The 'travel issue' of the TLS that goes to press tomorrow is, as you'd expect, not the normal summer holiday guide. Our TLS-travellers fabricate absurd histories for other peoples (Arthur Evans in Crete); or they love Florence but hate the Florentines (almost every nothern European in 1900); or they visit Mauritius and kill all the dodos; and many more tales of bad trips besides.
The dodo is sometimes seen as an especially baleful example of travelling man's destruction of non-travelling non-man. But this famously extinct creature, whose last relics are pored at every day by Alice-in-Wonderland tourists in Oxford's Natural History Museum, is, instead, one of very many.
Most holidaying bird-lovers have their own favourites on their lists - or rather no longer on their lists. A decade ago OUP published a miserably titled and magnificently illustrated book, Extinct Birds, in which Errol Fuller set out the full picture of the destruction, including one of the most horrific and absurd losses, one that has always stuck in my own mind and which occurred in the last thirty years.
The Atitlan Grebe can only be imagined now. It was part of my imaginings this morning because I woke up to a particularly magnificent display on the Thames by its more sucessful Great Crested cousin.
The black-and-white flightless Aitilan was last seen in 1987. It was extinguished by Pan Am (now, appropriately enough, an extinct airline), holidaying fishermen who wanted bigger fish, holidaying souvenir-seekers who wanted more rush mats and, as is so often the way, by flying grebe tourists who saw a better life on a high Guatemalan lake than they had at home.
All grebes are amazing creatures, as I once tried to explain in the TLS myself. They have more feathers than any other birds. Many of them eat their feathers so that their stomachs can be constantly scoured of the disgusting other stuff they eat. Both sexes carry their young on their back. Indeed both sexes share almost all child-care functions - as is vigorously visible on the Thames.
The Atitlán Grebe was first described in 1929 by the American ornithilogist Ludlow Griscom. The population seems never to have been high and dropped from about 200 to 80 as a result of competition and predation by large-mouth bass introduced into the lake in 1960 to attract Pan Am's frequent flying fishermen.
Atitlan numbers recovered to a high of 232 in 1975 when the bass, which fed off the grebes' favourite crabs, were themselves reduced by rod and line. But the loss of breeding sites to mat-making reed-cutters and other tourism development set them back. So did the murder of a government game warden in 1982 and falling lake levels following an earthquake.
Both man and nature, it seemed, were against the Atitlan Grebe. Its pied-bill cousins, smaller but able to fly, arrived for a campaign of vigorous inter-breeding. In 1980 there were fifty left on the mile-high Lake Atitlan which gave the bird its name. In 1983 there were 32. In 1987 another name was added to the Dodo-list.
Some eighty bird species have expired since the seventeenth century when the Mauritius remains headed off for Oxford and a few travellers started noticing. I don't suppose tourism can be blamed for every loss. Before I read further into OUP's Extinct Birds, there are just a few more details to be fixed on the TLS travel issue that will be winging its way to subscribers on Wednesday.
