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A topical audio essay by a leading commentator from around the world.

Letter From...: 26/09/2009

26/09/2009

BBC World Service - Letter From..., 26/09/2009

How tourism in Antartica could inadvertently risk one of wildlife’s greatest spectacles.

A topical audio essay by a leading commentator from around the world

For decades now many of us have enjoyed seeing Sir David Attenborough in exotic locations around the world bringing his encounters and understanding of the living world to our homes. 

Sir David thinks the dodo’s ancestors were probably pigeons driven onto the Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius in a storm. Then over millennia, the offspring of these birds, living with an abundant food supply, with no large predators around evolved until they became the size and shape of turkeys; and with little need to take to the air their wings finally lost the ability to fly. 

In the 16th Century, men finally arrived on the island and in a matter of only forty years the dodo was dead. 

But these were not the only flightless birds to have become extinct in recent times. Less than 200 years ago the Great Auk, a two foot high relative of the guillemot met the same fate at the hands of man. 

Today, in more enlightened times this could never happen, but in Antarctica history could possibly repeat itself as tourism inadvertently poses a threat to one of wildlife’s greatest spectacles.

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