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The Stradivarius of Birds There is some debate about how many violins made by Antonio Stradivari survive to this day, but seven hundred instruments is a pretty good guess. They vary greatly in value, but they can fetch up to $3.5 million at auction. There is no debate about how many Guam kingfishers survive to this day. As I write this, there are fifty-eight birds left alive. I have no idea what you’d have to pay to own one, but my guess is they are worthless. There is simply no economic demand for them. The Guam kingfisher is a beautiful bird with an incredible story. Properly called the Micronesian kingfisher, it was found only on the island of Guam. At some point during or immediately after World War II, a cargo ship accidentally brought some vicious stowaways to the kingfisher’s island paradise. The stowaways were brown tree snakes, a mildly venomous native of New Guinea. The tree snakes had no natural predators on the island and their population size went from a couple to perhaps ten thousand per square mile in just a few short years. And they ate almost every bird on the island, including our beautiful kingfishers. Let me give you an idea of how many snakes “ten thousand per square mile” really means: the common cause of power failures in Guam is the weight of brown tree snakes hanging on utility lines. By the time we got to the Guam kingfisher, there were only twenty-nine birds left. By 1990, we had built the population up to sixty and it has pretty 176 11 much stayed right around that number ever since. Today, eight of those birds live at the Saint Louis Zoo—three breeding pairs and two chicks (or about 12 percent of the world’s population). We don’t put them on display. They’re simply too valuable to us, even if they don’t have any value on the open market. A Stradivarius can go for upwards of $225,000 an ounce, and people really do pay that much! They are revered and much sought after. The Smithsonian keeps them in its collections, and we as taxpayers underwrite their care. They are considered art. As one enthusiast wrote, they dare to “challenge the ingenuity of God’s own designs.” If scarcity equates to value, then the Guam kingfisher should be even more valuable than a Stradivarius. There are fewer of them (and they weigh less, too). I’ll grant you that they are not considered art, nor do they challenge God’s own designs. On the other hand, they are exquisitely beautiful and they don’t merely challenge God’s own designs. They are God’s design. I think I understand why people care so much about a Stradivarius violin and its sweet song. What I don’t understand is why people don’t care just as much, if not more, for a Guam kingfisher and its plaintive call. In the end, I can’t figure out why people who care for one don’t automatically care for the other, but I think the problem might be that people just don’t know enough about the Guam kingfisher. Like so many things in our world, it’s not about the law of supply and demand so much as it is about creating demand through slick marketing. You can’t sell what people won’t buy, and zoos are, to a certain extent, like any other business. The good work that we do costs money. If we want people to visit, this place has to provide a fun, marketable experience. On the other hand, there is nothing fun about extinction. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to get people to fork over two bucks for a balloon than it is to get them to fork over two bucks to help save lemurs in Madagascar. Zoo directors have been impaled on the horn of this particular dilemma since the very beginning. We’re half serious conservationists (largely by personal preference) and half marketing weasels (largely because of our actual jobs). It is, at least for me, one of the most difficult parts of what I do. The whole thing was brought front and center for me shortly after I first started working in St. Louis. When I arrived, the first thing I did was take a careful look at...

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