The Romeo Error
When Romeo viewed his beloved Juliet seemingly deceased, his mistaken belief about her death led to dreadful outcomes. Out of grief, Romeo hastily consumed a vial of lethal poison. After Juliet awoke to realize Romeo’s error, she, too, took her own life. Whatever else Shakespeare’s play might embody, its tragic narrative admonishes us to default to the prospect of life over assumed death. Although empirical verification for death is standard protocol nowadays in human medicine, this same logic is not always applied to claims for bird extinction. I refer now to a recent proposal by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to write off as sure goners the Ivory-billed Woodpecker plus 10 other bird species.
Miscalculation about bird extinction also can lead to calamity. If we give up on rare birds prematurely, without evidence to justify their obituary, the conservation protections for lingering survivors may be withdrawn too soon. These lapses in judgment then lead us to abandon conservation out of a flawed notion that species disappeared when they haven’t. This phenomenon of rashly declaring a species extinct while it is still very much alive occurs frequently enough to be christened the “Romeo error.” Finding such lost species after
