It’s half past one in Cincinnati. It’s time to let this go.
Charging my phone above the microwave in a Glastonbury campsite, I was struck by a sudden description of an animal I recognised, in a place I did not expect. In post called Life, Death and Dragonflies, on his substack Chasing Nature,
relays a description of a purple damselfly landing on a machine gun, somewhere in Vietnam. From the description, from the location, from the images of congeners taken from iNaturalist, I confirm my suspicion that it was a species I knew well in one sense - though I know nothing really about it; not even its specific name. I only know its generic name now thanks to Bryan.Bryan writes about North America. I know places, and species in Europe, and I know places in southeast Asia but, as for North America - well, I have visited. I remember a little of what the light feels like there. I remember, too, the feeling of being in a parallel world. For a European, human news from North America is very familiar, whereas description of wild creatures have a fantasy feel. Quite a few of them are also found here (I’m in the UK now) and most of the rest look like they might belong, even though such appearances are often deceptive. Some North Americans would never survive in Europe. Some wild North Americans cannot survive in a North America made European, just as some civilized Europeans cannot survive the reverse.
Martha was a wild North American who died in a city; today is the 109th anniversary of her death. Not Martha the saola, who died on the 26th of January, 1996; the other Martha. I doubt my right to tell her story, as I doubt my right to tell Mwanamizi’s story, although my right is less likely to be questioned by human beings. What is more, I doubt that I should be telling Martha’s story here because it doesn’t fit in with my plan.
My plan was chronological; I was supposed to go through time-chunk by time-chunk, through three parts of a book. Often I found that I wrote far too much, unsure what was muscle and what was just flab. And yet, at other times, I found that an earlier post had missed out a crucial detail necessary for understanding a later one. Still, I couldn’t go back. I put out a post a week, regardless and then, in the summer, I stumbled. I had two weeks in Italy, conceived at the start, but never confirmed, where I was supposed to blatt out a great chunk of the central section; tackle some mountains; let September be a long homeward glide. It didn’t happen. I walked the roads at night. I lay in bed a whole day reading a novel. I chivvied my disappointing self to no avail and chatted with the neighbours. I walked with my cousin on the gold mountains. I dined out with relatives. I stared at my screen and moaned.
I was trying to resurrect past versions of myself from my old notebooks. I was trying to resurrect past visions of the saola from my old notebooks. The effort of the dredging was too like the effort of dredging lessons out of data, data out of forests. It was tiring in itself, and it was tiring because it felt that I was just reiterating the same bad habits I was writing about; habits that were all about having a plan with something wild at its centre; trying to move from talk to action, while at the same time fearing that a lack of communication with that wildness was the problem in the first place.
On the Eurostar on the last morning, heading back to my wife and children, I suddenly began writing about Martha and I could not stop.
According to my plan, if I was going to talk about Martha, I should have done so in this (long) post which covered - “covered” - the 2005 Cambridge Student Conference for Conservation Science and the 2005 “Work that Reconnects” in Monkton Wyld. At the former I met Tony Whitten who, in my mind at least, “recruited me” for saola conservation. At the latter, I met Joanna Macy, who led the course, and who presented an entirely different vision of what it meant to be human and aware of what was happening in this time in the life of the Earth.
Joanna’s own stories were rooted in Buddhism and Systems Theory, but they were far from cold. She told the story of the sessions she’d led in Novozybkov, the closest Russian city to Chernobyl, of the people there who could no longer go into the forest. Who could no longer pick mushrooms or picnic there or hunt boar and deer, though she didn’t say that and whose children, and grandchildren and great great grandchildren would not be able to go to the forest either “And,” one of these people told her, “we are people of the forest.”
The hairs that rose on the back of my neck when I heard her say that were rising because I was hearing about something I’d been told was a lie. That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be important to anyone, not compared to things that hit human bodies, like cancer. "I don't know if I have a soul,” said one woman in Joanna’s telling, “I grew up told that I did not have a soul. But I have pain in my soul, so I think I have one."1
Buddhism and Systems Theory don’t propose souls as Christianity does but it was better - far better - to believe in the soul where such pain could be felt than to deny such pain could be felt at all.
