The Rich Meals That Keep Wild Animals on the Menu
The biggest bird-hunting day of the year in the island nation of Samoa, it turns out, is not a great day to start searching for one of the world’s rarest birds. It is the eve of White Sunday, a national holiday during which many wild birds are eaten as a favorite traditional food, and 12-gauge shotguns have been ringing out in the forests for days. Even the most common birds are in hiding.
I have joined Gianluca Serra, an Italian ecologist and conservationist who specializes in creatures at the furthest edge of extinction, on a week-long quest for a bird that probably numbers no more than 200. We begin on an airy jungle ridge above a village called Uafato, in a hut designed to conceal us in shadows. Uafato is remote by the standards of Upolu, the more heavily populated of Samoa’s two main islands, and it has turned its communal forest into a no-hunting zone. The birds don’t appear to be aware of this fact. Apart from the ocean winds, which periodically drag in a squall so heavy that it triggers instant symptoms of the common cold, the landscape is remarkably still and silent.
I would like to tell you the name of the bird we are pursuing, but even that is not easy. In Samoan, it is called either manumea (which can mean “red bird” or “precious bird”) or manuma (“shy bird”). The first scientific report on the species was published in 1845, and the bird soon became known to English speakers as the tooth-billed pigeon, because its lower bill features bizarre sawlike serrations. Early naturalists also tossed around names such as “dodo pigeon” and “dodlet,” because it resembles a miniature version of the dodo, that famously flightless bird driven extinct in the 1600s. Because genetic testing has now shown that the tooth-billed pigeon really is related to the dodo, and because it, too, may be facing extinction, some are again calling it the “little dodo.”
Let us agree, here, to call it the manumea. By any name, it is a dark blue-green and chestnut pigeon, large enough to be mistaken for a chicken, with a hooked, outsize, sunset-colored beak, as though it had ambitions of becoming a parrot. It lives only in Samoa, where it is the national bird, found on the nation’s currency and in murals throughout the capital city of Apia. Hardly any Samoans have seen the living bird.
Ironically, on those rare occasions when a manumea reveals itself, the bird has presence. Since the 19th century, observers have described it as beautiful, dignified, special. Serra has had one clear sighting and sketched his impression immediately afterward. His drawing shows an electric-blue phantasm on the wing, more like an angel or a pegasus than any earthly being. He saw it from the same hiding spot we are using above Uafato.
After five and a half hours, we are still, with apologies to Samuel Beckett, waiting for dodo. “It’s a ghost species,” says Serra, whose swept-back silver hair and perpetually sunburned face give him the look of a European consul gone tropical. “How can we conserve something we can’t see?”
Giving up for the day, we descend to Uafato, whose white sand and palm trees are overseen by a tall, tumbling
