland in the 1840s.
Why it went extinct: Damn good eatin', adults and eggs alike. Also, bred only communally, on certain offshore islands -- there may have been just 20 or so worldwide -- and nowhere else. Once hunters and eggers found the nesting sites, they quickly wiped them out.
How to save it: Tough. You need to preserve at least one nesting site intact. This means protection, with teeth, or some sort of conservation ethic among the locals. And the locals aren't a very promising crew... 18th and early 19th century Canadians and Icelanders weren't exactly models of conservationism... if it was edible, they ate it, and let posterity feed itself.
Consequences if its saved: economic consequences are modest. Icelanders have a slightly more varied diet. Darwin gets an interesting example of convergent evolution, since a Great Auk was obviously very like a penguin without actually being a penguin.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
1) The Great Auk. Weird-ass looking bird, basically Mother Nature's attempt to make a penguin out of a puffin. The only flightless seabird in the northern hemisphere. Large, agile swimmer -- basically, it /was/ a penguin, just built by evolution from different stock.
Found during medieval times along all North Atlantic coastlines, from Cape Cod to northern Spain -- auk colonies are mentioned in Germanic sagas and well attested in medieval writings, and middens show that coastal Indians used the American ones as a food source.
Reduced to Iceland and Canada by about 1700. Last ones killed off Iceland in the 1840s.
Why it went extinct: Damn good eatin', adults and eggs alike. Also, bred only communally, on certain offshore islands -- there may have been just 20 or so worldwide -- and nowhere else. Once hunters and eggers found the nesting sites, they quickly wiped them out.
How to save it: Tough. You need to preserve at least one nesting site intact. This means protection, with teeth, or some sort of conservation ethic among the locals. And the locals aren't a very promising crew... 18th and early 19th century Canadians and Icelanders weren't exactly models of conservationism... if it was edible, they ate it, and let posterity feed itself.
Consequences if its saved: economic consequences are modest. Icelanders have a slightly more varied diet. Darwin gets an interesting example of convergent evolution, since a Great Auk was obviously very like a penguin without actually being a penguin.
Thoughts?
Doug M.