Extinct Coastal Bird Literally a Sitting Duck
By Suzanne Bohan, Contra Costa Times
March 23, 2008
It’s California’s archaeological equivalent of the dodo bird, and the fate of this all-butforgotten flightless duck that disappeared 2,500 years ago is reviving debate over the
theory that prehistoric hunters drove to extinction woolly mammoths, camels, giant sloths
and other large creatures that once roamed the North American continent, according to
a new study.
The legacy of this land-bound bird also serves to remind modern humans how best to
protect imperiled species still in our midst, added Brian Codding, an archaeology Ph.D.
student at Stanford University who contributed to the study published March 12 in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study describes solid evidence that prehistoric people, like their modern
counterparts, pushed other species over the brink, said Terry Jones, the lead author and
an anthropologist with California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo.
“We have the best archaeological record for a human-caused extinction in North
America,” Jones said.
The bird, about the size of a goose, was a masterful underwater swimmer but had
stumps for wings and couldn’t fly. It’s called Chendytes, and fossilized bones of the
flightless duck found in 14 ancient middens that dot the coast between Southern
California and into southern Oregon show that humans began hunting the bird nearly
12,000 years ago.
Because Chendytes couldn’t flee by taking flight, it nested on rocky outcroppings,
offshore rocks and coastal islands, where it was safe from predators. But when
indigenous Californians began building seaworthy vessels about 12,000 years ago, they
soon followed the birds to their nesting grounds, easily capturing the ducks and their
eggs, explained Jones.
“They could have just grabbed them, because they’re flightless,” Jones said. “They were
the epitome of sitting ducks.”
Flightless birds rarely fare well in the face of human encounters.
On the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, the last of the flightless dodo birds died about a
century after sailors first arrived in 1561.
Chendytes were meaty birds, yielding large drumsticks that undoubtedly appealed to the
natives, according to the California State Parks Web site, describing a 5,700-year-old
midden north of Santa Cruz that held a large collection of Chendytes bones.
Indigenous Californians would toss the remains of the bird into middens — the
equivalent of trash heaps. Along with Chendytes bones, archaeologists have found
remains of other meals, like shells of mussels, barnacles, abalone and rock oysters.
The same middens were used for thousands of years by native populations, and those
that remain provide an invaluable archaeological record of daily life for the state’s first
inhabitants.
All of the middens studied had Chendytes bones, including the oldest of the group, an
11,000-year-old debris pile in the Channel Islands. Remnants of the flightless bird were
found in its lowest layer, showing native inhabitants hunted the bird as far back as the
record reveals.
Jones, along with other colleagues, tracked the steady decline of Chendytes bones in
the middens, however, until they no longer appeared about 2,500 years ago, according
to recent radiocarbon dating Jones and others conducted. Their radiocarbon dating work
also moved the estimated extinction date of the flightless duck up 1,300 years over
previous estimates, Jones noted.
That’s significant, he explained, because the midden record shows that the vulnerable
Chendytes, which was virtually helpless against hunters and the dogs that sometimes
accompanied them, co-existed with humans for at least 8,000 years before an
expanding native population finally pushed the duck over the abyss into extinction.
A prevailing hypothesis among paleontologists, which has trickled down into common
knowledge, holds that ancient hunters rapidly killed off many animal species in North
America.
It’s called the “Pleistocene overkill” hypothesis, and it holds that shortly after ancient
hunters arrived in North America about 13,000 years ago, they engaged in a “prehistoric
blitzkrieg” that drove to extinction in less than 1,000 years at least 35 species of animals,
including the mastodon, woolly mammoth, an ancient beaver the size of a black bear
and a giant sloth as tall as a giraffe, as well as smaller herbivores.
But since the easily-captured Chendytes persisted for at least 8,000 years before
succumbing to overhunting, that raises serious doubts for Jones and others as to
whether prehistoric humans had the wherewithal to bring down any species in a
thousand years or less.
This new study on Chendytes, the most comprehensive yet on the flightless bird,
“suggests that to wipe out a species, it would have to take some time,” said Jones.
While that may sound like a fine point to those dismayed at humanity’s seemingly hardwired proclivity to wantonly exploit other species until they reach their demise, the
conclusion of the study points to the crucial role of climate change in ushering in the
extinction of these species, Jones said.
“I’m fairly certain that climate-change events provide a better explanation for what we
see,” he said.
The extinction of many of these species coincided with the ending of an ice age and the
warming of global temperatures that could have led to heat stress, alterations in plant
communities and other changes threatening the ability of these animals to survive.
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