Forest owlet - Athene blewitti

For half a century, the forest owlet was known from only seven museum specimens. Of the five specimens belonging to Britain’s Natural History Museum, four were shot in the 1880s. The fifth, purportedly shot in 1914, was acquired as part of the enormous collection donated to the museum by flamboyant World War I soldier, spy, and amateur ornithologist Colonel Richard Meinhertzhagen. While doing research for The Birds of India in 1993, Pamela Rasmussen of the Smithsonian Institute, Nigel Collar of BirdLife International, and Robert Prys-Jones of the Natural History Museum’s Bird Group found incongruities in Meinhertzhagen’s documentation for his forest owlet specimen. Using modern forensic technologies, Rasmussen and colleagues discovered evidence of theft (possibly from the museum’s own holdings), re-stuffing, and falsified label data. Basing their information in part on Meinhertzhagen’s invented location for the bird he claimed to have killed, researchers had for 113 years been looking for the bird in the wrong place. After taking into consideration the habitat preferred by other Athene species, in 1997, Rasmussen and Collar et al. rediscovered the forest owlet in a lowland hill forest near Bombay, one of the most populous cities in India. The team is re-examining Meinhertzhagen’s entire bird collection and uncovering more discrepancies.


Magnolia - Magnolia kobus

There is a short section in Sir David Attenborough’s 1995 book The Private Life of Plants about some researchers who found a few odd black seeds in jars of 2,000-year-old rice buried at an archaeological site in northern Japan. The seeds reportedly sprouted, and ten years later the plant—a magnolia—bloomed. An unusual number of petals on the flowers suggested that it might be a new species related to Magnolia kobus. Despite my extensive attempts to confirm this story with magnolia experts, the book’s publishers, and the university group on the dig site, it remains uncorroborated. Perhaps it is a hoax, or simply a mistake (magnolia seeds are, in fact, renowned for being particularly fleshy and short-lived). Nevertheless, I included the magnolia in the picture because the story so clearly exemplifies the depth of our desire for nature to be resilient.

Seeds, arctic lupine - Lupinus arcticus

A fairly common plant in the arctic, this lupine is unique for its seeds’ extraordinary longevity and resilience. At a gold mine in Canada in 1954, an entire lemming burrow was dug up from three to six meters below the frozen surface. A curious mining engineer put the nest and all its contents in a cool, dry storage shed. Twelve years later, Canadian Museum of Nature paleontologist Dick Harington heard about the unearthed burrow and took the contents to Ottawa for examination. Harington inferred an age of about 10,000 years from some partially fossilized bones. Of about 20 seeds found in the burrow, six sprouted and grew into healthy Lupinus arcticus plants. If these seeds were as old as the bones, this would be the longest known example of seed dormancy. The previous documented record holder was a sacred lotus that sprouted from a 1,275-year-old seed.

Large Blue - Maculinea arion

The last of Britain’s large blue butterflies died in 1979, despite 200 years of conservation efforts to save them. Maculinea arion is myrmecophilous, or ant-loving, and has an astounding relationship to the red ants native to its habitat. The butterfly lays its eggs on wild thyme. The caterpillars hatch, feed on the thyme leaves for a few weeks, then drop to the ground and begin to secrete “honey” to attract ants. After the ants have fed, the caterpillar waits for most of them to leave, then rears up on its back legs and imitates an ant grub. If this deception works, one of the red ants will mistake the caterpillar for an escaped grub of its own kind and carry it back to its nest. Once inside the nest, the caterpillar feasts on the grubs with which it has been placed. The following spring, the caterpillar forms a chrysalis near the entrance to the nest. The adult butterflies of this species all emerge from the ground within a few weeks in mid- to late summer. In 1972, in the face of the imminent extinction of Britain’s population of Maculinea arion, one scientist, Jeffrey Thomas, made an exhaustive last-ditch effort to examine what remained of the butterfly’s habitat in Cornwall and try to save it. There he discovered five nearly identical species of red ants. Several of these, it turned out, were invasive species that tend to recognize the caterpillars as intruders and kill them, while the red ant species key to the butterfly’s survival had dwindled because of well-meaning but incorrect conservation efforts. The requisite ants require close-cropped fields with sun-exposed sandy soil for their nest sites. But an attempt to foster the growth of wild thyme by excluding browsing animals had resulted in more vegetation and cooler soil. After its extinction in England, Maculinea arion’s close cousins from Sweden were reintroduced to correctly prepared sites in 1983. There are now several separate, carefully monitored colonies around Britain, with one hatching a thousand or more adults each summer.

Franklin tree - Franklinia alatamaha

Franklinia alatamaha no longer survives in the wild. The well-known Philadelphia plantsman John Bartram first discovered this spreading green tree with graceful white flowers along the Alatamaha River in Georgia in 1765. He returned to the site a few years later and collected seeds. The Franklin tree was reportedly seen in the wild in 1790, and possibly in 1803, but has never again been found in its native environment. Luckily, Bartram was able to grow the plant in his garden from the seeds he gathered. It is believed that all Franklinia alatamaha available from nurseries today are descendants of those he cultivated.

Owens pupfish - Cyprinodon radiosus

The Central Valley of California was nearly mosquito-free before the decline of the native pupfishes. Uniquely tolerant of the elevated temperature and shallow waters in the valley, the Owens pupfish has the misfortune of living in the river system most severely impacted by the water demands of Los Angeles. By 1948, it was believed to be extinct. After it was rediscovered in 1956 and in 1964, efforts were made to build refuges with sanctuary pools and barriers to keep out non-native, predatory fish. In 1967, the Owens pupfish was federally listed as endangered. In 1969, a combination of natural forces almost completely dried out one of the last remaining pupfish pools. California Department of Fish and Game biologist Phil Pister and colleagues raced out to an area called Fish Slough with buckets, nets, and aerators to save the fish. They removed 800 fish and put them in mesh cages in a nearby pool, planning to move them the following day to better sites. On Pister’s final check before leaving for the day, he noticed that the fish were dying in large numbers from lack of oxygen. He gathered all the survivors in two five-gallon buckets and, praying he would not trip, carried the buckets and the fate of the species as he searched for more suitable temporary pools. Fortunately for the pupfish, Pister succeeded. Less drastic conservation efforts continue to this day.

Egg, short-tailed albatross - Phoebastria albatrus

The short-tailed albatrosses of Torishima Island, 370 miles south of Tokyo, once numbered in the millions. They were slaughtered for their plumage from the early 1800s until the 1930s. The harvest of feathers and down was so great it could be measured in tons. In 1902, a volcano erupted on Torishima, destroying nesting habitat and killing many of the birds, along with all of the 125 villagers who made their livelihood from them. The short-tailed albatross was believed extinct for two decades. Happily, short-tails were seen again on the island in 1951, and by 1977 nearly 200 birds were nesting there. Since then, Japanese ornithologist Hiroshi Hasegawa has devoted his life to the resurrection of the species. Although long-line fishing operations continue to take a steep toll, there are now about 1,000 short-tailed albatrosses breeding on Torishima Island.