With this writing I am striving to do my bit to heal a split between this vision, and others that seem to be in the same family, and the vision underlying the Cambridge workshop. It’s hard; the two seem to come from different hemispheres of the brain and Systems Theory itself is now seen as too intellectual, too objectivizing and remote, for people on the ‘qualitiative,’ ‘right brain’ side. Like so many others, this rift has only deepened. . Despite this, I still didn’t read The Master and His Emissary, despite telling
that I’d read it on the train. On the train, I was writing about Martha. On the last evening at Monkton Wyld, I was telling her story to Joanna and the others at the workshop.A story - a myth - can pour through you. At that time, the most powerful storytelling experience I had undergone was probably courtesy of Mwanamizi; another story I arguably had no right to tell. But with that story, I felt that I was walking on the shore of an unknown depth. With Martha’s story, I felt a torrent was running through me. Although it was not a traditional story at all, the experience was harder to deny. It was harder to deny because, at the end of the telling, the power was suddenly turned off like a tap, and I was alone in front of an audience with the wings of the story gone and no idea how to follow the words that had just left my mouth.
I haven’t quite conveyed the sense there, but I hope that I will. I said ‘the wings of the story’ just now; suggesting, perhaps, that there were only two. It was a story with a lot of wings in it.
Martha was a wild North American who died in a city.
The Choctaw, according to Wikipedia, called her people ‘lost:’ the lost doves. What her people thought of the Choctaw, Wikipedia cannot say. Perhaps they never actually understood one another and perhaps they understood one another very well. I understand neither, in the way one is supposed to understand these things; that is, in a rooted way. Martha, and her people, were never rooted.
In The Work that Reconnects, there is an exercise called the Council of All Beings where humans don masks and speak in the voices of others. They speak in the voices of others who are not entirely other, or so it is assumed. We didn’t do that one in the week at Monkton Wyld but, if I had been wearing a mask of Martha, when I spoke, I might have said I was lonely. That word ‘lonely’ would have been so small; a grain of rice in a grey cirque of voiceless sand. I kept to the third person, as I did with Mwanamizi. I said ‘this is a great story of my people;’ and we laughed together a little. I led the laughter because I was joking and, at the same time, I wasn’t. In the Work that Reconnects, there is an exercise called Honouring the Gifts of the Ancestors. We did do that one at Monkton Wyld and I drew license from it. It made me feel it might be OK to let free the mythic power of these stories; the kind of stories I’d learned at Oxford; stories of Deep Time.
I thought of another North America. Names surfaced from my childhood, full of grandeur, long denied relevance: Struthiomimus, Anatotitan, Saurolophus, Leptoceratops, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex. A flash and a bang, a day worse than any other and every great lineage of that mighty house is dust. All save one.
It felt good to be telling evolutionary history in the language of Lord of the Rings. I was suspicious of the way it felt good, of course I was. It did feel good, though. I had the audience now; they hadn’t been expecting this. I hadn’t been expecting this2.
This was 2005; birds being dinosaurs wasn’t yet understood in pop culture. We didn’t yet understand - I didn’t know - that the most numerous bird now was basically flightless, living largely in boxes, that its pre-packaged menses are fruit now, that it betrays all we think that a bird ought to be. Back then it was still easier - though not easy - to think about the time, just over a century earlier, when the most numerous bird on the planet was still unquestionably a wild species and was also, almost certainly, Ectopistes migratorius, the slender, spike-tailed, dove whose flocks numbered in the billions.
Back then, it was still possible, I think, for the imagination to race into numbers like that and for hope to prevail. I said E. migratorius numbered in the billions and that might mean little; there are too many zeroes. Let me be a little more precise about it: Alexander Wilson once saw a flock which he estimated at holding:
two billion,
two hundred and thirty two million
two hundred and seventy-two thousand
individual birds.
They’re an estimate, of course, not an actual count, because Alexander Wilson died at 47 “of dysentery, overwork and chronic poverty” and if all his work since birth had been the steady, simple, unsleeping counting of the birds in that one flock then; he would only have got a bit over halfway by the time he died.
We know now - and I suppose we knew then - that numbers like that can fall dumbly, and this kind of talk does little to help. Football pitches, multiples of Wales, towers of paper which reach to the sun; we all live here but we have to keep the door closed. Personally, I realized this for the first time with this story.
Try this, if you have roots in Europe: imagine the clatter of a woodpigeon’s wings - it sounds a bit like applause. Imagine, then, when you’ve heard applause swell in a theatre. Then think how many people that theatre might have held. Imagine it was the largest stadium on earth and imagine it were packed with human beings. Then multiply it ten-thousand-fold, do you have it?
