Thanks for getting off your hands. Part 2 sometime late this week (I’ve spent way too much time trolling polls and news and whatnot dealing with the election). The plan is for Part 2 sometime late this week (I hope Thursday). Before Part 2 is posted I plan on posting a fishing report from this past Saturday and a little profile on a fly fishing author.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to forgo the fancy cuisine and stick with the hot dogs (please, don’t tell me the ingredients) in my neck of the homogeneity restaurant world .

PS – send me the PDF (there’s no such thing as too much reading material, right?).

Ok, ok, I’ve been sitting on my hands for a few days waiting for part deux but patience has run. I’ll bite.

The examples you give are varied and good. The passenger pigeon in particular. The loss of so many million didn’t make a difference? Trouble is we don’t know. By the time people actually started to look at ecosystem function, biodiversity and extinction the poor pigeon was long gone. We don’t know what changed after because there is no record of before and it is difficult to imagine a species, in such numbers, not having a major role. There is a good paper on commonness and extinction (Gaston, K. J. & Fuller, A. Commonness, population depletions and conservation biology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 23, No 1, pages 14-19).  I can send you the .pdf if you are interested and can’t get direct access.

And the loss of the little, inconsequential Bonneville CT? Here’s an analogy. You live on a street. A very diverse street. It has peoples from all continents and of all ages from newborn to nonagenarian. There are assorted restaurants, Chinese, Italian, Swedish, Indian, Thai and the inevitable Starbucks among others. You exterminate the Indians. No loss, plenty of other places to choose from. But one evening you fancy a Malai Gosht. Rich, sticky and pungent. No go. No Indian restaurant. A bit of your diversity has vanished too. You could make it yourself (though it wouldn’t be the same) but the Indian grocery attached to the restaurant has gone with the Indians. Hey ho. You can live without it. Trouble is the Chinese and Thai restaurant relied on the Indians for some of the key ingredients in their dishes. Consequently their menus contract – become less diverse. Their restaurants aren’t as attractive any more and their clientele fewer. They start to live on the ragged edge, still present and, without close scrutiny, outwardly the same as they have always been but now a shimmer away from collapse. One little nudge and they go, in turn weakening the connections they have made. After awhile all that is left is Starbucks.

Flocks of passenger pigeons a mile wide and 300 miles long. Just thinking about it I feel the loss of that spectacle.