Wildlife Window: Bring knowledge to wolf issue in Colorado - Loveland Reporter-Herald

Human history took a profoundly sad turn in 1647. Or maybe it was 1681. People didn’t keep records back then the way we do now.

This sad turn began when Portuguese sailors found the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. Word spread and sailors from other countries stopped at the Mascarenes. By the 1620s the Dutch had laid claim to the islands.

Those islands were the only place on this whole planet where lived some big flightless relatives of pigeons. Ornithologists have disagreed over the years whether the group included three or four species.

Two or three were called “solitaires”; the biggest and most famous was called “dodo.”

Some accounts claim the last living dodo was seen in 1647; other accounts extend the species’ survival another three decades.

The exact date when the dodo ceased to exist is slightly less relevant than the flesh-and-bone reality of the event.

Four centuries ago, humanity regarded Life on Earth as a buffet, at which table, allegorically, we were free to choose what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to discard.

Thirty years ago, I got a contract to write all 325 bird entries for an 11-volume encyclopedia, “Endangered Wildlife of the World.” I spent a year of my life researching, studying, contemplating and grappling with indefensible idiocy of human-caused extinction.

Checking the status of those birds, I find more than 80 of them have not been seen alive since I wrote about them.

When Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled into North America, elk lived across the entire country. By 1750 all elk had been eliminated east of the Mississippi River. By the early decades of the 1900s, Colorado hosted scarcely 2,000 elk.

During the interval, we lost Steller’s sea cow, sea mink, Atlantic gray whale, Labrador duck, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet and without any doubt species we never even knew existed because we didn’t know about them before they were gone.

Now, here we are in the 21st century and possessing a body of knowledge many times greater than everything learned in the previous millennium.

Yet we cannot find a way to use that knowledge to arrest that sad turn of four centuries ago. And so human-caused extinctions continue. It is hugely sad because we are imbalanced with the power to destroy with no power to create.

One would think this imbalance would confer an inarguable ethic to protect life.

This election year, Coloradans will be voting on a proposal to bring wolves back into the place we call home. A multifaceted subject with fiery passions in each, the subject will generate much bickering that will escalate as November nears.

No matter how the vote decides, the bickering will become a feud of political friction.

I plan to devote one column each month between now and November to clarify claims made by both proponents and detractors of this wolf proposition.

Forming and espousing an opinion on a subject of this stature come easily enough. Holding an opinion based on well handled knowledge presents a daunting challenge.

Let’s find out where knowledge takes us.

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Wildlife Window: Bring knowledge to wolf issue in Colorado - Loveland Reporter-Herald
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