The more specifically you go looking for one particular bird, the greater the chance you will come home disappointed. Sometimes you know deep down that it simply isn’t going to happen. That was exactly how I felt a few days ago on a ferry. I was leaving the American mainland and crossing by boat to Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Boston. All for the sake of a bird I would not find that day.
I came across the heath hen through a book – a thick volume collecting seven years’ worth of magazine issues. Bound old pages with, on the cover in elegant lettering, The Nidiologist. A journal published from 1893 to 1897, devoted purely and entirely to nests. Inside the front cover was a bookplate reading ‘ex libris – Alfred O. Gross’, bearing an image of an intriguing bird with feathers standing jauntily upright along its head like rabbit ears: the heath hen itself.
Gross had specialised in the bird. He had worked on the very island I was heading to. With the book from his bookcase tucked under my arm, I stepped off the ferry and made my way to the place where the heath hen had last been seen. I found the exact spot and stood there for well over an hour – listening, waiting, looking around. Hopeless. Nearly a hundred years ago, the heath hen went extinct at that precise spot on the island. A metal monument commemorates the species.
Whether the island’s visitors will know what they are missing is another question
The heath hen I had only just come to know no longer existed. And yet I wanted to visit the place where it had lived. Gross had made it his life’s work to save the species. The once fairly common bird had in the end been found only on this island, and it was there that Gross – a subscriber to the nesting journal – lost many of his precious birds in the middle of the breeding season. A fierce wildfire raged through the area, but the females, brooding bravely, refused to abandon their nests. This proved to be the final blow after a succession of misfortunes, leading to a survey in which only four birds were spotted. All four were males. A year later, just one heath hen was seen. He was christened Booming Ben, named after the booming sound he produced with his throat sac as he searched for a female he would never find.
It must have been devastating for Gross. An entire species slipped through his fingers. What remains are old films in which you can see Gross holding the last bird, ringing it, and releasing it. Close to the spot where Booming Ben was last seen, the woodland has since made way for an airport. Where a bird went extinct, planes still take off and land. In a sense, the island is now more booming than it was when Booming Ben made his booming calls as part of his courtship display. Today it is tourism that is booming. But whether the island’s visitors will know what they are missing is another question. The information leaflet for Martha’s Vineyard says nothing about the bird or its monument. I saw only three joggers run past the monument; not one of them spared it a glance. The place felt exactly as lonely as you would expect somewhere to feel where something once went extinct. The heath must make do without its grouse.
Auke-Florian Hiemstra studied biology in Leiden and is conducting doctoral research into urban biodiversity at Naturalis Biodiversity Center. His research can be followed on Instagram @aukeflorian