No. This is no way to talk. There’s only one thing you can say, and many have said it; some who speak from experience and some who never will. You say: “the sound of their wings was a gale and their landing thunder.” You say: “the shadow of their multitudes blacked out the sun. At the great roostings, which filled forests, their droppings covered the ground like snow.”
But to say that the numbers fail is too easy a claim. Perhaps it is better to think that it is us, not the numbers, that fail. We like to think that the things that truly matter can’t be measured. What cannot be measured cannot be checked. Without the numbers, it’s easy to affirm the importance of ‘the human scale.’ Then you can use the word ‘lonely’ to talk about Martha and think it’s enough.
It’s not that numbers don’t work; I think these numbers work:
There was a flock that passed over Cincinnati that was 2 miles from edge to edge; they flew fast, they flew thick, they flew low. Imagine looking up at two miles of black sky; flickers of sunlight, sifted by wingbeats; standing in the centre of a field of shadow, two miles wide. That’s a foothold. So: there was a flock that passed over Cincinnati that was 2 miles from edge to edge. It was 230 miles long. Have you seen a eclipse?
Living, sussurating rivers, pouring through the sky, close to the continent; rivers of shadow beneath them. They would fall at last, in all of their power, into the unfortunate forests of the roostings. There they would break the boughs, poison the understorey and utterly baffle the local populations of bobcat, fox, fisher and goshawk who could glut for lifetime on lifetime and never be done. Predator saturation; you can’t take a bite out of that. What could take a bite out of that?
It was a rhetorical question once; I wish it still were.
"The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, travelling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced."
This is a now-famous quote from an 1857 report from a select committee of the Ohio Senate in response to a proposed protection bill from a species. It is very much in the spirit of this less famous quote from a more famous work of six years earlier.
“And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined.”
Both authors were writing in full awareness of the extirpation of the American bison. Melville made this plain and explained, convincingly but entirely incorrectly, why the case of the whales was different. Both authors, I think, did not understand, or did not want to understand, what they themselves were now, as humans. We are hardly better equipped to understand it than Melville; we just have less choice. We want human stories, animal stories; not stories at this scale.
Animals are bandits with knapsacks; we aren’t like fungi, we aren’t civilized, as a rule. But there’s an intelligence brought to bear on a glut that has no rules to bind it. The muzzle which is stuck into the oil now was stuck then into the flocks. The passengers themselves were aggregated, organized to exploit the mass masting of the forests, and then the mass farming of the continent - and they would ruin farmers: locusts the size of rabbits; aerial rivers of them. Well, now there was a species that could organize itself on the Passengers as the fishers and bobcats and goshawks and foxes could not. There were other black rivers fanning out across the continent. Hunters with railways are fundamentally different, ecologically, from hunters with bags. Trains of dead Passengers ran back to the stomachs of the east.
Accounts of the rivers of pigeons darkening the sky are strangely consistent over the relatively brief time that humans of European descent knew about these birds. The hellish accounts of what happened when a township attached a roosting also remain oddly consistent from those of John James Audobon to those of Etta S Wilson of Michigan, reminiscing on the species twenty years after Martha’s death. The splendour of the flocks swirling slowly down into the forests and oscillating on a long glide between the azure of the pigeon’s backs to the rich deep purple of their breasts. Still, he admits that even he cannot describe the movement of those flocks when pressed by a hawk:
“At once, like a torrent, and with a noise like thunder, they rushed into a compact mass, pressing upon each other towards the centre. In these almost solid masses, they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.”
An inadequate description, he says.
One can still find similar spectacles, though without the azure and the purple and without, perhaps, the scale. However Audobon goes on to say something else which is most surprising. He says that the next group of pigeons in the stream follow the figures that their predecessors had described, even when the hawk is gone. It’s a very strange claim and I can scarcely believe it. We can’t check now.
We can’t check either how they reacted to guns. Audobon goes straight on to describe the townspeople line up on the buttes with their rifles, as the flock comes in. What the flock does when it passes, he doesn’t choose to say. A shotgun blast might easily bring down eighty; they flew thick, they flew fast, they flew low. What a pellet does to a pigeon is not so different from what a peregrine does, but these falcons were invisible, coordinated and impossibly numerous. As the pigeons tumble, their slipstreams warble and wink out and their neighbours see them fall. What is that doing in the flock so internally attuned that it follows it’s own contortions around a hawk that isn’t even there? I don’t think the pigeons threw themselves into towers and coils when the shotguns hit; I think someone would have mentioned it. I think they just kept coming. Not because they were oblivious, though. They just didn’t know what else they could do. People think of pigeons as stupid, but their minds hold landscapes, they are masters of navigation. Our minds, similarly, hold as much as they have needed to and now we don’t know what to do. We just keep coming.
