CUT one fine Persian rug into 36 equal pieces, and what are you left with? Lots of equally fine miniature Persian rugs? No. You are left with 36 useless, ragged swatches. This is David Quammen's analogy for the destruction of our island ecosystems, which destruction is in its turn a frightening portent for the future of the entire world which we have sliced into nature reserves, parks, isolated forests and other swatches of landscape. This straightforward experiment opens The Song of the Dodo, and it represents the fundamental basis of island biogeography - the geographical distribution of plant and animal species.
Islands cause isolation. And isolation is the "flywheel of evolution", resulting in tigers in Asia, but not in New Guinea, marsupials in Australia and South America, but not in Africa. However, isolation also causes extinction, and the more marvellous and quirky a species is, the more likely it is to disappear, like the dodo in the title of this book. Islands, it seems, are also where species go to die.
Quammen's premise seems doom laden: "The evolution of species casts light onto its dark double, which is the ultimate subject of this book: the extinction of species in a world that has been hacked into pieces." But he does declare that the richness of the earth's ecosystems might recover to previous levels "within, oh, 10 or 20 million years, assuming that Homo Sapiens itself has meanwhile gone extinct too".
The facts, figures and predictions in The Song of the Dodo are depressing. But this book, which is an eclectic (if uneven) mixture of global travel writing and natural science, is never dull. It is an extraordinary and beautiful piece of literature. On the one hand, Quammen discusses, with statistics, untold cases of extinction and "rarity unto death", and on the other, he dazzles the reader with his exotic adventures.
Quammen's theorising and case studies arc, as a result, both exciting and encyclopaedic. His writing is tight, yet chatty (and not without a littering of expletives). He explains perfectly the relationship between flightlessness, isolation and size. The famously extinct dodo evolved towards greater size, but its wings didn't, and, at some point, it dispensed with flying. This was not a problem, as Mauritius, the dodo's home, in its primordial state, contained no terrestrial mammals: no rodents, no carnivores and no humans. Unafraid of water, it drank and bathed freely, but was unable to swim. The dodo was, of course, not stupid. It was ecologically naive. The last credible sighting took place in 1662.
Quammen effortlessly displays the writing skills that made him an award winning essayist for the American Outside magazine. His breathtaking, imaginative flight into the lonely world of the very last dodo on earth is both eloquent and brutal. He imagines that her last fertile egg was eaten by a monkey and that her mate was clubbed to death by a Dutch sailor. For the last half dozen years of her life, she has not set eyes on another member of her own species: "In the dark of an early morning in 1667, say, during a rainstorm, she took cover beneath a cold stone ledge at the base of one of the Black River Cliffs. She drew her head down against her body, fluffed her feathers for warmth, squinted in patient misery. She waited. She didn't know it, nor did anyone else, but she was the only dodo on Earth. When the storm passed, she never opened her eyes. This is extinction." At moments such as this, Quammen drives home the consequences of biological imperialism: when man realised that the natural world was not an inexhaustible commodity, it was truly a new era in human consciousness.
The launch pad for island biogeography was, unsurprisingly, Charles Darwin's and Alfred Wallace's studies of island species and the resulting theory of evolution. But did Darwin, who received Wallace's revolutionary manuscript in 1858 prior to publishing his own ground breaking theory on the origin of the species, deserve his place in history? Although there is much evidence to tarnish Darwin's character, it is not conclusive. Nevertheless, Quammen's dislike of Darwin oozes from every reference to him. Wallace, in contrast, is painted as the driven, spirited and honest golden boy. He was not, Quammen quips with characteristic lyricism, "one to accept a swoopy toothed Celebesian pig as the whim of God".
But Quammen is not only unflattering about Darwin. He makes some delightful digs at Man in general. Watching a pair of marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands engage in fierce combat during the mating season, he comments: "They blast salt out their nostrils, mutually disdainful. This nonsense can go on for as much as five hours, but who are we to judge? It's no crazier than a Tennessee roadhouse on a Saturday night. At least they don't hit each other with pool cues." Can't argue with that.
In this vast, lucid book the reader can experience the scientist's clarity of vision and the writer's passion and the man's exasperation at the catalogue of lost species. The Song of the Dodo closes on a hopeful note: Quammen searches the Aru Islands for the Cenderawasih (Indonesian for bird of paradise), and as he walks through a tropical rain forest, which is acquainted with the axe but innocent of the chainsaw, he hears the bird's faraway song through the dense canopy. It is distant, allusive and heavenly. But, most importantly, it is real.