CHAPTER XIII

THE THING WITH FEATHERS

Homo sapiens

“Futurology has never been a very respectable field of inquiry,” the
author Jonathan Schell has written. With this caveat in mind, I’ve set out
for the Institute for Conservation Research, an outpost of the San Diego
Zoo thirty miles north of the city. The drive to the institute leads past
several golf courses, a winery, and an ostrich farm. When I arrive, the
place is hushed, like a hospital. Marlys Houck, a researcher who
specializes in tissue culture, leads me down a long corridor into a
windowless room. She pulls on a pair of what look like heavy-duty oven
mitts and pries the lid off a large metal tank. A ghostly vapor rises from
the opening.
At the bottom of the tank is a pool of liquid nitrogen, temperature
minus 320 degrees. Suspended above the pool are boxes of little plastic
vials. The boxes are stacked in towers, and the vials arranged upright, like
pegs, each in its own slot. Houck locates the box she is looking for and
counts over several rows, then down. She takes out two of the vials and
places them before me on a steel table. “There they are,” she says.
Inside the vials is pretty much all that’s left of the poouli, or black- faced honeycreeper, a chunky bird with a sweet face and a cream-colored chest that lived on Maui. The poouli was once described to me as “the
most beautiful not particularly beautiful bird in the world,” and probably
it went extinct a year or two after the San Diego Zoo and the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service made a last-ditch effort to save it, in the autumn of 2004.
At that point, a mere three individuals were known to exist, and the idea
was to capture and breed them. But just one bird allowed itself to be
netted. It had been thought to be female, but turned out to be male, a
development that made Fish and Wildlife Service scientists suspect that
only one sex of po`ouli was left. When the captive bird died, the day after