Arthur Allen's early views on vanishing species

"It is interesting to contemplate whence each of our birds has come and whither it is heading—whether to conquer the earth with its progeny or to sink before long into oblivion.

"The processes which are going on today are the same as those that have been transpiring for millions of years. So incomplete are the records and so small our vision that it is exceeding difficult to interpret even what is going on before our eyes.

"The Great Auk, the Labrador Duck, the Passenger Pigeon have joined the great army of Archaeopteryx; and the Heath Hen, the Eskimo Curlew, the Whooping Crane, the Trumpeter Swan, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker likewise will soon follow them in spite of all we can do to protect them.

"The most we can hope for is that an intensive study of each of these vanishing species will be made before it is too late, perhaps such studies as will give us some inkling of the natural laws that have made and destroyed thousands of species of birds during the last two hundred million years."

Dr. Arthur Allen wrote in his book The Book of Bird Life: A Study of Birds in Their Native Haunts published in 1930. It shows that Doc Allen was already thinking that an in-depth study of each vanishing species needed to be undertaken to help save the bird. Of course, Tanner's three year field research of the ivorybill was the first to be carried out.

For those that know, to quote the late Paul Harvey, "the rest of the story," the heath hen did go extinct. The last was seen on Martha's Vineyard in 1932. The Eskimo curlew is probably extinct while the whooping crane and trumpeter swan have been saved.

And the natural processes that once pushed numerous species into extinction have now been augmented by human-related activities such as habitat destruction.

We all need a place to live; without it we would vanish too.