Sea Cows, G W Steller and 'tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag'

London has changed much in the fifty or so years since I became aware of its sprawling mass of buildings. The factories of the early twentieth century have gone, demolished or transformed into loft-style apartments; the fate of so many Victorian schools in the wake of a post-war-declining birth rate. Swanky riverside apartments now line the River Thames from Richmond to the Docklands; where once there was only mud, there is now steel and concrete and glass and 'C' list celebrities. The Power Station at Battersea, a once proud purveyor of coal-fired electricity to the southwest of the capital, still stands, thirty of forty years after its decommissioning, long bereft of its roof, its four huge chimneys pointing purposelessly towards the sky. The house, the terraced slum, in which I grew up has long gone, only to be replaced by one of the worst examples of the planners' art in the entire capital.* And yet, the change which has perhaps affected me more than most is the apparent change to an earlier change, a change that happened shortly after I was born.

The UK's 'Clean Air Act' of 1956, itself a response to London's 'Great Smog' of 1952, for which recent research has suggested a death-toll of approximately 12,000 rather than the originally estimated 4,000, and the follow up legislation in 1968, had the effect of not only making the environment more pleasant for people but also, by mere chance, more pleasant for wildlife. By the nineteen seventies, the 'triumvirate' of ubiquitous species of birds in the 'inner city' of feral pigeon, starling and house sparrow had been augmented many times over. When my parents moved from a house little more than one mile from the Thames into a house perhaps three miles further away in the mid-seventies, the count of bird species increased from three or four (common crows should perhaps added to the 'triumvirate') to twenty three or four, commonly seen, either in the (very) small garden or in the nearby park.

And yet by the mid-nineties, that count was declining. No longer were some of the most frequent visitors to the bird table to be seen; no greenfinches with their distinctive yellow wing-flashes; no chaffinches; no goldfinches around their favourite food hopper, specially filled with Niger Seed, a species favourite; fewer and fewer jays hauling their 'peanuts on a rope' onto their branch; no fieldfares and no redwings, winter visitors for the apples on spikes thrust into the frozen ground and certainly no more green or pied woodpeckers or nuthatches; even the house sparrows and the house martins have all but disappeared and it has been many years since the hedgehogs came snuffling by the front door for their evening bowl of dogfood and the occasional earthworm, if one or two could be found after the rain.

Why this should be, I cannot fathom; nothing much has changed it seems, least of all, the ready supply of food.** Perhaps the rumoured poison left by railway tracks to curb the populations of urban foxes, as if road-kill were not already their biggest killer, is to blame; perhaps the semi-predatory habits of an ever growing population of magpies; perhaps people's habits have indeed changed whilst maintaining the appearance of stasis. We do not, at least, actively kill songbirds in the UK for food or sport anymore, loss of habitat, around the globe, is a far greater danger to wildlife now than the hunting habits of man.

Yet it was not always so. In recent history, we have lost the dodo, the passenger pigeon***, the moa, the elephant bird, the great auk to human hunters basking in ignorance of what the words 'sustainable resource' might actually mean. As soon as someone mentions that a bird or an animal might be good to eat, humans, until very recently, plundered that resource as though it were not somehow finite and fragile.

I was reminded of this while perusing, once more, my copy of  'Vanishing Eagles'; paintings by the artist Trevor Boyer of the many endangered eagles in the world, many of which were painted as part of an advertising campaign for 'Eagle Star Insurance' and, in particular, his majestic painting of the largest eagle of them all; Steller's Sea Eagle.

Georg Wilhelm Steller was an eighteenth century German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer (those were the days when being a polymath was marginally easier than today) who spent much of his time in Russia; he was a part of Vitus Bering's second expedition to Kamchatka**** which lies opposite Alaska, separated by the strait that bears Bering's name. Steller found a wealth of new species and, as a result, probably has more species named after him than any other naturalist; Steller's Sea Eagle*****, Steller's, or Spectacled, Cormorant (now extinct),  Steller's Jay (described after a brief landfall in Alaska), Steller's Sea Otter, Steller's Sea Lion, Steller's Sea Cow (now extinct), Gumboot chiton (Cryptochiton stelleri) and Hoary Mugwort (Artemisia stelleriana).

All of Steller's finds are now either extinct or endangered with the exception of the jay. In fact within 30 years of Steller's discovery of the Sea Cow, a much larger relative of the dugong and the manatee, and his remark that 'it tasted good', the animal had been hunted to extinction for its oil, meat and skin..

We congratulate ourselves in the west because we no longer hunt for food, merely for sport. We pride ourselves that we plunder no more, although one should perhaps try telling that to the fish sucked up by the giant vacuum cleaners that are our commercial trawlers. We are more responsible, we tell ourselves, and yet, invariably, we only adopt this attitude when a species is so close to extinction that any protection that we might give it merely postpones the inevitable such are the genetic bottlenecks we create.


* I grew up on a hill. A road led from the top to the bottom with side roads at varying levels all along its route. When it was redeveloped, the planners levelled part of the hill, digging deep to make a level surface on which to build. The result? Many of the houses' roofs are below the level of the roadway which runs atop the hill with scant feet between the houses and the foundations of the road. Upshot? Many of the houses get little or no natural light on the ground floor!
** Although the house martin's disappearance from the area was perhaps explicable; the practice of a few householders, which rapidly spread among others, of demolishing the nests under the eaves of their houses as soon as they were built.
*** There is perhaps no better illustration of just how precarious is any other species' survival than this North American pigeon. Estimates put its numbers as anywhere between 3 and 6 BILLION; a flock would take hours to fly overhead, so vast were their numbers. In the space of one hundred years, by 1900, every wild bird has been slaughtered to feed the growing cities of the eastern seaboard. The last bird died in a zoo in 1913.
**** The expedition, despite Steller's successes, was a disaster. Scurvy broke out amongst the crew and, as Wiki points out:
"Although Steller tried to treat the crew's growing scurvy epidemic with leaves and berries he had gathered, officers scorned his proposal. Steller and his assistant were some of the very few who did not suffer from the ailment. On the return journey, with only 12 members of the crew able to move and the rigging rapidly failing, the expedition was shipwrecked on what later became known as Bering Island. Almost half of the crew had perished from scurvy during the voyage. Steller nursed the survivors, including Bering, but the ageing captain could not be saved and died. The remaining men made camp with little food or water, a situation made only worse by frequent raids by arctic foxes."
There's truth in that old adage: 'Pay attention to your doctor and eat your fruit and veg!'
***** A couple of pictures of this most striking and awe-inspiring of eagles:

******* The 'tuppence' (two pre-decimal pennies) in the title refers to the song: 'Feed the birds (tuppence a bag)' from the Disney film of 'Mary Poppins'