“The tenderness and affection displayed by these birds towards their mates, are in the highest degree striking.” Pigeons, of course, have meant both Aphrodite and the Holy Spirit but Audobon does not use the L-word. Steller used it when he wrote about the sea cows but Audobon was perhaps a little more pinched by the standards for scientific writing which constrain us today. Also Audobon, unlike Steller, was not in fear for his life when he wrote.
I could say that scientific accounts must speak only of things that can be measured and so love cannot be included. And I could say that this is why, in the name of rejecting ‘anthropomorphism,’ scientific accounts promote automatism instead. But I think the truth is the exact opposite. What cannot be measured cannot be checked and so refusing quantification can be self-serving. If the love you feel for your family cannot be measured then no-one will ever be able to say you don’t love them enough. If a pair of passenger pigeons cannot love each other, then a billion such pairs cannot love each other and it is therefore a nonsense to suggest that…
…but really, it’s beyond words, isn’t it?
According to Bachmann, Audobon writes, the pigeons in the more cultivated parts of the nation no longer bred in communities. The scattered nests close to the trunks of tapering pines, were loosely, sparsely built and, of the two eggs which are always laid, one frequently drops out. It seems like a hint at what happened.
There are theoretical reasons why hunting - or rather targeted hunting - is not expected to lead by itself to extinction of a species. As they get rarer, it becomes less and less profitable to seek out the last few. Hence habitat destruction is considered a more likely suspect when a species is lost. However, all these things: the copycat flocks, the strong pair bonds, the lost eggs in lone nests, the lower reproductive output in unfamiliar surroundings; all seem like hints or clues towards the phenomenon known as the Allee effect: non-linear negative density dependence in a population. The hypothesis, which I first read in David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo, is that the Allee Effect hit the Passengers early: they were so dependent on living with a mass of others that a scattered population in spindly pine trees faded out. In other words, they actually were driven to extinction by habitat destruction, but the habitat of passenger pigeons was passenger pigeons.
I think Joanna Macy liked that point. I’d hoped she would when it formed it my mind, and it formed in my mind in response to the stories that we’d heard from Joanna herself. It was a very Systems Theory point and I knew it was when I said it and I said it and Joanna affirmed it with a nod, and I felt the feedback and went on, strengthened.
Another story of hers was about an Australian activist called John Seed whose strength came in, he said, with the realization that he was not a lone human protecting the rainforest, but the rainforest protecting itself. That illustrated Joanna’s way of thinking very well. It sounded very strange and New Age, but I didn’t actually have to stretch very far to accept it. I could get the key concepts from none other than Richad Dawkins. He has this concept of the ‘extended phenotype; if you think of the body of an organism as being woven by genes on the loom of causality, then it becomes obvious that the pattern extends beyond the organism’s body. The beaver’s dam is a weaving of the genes, just like the beaver’s tail . Dawkins would claim that the gene point of view is the only really valid one here. I don’t buy that, but I do think it’s a valid one and an antidote to the politically reinforced idea that only an organism can have a perspective.
I wrote last week about the wish to protect pandas because they look a bit like human babies. This can be seen - and often is - as part of a weaving by the human genes. It can also be seen as a weaving by the panda’s genes; their phenotype extending as easily into our minds as it does into the trunks of the trees that their genes make them horny for climbing. A rainforest, though more complicated than a panda, can be seen the same way. So can even a river, which doesn’t have literal genes. There aren’t any boundaries in this world - though there are tides and defences, traps, cages and spells.
To deny the soul as the place where pain is felt - that is monstrous. To affirm the soul as an inviolable kingdom - that is silly.
To affirm the soul as an inviolable kingdom is to affirm not only that genes do not matter, but to affirm also that species do not. Whereas it was possible, in a systems view, in the Jewelled Net of Indra, to see the story I was telling as a part of the Passenger Pigeon itself.
