The Song of the Dodo Quotes

“Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befuddled—but resourceful enough to have escaped and endured when the other birds didn’t. Or else she was lucky.
Maybe she had spent all her years in the Bambous Mountains along the southeastern coast, where the various forms of human-brought menace were slow to penetrate. Or she might have lurked in a creek drainage of the Black River Gorges. Time and trouble had finally caught up with her. Imagine that her last hatchling had been snarfed by a [invasive] feral pig. That her last fertile egg had been eaten by a [invasive] monkey. That her mate was dead, clubbed by a hungry Dutch sailor, and that she had no hope of finding another. During the past halfdozen years, longer than a bird could remember, she had not even set eyes on a member of her own species.
Raphus cucullatus had become rare unto death. But this one flesh-and-blood individual still lived. Imagine that she was thirty years old, or thirty-five, an ancient age for most sorts of bird but not impossible for a member of such a large-bodied species. She no longer ran, she waddled. Lately she was going blind. Her digestive system was balky. 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.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“The next day, William Lanney's much abused remains were carried in a coffin to the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was large. It included many of Lanney's shipmates, suggesting that the whaling profession in late-nineteenth-century Hobart was graced with a higher level of humanistic sensibility than the surgical profession.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Once a species of insect or bird has reached a new island and established a population, evolution toward gigantism does offer certain advantages: fat storage, thermal stability, and defense against predators, if there are any. But gigantism is also a way of becoming flightless, and flightlessness is a way of becoming marooned.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“There’s a voice that says: "So what?"
It’s not my voice, it’s probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn’t he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity?" And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire?”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his “Rosetta Stone” paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“Without explaining what’s on my mind, I ask Nafus and Schreiner: Have they seen any recent invasions by exotic arthropods, or any dramatic population outbreaks among native ones? I inquire about arthropods rather than insects because it’s a broader category, inclusive also of such charming non-insect invertebrates as ticks, centipedes, millipedes, and spiders. Asking a professional entomologist about arthropods (and not about, say, bugs) is a way of signaling at least some familiarity with the subject. Still, Nafus rocks backward in his chair, rebounding from the dumbness of my question. “We have invasions and outbreaks all the t”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven’t collected a single snake. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in the north of the island as in the south, has passed the peak of its cycle and declined. Maybe the trap design is no good, or possibly we’re using the wrong bait. Temporarily, for whatever reason, B. irregularis has turned invisible. But the consequences of its presence surround us like a web.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“aboard:”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

“Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction