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by John Humphreys

Extinction is for ever. The American naturalist Charles William Beebe put it most evocatively:

“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

In fact, this quote was one of Gerald Durrell’s favorites – the wildly talented naturalist, author and conservationist – and motivated him like nothing else to work to protect animals from extinction. It was he, with the Jersey Zoo in the Channel Islands off the French coast, who was among the very first to think of breeding ultra-rare animals and birds in captivity so that you could, down the road, reintroduce them to the wild if the causes of their near extinction have abated. He and his colleagues – and those he inspired –  have been quite successful:  captive breeding and reintroduction programs have been set up for animals from the spectacular (like the Mauritius Kestrel) and very strange (the aye-aye lemur) to the modest but still beloved by God (Indian Pygmy Hog).

The California Condor, for one, would have been snuffed out long ago were it not for such an initiative.

Durrell espoused the idea that we should never neglect the small and obscure – land snail, lizard, frog, snake, tiny bird – however non-photogenic they were.

One is reminded of what the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Daniel Ciobotea, is meant to have said: “Extinction is a loss of our knowledge of God – erasing his fingerprints”

And I want to focus your minds on one such case.

There was once a miracle, a little frog. Just two inches long, it was – even for the infinite wonder of God’s creation – an extraordinary beast. Once the frogspawn was fertilized, the mother swallowed the eggs and let them turn into tadpoles in her stomach. She didn’t eat until they were big enough to be let go. The babies did not get digested by the frog’s stomach because they had the biochemical trick of switching off the normal stomach acid.

This almost ridiculously wonderful creature did this to give its young the best start in life. Well, too late now, For through logging of their native forests, over-collecting, an invasive fungus, maybe climate change…who knows?  – this frog is gone. To be remembered in a few slices of film and a Wikipedia entry.

If this moves you to tears, as it does me, we need to do something. Let’s not let this happen again on our watch. Visit www.durrell.org to get some ideas.

*Humphreys is a biochemist working in pharmaceutical software. He has been mad about natural history since the age of 5 and is an ardent conservationist and pragmatic environmentalist.

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