Wall of the Dead
Naturalists who go out to find new birds or butterflies, too often do not return.
by Richard Conniff
I was just now listening to an audiobook of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, brilliantly narrated by the actor Anthony Heald. As the whaleboat drives its first harpoon into its prey, Melville writes, the line to which it is attached trails back through the boat, coiling snake-like over the arms and around the necks of the oarsmen. The line seethes out as the whale makes its run. The boat pitches unpredictably from side to side. It takes only one wrong move to be plucked out and lost at sea.
Melville comments:
But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
It took me back to an old interest in how field naturalists too often die at their work. It started a while back as I was researching my book The Species Seekers, when I noticed that many of the people who went out in search of unknown birds, butterflies, and other species never returned. Some died in relatively ordinary shipwrecks, car accidents, or plane crashes, or of dreadful tropical diseases. Others, more exotically, were ritually beheaded, swept away by rogue waves, gored by a wild buffalo.
These cases began to accumulate in a research folder, and eventually I included a brief listing at the end of the book, not quite 100 names, with dates, brief details of their research, and what killed them in the course of their field work:
Smithwick, Richard P. (1887–1909), American ornithologist, smothered to death while digging his way into a soft bank to raid a Belted Kingfisher nest, found “with his feet only projecting through the sand,” age 22, in Virginia.
The names continued to accumulate after the book came out, and I soon posted a more extensive “Wall of the Dead: A Memorial to Fallen Naturalists” on my Strange Behaviors blog, with a brief rationale: “We go to great lengths commemorating soldiers who have died fighting wars for their countries. Why not do the same for the naturalists who still sometimes give up everything in the effort to understand life?”
Other naturalists began sending me names of deceased researchers who belonged on the list. Then I wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times on “Dying for Discovery,” and the list quickly grew to hundreds of the mostly forgotten dead. It’s been going for a dozen or more years now, and I’ve lost count of how many names the list now includes. Three new ones came in just today. (New to me, that is, though the deaths occurred early in the 20th century.)
Some of the deaths seem almost idyllic: A beetle specialist who suffered a heart attack while doing field work and was found seated under a tree with his collecting equipment in his hands, so peacefully that his colleagues mistook it at first for sleep. Others are savage: A 29-year-old marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, who was attacked by a leopard seal while snorkeling and dragged 200 feet underwater.
The naturalists themselves seem fascinated with these deaths partly as cautionary tales: Take you malaria meds, wear good boots, try to avoid gun battles. But the deaths sometimes seem so absurdly random, so impossible to prepare for, as if the nature they have chosen to study is playing a practical joke on them: The ichthyologist who wore the proper boots, which filled with water when her boat went over, anchoring her to the bottom. The herpetologist exploring for reptiles in India’s Western Ghats who suffered a minor slip on a trail and landed with a bamboo spike through his eye. The ornithologist on his honeymoon who was climbing back down a tree after collecting a bird’s nest when he became caught in his climbing rope and strangled as his helpless bride looked on.
Naturalists go about their work knowing in some back corner of the minds that they could die in the field. David Boynton (1945-2007), for instance, was a leading naturalist in the wild, vertiginous landscapes of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. “There is a fern that grows in thick mats along these ridges,” he once told a journalist, “and I know from personal experience that you can try to push your way through this green layer and wind up stepping off into air.” He died a few years later in just such a fall from a 300-foot-high cliff. Knowing and preparing, while essential, are no guarantee against “the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”
The names come in from people remembering researchers who were their close friends, for the simple human purpose of honoring their memory. They come in to commemorate great names within the limited world of a scientific specialty. What makes the deaths especially touching for me is the outside world’s sense of their futility. It’s often said that people who discover and describe new species write their papers for an audience of maybe seven other people in the world who might understand or care about it. Would you risk your life to be the first to discover a species of frog, or a jewel beetle?
“Why do they do it?” readers wonder, and there are lots of more or less practical answers I could offer. But as I was writing The Species Seekers, an impractical answer seemed to me to fit best. It came from a nineteenth-century specialist in marine mollusks named William T. Dall, age 19. His work pursuing new species along the coast of Alaska required him, among other adventures, to make a long frigid trip in a sealskin dory across open water, trying to avoid being crushed by waves loaded with cakes of ice.
In an 1866 letter home to his family, he tried to explain why he did it, and why he did it for mollusks in particular: “There is a singular delight,” he wrote, “in taking these delicate and almost microscopic animals and putting them under a strong glass, seeing the tiny heart beat, and blood circulate and gills expand, counting the muscles and blood vessels and almost the tiny disks that form the blood and to know that you are the first that has penetrated these mysteries and are perhaps the only one who ever will, and that all your notes and drawings and observations are so much solid knowledge added to the power and grace and beauty of the Infinite.”
It’s a passage this still brings tears to my eyes. But for me the best thing about Dall is that he isn’t on my “Wall of the Dead.” By extraordinary luck, he completed his various expeditions without having been caught in life’s whale-lines, ultimately describing 5427 new species, and winning the acclaim of his scientific colleagues. After a long, successful career, Dall died at home, age 81.