Dozens of plant and animal species go extinct every day. Few are recorded, even noticed. The last of a species – the endling – is identified in still fewer cases.
Much has been written about Truganini, the last surviving Tasmanian Aboriginal whose tribe was exterminated by the Europeans who colonised Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. Truganini became an endling in 1874, three years before her lonely death. Around the same time, another nameless endling passed away, thousands of miles away.Imagine a half-zebra with the stripes fading in the middle to disappear into a plain brown coat in the rear. Once abundant in the grassland of South Africa, the quagga was hunted to extinction for its hide and meat nearly 130 years ago. By the 1870s, the wild stock disappeared and zoo specimens became rare. The quagga endling died in Amsterdam’s Artis zoo in 1883.
Martha the pigeon and Incas the parakeet died in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914 and 1918, respectively. Martha’s death marked the extinction of the passenger pigeon, a species that crowded the American continent in billions till the New World was discovered. Incas was the last Carolina parakeet, North America’s only parrot species.The Heath hen, a majestic grouse and a variant of the Greater prairie chicken, was nearly extirpated due to poaching by the end of the nineteenth century. The endling – named Booming Ben – lived alone for four years in a small Massachusetts island called Martha’s Vineyard till a forest fire killed it in 1932.
The kangaroo had a cousin that resembled a wolf. The Tasmanian tiger, the largest marsupial (animals that keep the newborn in a pouch) of our time, and a carnivore at that, was killed as vermin and vanished from the wild by 1930. Benjamin, the endling of undetermined sex, died in the Hobart zoo in 1936.The latest in the list of known endlings was Lonesome George, a male Pinta Island tortoise. Rescued to the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos, the giant spent four lonely decades in captivity before dying in June 2012. While endlings of less-evolved life forms may not have dwelt on their last days, did Benjamin or George realise they hadn’t seen another like them for a really long time?
Boa knew of that absolute loneliness. And to dispel it, she sang to herself in a language that had no more speakers left among the Bo people, one of the ten Great Andamanese tribes. With Boa died her language and the tribe in 2010.A few months earlier, another ancient language of the archipelago – Khora – had passed with Boa’s neighbour Boro. In line are the fifty-odd remaining members of the other Great Andamanese clans and only two surviving languages.
Boa’s story was written by linguist Anvita Abbi who knew the octogenarian in her final years. The only “endling” I came across may not qualify as one but she suffered the same fate.Rajasthan’s Bharatpur did not have any tiger since the last one was shot in 1962. But in 1999, a barely adult Ranthambore tigress wandered out, followed the course of the Gambhir river and landed up in the famous wetlands of Bharatpur.
The tigress settled down among ample prey in the grassland and, thanks to the then conservator of forests, Bharatpur, Shruti Sharma, was protected from poachers who would soon butcher the big cats of Sariska and Ranthambore. Unusually reclusive, she was in her prime when her remains were found in the summer of 2005. For six long years, she did not have a partner or a competitor. She still sprayed to mark her territory.
Isolated populations of tigers continue to survive in many pocket reserves. But the Asiatic cheetah went extinct in India long ago, with the last three gunned down by a maharaja one night in 1948 as the glare of his headlights blinded the animals.While the cheetah’s admirers keep alive plans to fly in the African variety, the populations of several other species – the great Indian bustard, wild buffalo, Jerdon’s courser, gharial, hangul, Nilgiri tahr, river dolphin, dugong and numerous amphibians – have crashed drastically since.
An ageing forester in Jharkhand’s Palamau Tiger Reserve told me the story of Rani the tigress. A railway track across its core cuts Palamau in two unequal halves – the small stretch of Betla forests in the north and the rest of the reserve. Sometime in the 1990s, tigress Begum shifted to this 29 sq km patch with her tiny cubs – Raja and Rani – perhaps to avoid the marauding males of Palamau after the tiger that fathered her cubs went missing.
The railway track saved the family from other tigers but Begum was soon poisoned by irate villagers who did not take kindly to losing too many cattle. The orphaned cubs were apparently around six months old. The forest staff occasionally helped them with live baits. But it was equally the railway track that protected young Raja from Palamau’s dominating males who stayed on the other side.
There are many theories about Raja’s eventual disappearance. But Rani survived. She was apparently spotted in Betla as late as in 2009. If those reports were true, she lived long for a wild tigress. But after her brother went missing, she probably never met another of her kind. Rani’s wait for a mate used to make routine headlines in the local press during 2000-05 – her prime years.Every day, more than fifty trains galloped by between her and the few remaining males of Palamau. The railway track that saved her as a cub eventually became the limits of her solitary confinement. For all practical purposes, Rani died an endling.
In the winter of 2015, I remembered Rani on a cold and misty evening in Uttarakhand’s Rajaji National Park. The sun was about to set on the Ganga lumbering through the woods. I was standing by a wide canal running south from Rishikesh along the eastern bank of the river. Encased in concrete, its steep embankments left no toehold and made it impossible for the best of swimmers to haul themselves up on either bank.Behind me stood the forests of Chila. In front, parallel to the swelling canal and the somewhat depleted river, ran a railway line. If an animal from Chila somehow made it this far, it would then have to negotiate the blinding traffic of NH 58 before reaching the forests of Motichur, the other half of the national park. Not surprisingly, few ever made it. The series of death traps – canal, railway, highway – ensured that in the last decade or so, no large mammal, not even the super cat, moved to the west of the river.
The lone tigress deep inside Motichur has been waiting all these years. A forest guard I spoke to that afternoon smiled wistfully as he pointed to the giant pillars of a half-made flyover meant to divert the traffic and allow safe passage to animals through the forests below. He wondered if a young male would arrive in time but did not sound very hopeful. The flyover has been a perpetual work-in-progress. Just like the two other flyovers near Dehradun – at Teen Pani and Lal Tappar – sanctioned to secure elephant corridors.As a result, channels of minor rivers flowing to the Ganga from the west remain the only tenacious links between the two halves of the Rajaji National Park. But if the rapid growth of the Haridwar township to the north continues at the present rate, even the last passages will be lost soon.
With the ageing Motichur tigress, the big cat will disappear from the western bank of the Ganga in Uttarakhand. I stood staring at the void atop the concrete pillars where the promised flyover should have materialised a few years back. But there is never enough money for conservation, not even for the tiger.Once she became an endling, Truganini had a prophecy. “I know that when I die the museum wants my body,” she told a priest. Truly enough, Truganini’s body was exhumed and put on public display at the Tasmanian Museum during 1904-47.
Having accelerated the natural extinction rate by at least 1,000 times, our gallery of endlings may have long run out of space. In any case, there will be no one to mourn or preserve the endling species of earth.Excerpted with permission from The Age of Endlings: Explorations and Investigations Into The Indian Wild, Jay Mazoomdaar, Harper Litmus.
