Extinct Species in Audubon's Birds of North America | Hacker News Reader

Extinct Species in Audubon's Birds of North America

audubonart.com

66 pointsbrudgers16 comments

> Lastly, the camaraderie amongst the colonies of parakeets themselves positioned them as easy targets for hunters. When a bird was wounded, the accompanying parakeets would swarm around it in sympathy, thus leaving themselves vulnerable to the aggressor.

> This bird was the last flightless bird native to North America and possess –to its detriment– a friendly demeanor that allowed humans to approach and capture it with little resistance.

Humans are dicks.

We also aren’t very intelligent.

Consider climate change for example. It’s a slow moving train wreck over a couple of centuries. Yet, we are still approaching peak fossil fuels with the goal of going net zero by 2050.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...

Clearly, that’s not going to happen.

I don't necessarily agree with this sentiment. Scientists have been aware of climate change for over 100 years, and we have developed a pretty deep understanding of the mechanisms at play and the factors affecting the climate. In addition, we've developed an understanding of the historical climate which is surprisingly detailed considering the nature of the evidence. I think this shows that we are very intelligent.

In addition to being intelligent, however, as a species we are governed by power structures that are slow-moving and hard to change. In general that's probably a good thing, but when technology affects the world in ways that are extraordinarily rapid from the pov of a geological timescale, we find ourselves without any reasonable mechanism on hand to rapidly undo that damage. I think it's actually kind of frightening to imagine the kind of power that would be needed to make the large-scale changes to society and infrastructure necessary to reverse climate change!

That being said, as one would expect given our slow moving power structures, I think we are making slow changes. They may not be enough, but I am confident that in 100 years or so civilizations across the globe will reflect a much more climate-conscious approach to technology and infrastructure. And actually, if you look at it from a geological timescale, that is indeed a rapid change.

The downside being 4 billion people will starve in that 100 years… to say little about the multitude of species that will be extinct at the end of that.

How do you read this article and come with this take?

Humans are just another animal and we behave as such. The fact that, as an animal, we have comprehensively analyzed our own destructive forces and developed technologies to mitigate them, I find that really incredible.

He really are.

We sure are. Penguins also had a similar friendly demeanor toward humans, so, spoiler alert when we found a thriving flock of them on an island… someone decided killing them and boiling them for oil on an industrial scale was the correct thing to do with the ecosystem. Dollop episode about this: https://youtu.be/w8pHcy5nG_8?si=cWGDeNknauVyYe6N

Passenger pigeons may have been the most numerous bird on the planet. Insane that they were hunted to extinction.

Why were specifically the passenger pigeon hunted? Why not the pigeons we have now

The typical pigeon you see in cities are rock doves which are introduced. There probably weren’t as many when they had to compete with passenger pigeons. Mourning Doves are pretty similar to passenger pigeons and are very common too, they are still hunted to this day.

There's a good chance the famous sky-blackening flocks of them weren't a regular occurrence, historically speaking. North America was in ecological chaos after the Columbian exchange, and booms of some species are a common occurrence in such situations.

Weep for loss of true beauty at the hands of greed.

I do weep, honestly -- it's getting hard for me to watch nature documentaries or go to zoos and nature preserves, because it reminds me of what we're still killing off at record speed.

> In his journal from December 1826, Audubon laments the ecological changes that are taking place before him as a result of habitat destruction and over-poaching: “A century hence, they will not be there as I see them. Nature will have been robbed of many brilliant charms. The rivers will be tormented and turned from their primitive courses…the deer may exist nowhere, fish will no longer abound in the rivers, the eagle scarcely ever alight and the millions of lovely songsters be driven away or slain by man.” (John James Audubon’s journal, December 1826).

Whew.

Also fascinating to learn that we had a native parrot in the US. Those parakeets and the passenger pigeons were both striking animals. Shame we lost them.

A fascinating character in Canadian history, and another one of the very early voices to draw attention to human ecological damages, was Grey Owl. His writings of you can find them, are very interesting and fun. (Canoe was his favorite and useful transportation.)

Reminds me of that quote attributed to Albert Schweitzer:

>"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth."

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