The Sun Sets Before the Dawn...

In a shocking news bulletin released the morning of May 26th, the Alaotra Grebe was confirmed as extinct according to the most recent assessments.

The Alaotra Grebe was a medium-sized, duck-shaped bird with predominantly black plumage and a starkly contrasting eye socket (vivid yellow) and a pair of piercing eyes (pale sunflower) located on either side of its head. It had a beak, the use of which unknown. Its natural habitat was Lake Alaotra in Madagascar (the world’s fourth largest island after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo in that order) and surrounding locations. Its extinction has been put down to continued poaching and the artificial introduction of carnivorous fish to their lake. Prior to the infestation of foreign fish, the Alaotras would themselves pick the lake of its water dwellers, but having to share food with a thriving population of hungry fish left their bellies empty and their survival doomed.

Regrettably, the Alaotras have silly little wings and it is speculated that they could only fly short distances before having to stop for a cigarette. Despite their twenty-Marlboro-Menthol-a-day habit, lung cancer has not been considered a significant contributing factor in their extinction – for such puny-looking birds, their constitutions were remarkably resilient.

They have not been formally sighted since 1985, leading many to suggest that perhaps they should have been checked on sooner. Few things survive in this world when left alone for twenty five years, let alone a group of medium-sized, bird shaped grebes.
The extinction of this rare, Malagasy species is the first of the bird-world since 2005 and becomes the latest entry on the IUCN red list of endangered and threatened birds.

Dr Leon Bennun of Birdlife International has said there is “no hope” for the species and that is “another example of how human actions can have unforeseen consequences”.
And this leads us the point of this article: should we care that our actions have unforeseen consequences for other species? If we shape the world to best suit our needs and it becomes unsuitable for the survival of another species, should we go to lengths – both expensive and time-consuming, not to mention unnatural – to artificially preserve its existence?

Natural selection works for a reason – only the best survive. The Alaotra Grebe was a lovely little bird, but thoroughly unequipped for the changes to its environment. Had we endeavoured to save it, it would have been at our own cost as a progressive species.

Of course, I believe that many species – perhaps even the Alaotra Grebe – are wiped-out unnecessarily, due to the inconsideration of actions that could be better executed. This is wrong; simply mindless; and a tragedy that millions of years of evolutionary diversification should end so unceremoniously, often with its neck stuck in a plastic ring.

But fundamentally I am a realist: a brutal, uncompromising realist, who has endured many outraged humanitarian protests when laying down the likelihood, in cold, hard black and white terms, that the human race will likely in the near future experience a vast population dive should an increase in temperature wreak the predicted havoc across the third world, killing millions who are unable to protect themselves from the unfeeling environment. And maybe, rather than crying ourselves to sleep at night over something we will, in all honesty be powerless to prevent and only able to slow or dampen at huge personal cost to the running of our society (and I don’t just mean this monetarily), we should accept that shit happens: some people are born lucky; others are born with one foot in the grave. This is nature’s way: we, and every other species on this planet, are expendable- playthings of a story with no script. Home Sapiens will not survive forever – we are no more prepared for what might happen to the world around us than the Alaotra Grebe. Conserve through consideration and mourn not what is lost in the quest for survival. It’s a cruel world and only the cruellest of creatures survive.


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