On the other hand, you don’t need a systems view, or an understanding of density dependence, to see the destruction of E. migratorius as something more than just hunting. Shooting was only a small part of it. Both John James Audobon and Etta Wilson write of the hellish scenes inside the roostings. Perhaps Wilson, who says she would not go herself, is partly echoing Audobon’s account and not just her brothers’. Some confirmation of this might be found in the fact that Wilson gives just one detail that isn’t in Audobon:
“the high, cackling notes of the terrified Pigeons, a bit husky and hesitant as though short of breath, combined into a peculiar roar, unlike any other known sound, and which could be heard at least a mile away.
I expect little Etta was less than a mile away and she could hear the pigeons roaring. Or, rather, as pigeons do not roar, she could hear E. migratorius roaring. It was a short-lived phenomenon, as these things go.
Less than a century after that river-long flock passed over Cincinnati, the last passenger pigeon fell off her perch in the Cincinnati Zoo. It was the first of September 1914. Her name was Martha.
You can believe that loneliness has a size, that it can fit in your brain; that trauma has a size, that it can fit in your body. You can believe you can empathize with a fear so intense it literally becomes an acid that eats away the tissues of your literal heart. You can believe that the word for Martha is ‘lonely’ and that you can empathize with that loneliness. Crying like a fire in the sun.
Alternatively, if you believe that numbers do matter, you can believe that the relevant number is not the size of the loss but the size of the brain to hold it. Martha’s brain was smaller than any of ours and her mind also smaller, it seems so. She could not feel the loneliness one of us could, no matter that she had greater cause. And that might be right, except for the sense that surely she knew that. Can’t we all feel, now, that there is something we need to feel that’s far too big for our brains? We should be roiling in sky-high serpents but we just keep coming, over the ridge.
Speculation.
We don’t know what happened at the animal level, or at the species level. We’ll know better in future but we’ll never know for sure; and then at some point we’ll have to forget. We don’t know for sure when or where Martha was born or was captured. We know that she died in the early afternoon in the Cincinnati zoo on the first of September 2014.
I have taken a long time to tell this story and perhaps it’s really just the shortest story in the world: “the last person in the world sat in a room; there was a knock at the door.”
There’s another contender for the shortest story in the world: “And when he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
When I was in the hall at Monkton Wyld, telling my story of the passenger pigeons to Joanna and the participants in that workshop, I felt like something was running through me and that was too big to handle. I have that sense, again, trying to write it down now. It seems that everything I am writing is about that; trying to tell this story that is too big for me. Too big, so that I tried to be a character rather than a storyteller to do the story proper honour. Now, telling it again and wondering if I failed as a character, all the time the story pouring through and carrying me and all the time - the other theme - me doubting all of this; fancying I am being melodramatic; making the whole thing up.
When I think that, I remember what happened at the end of that particular telling.
Martha died in 1914 and Etta Wilson was writing of the destruction of the roostings in 1934. I was thinking of that I was speaking and I was thinking, in fact, of the end of Slaughterhouse Five. I said that, when a human being leaves a place of destruction it is traditional that they will hear a bird singing. I said that the song will flow from the bird’s throat and that it will not stop and the song is built on a song which is built on a song, vibrating to us through worlds after worlds it comes to a human being when he steps out of a place of destruction and it means…
… I said that and it was like a tap had been turned off. I had felt, while I was telling the story, how small I was compared to the power of its flow. Now I could feel absolutely the difference between myself with the story in me and myself without. I was staring into a cluster of human faces and the last words I had said were “and it means.”
I had thought myself able to tell them what birdsong meant - all of it. I had thought that I could invite them - the dinosaurs - into a symbol of hope for us, for the good humans.
I’m not sure what I said. I finished it somehow.
I felt a bit lonely. I felt elated by the rush. I grabbed Joanna afterward, craving more feedback from her, I suppose. She was generous:
“I’d read about them, of course, but you really brought them alive,” I was happy and then I was horrified, because I knew - suddenly - what she was going to say next and she said it, with a laugh: “they’re not extinct!” It was a joke but also it wasn’t.
I didn’t know what to make of that.
And I still don’t. Nonetheless, there is a reason I have to tell this story now. The thing I was supposed to tell doesn’t work without it. Or so I tell myself.
Maybe I’m just scared.
Next week, I have to finally talk about the landslide.
A raw version of this story from a much younger Joanna Macy can be read here: https://ratical.org/radiation/WorldUraniumHearing/JoannaMacy.html I believe it’s also in her autobiography “Widening Circles,” but I don’t have a copy to hand.
I had some of them. I found out later that some had no idea what I was talking about.
Very powerful. By the way, the Cincinnati zoo statement appears to be 100 years late!