It seems like many people think of extinction as an event from far in the past or only in some distant place. Perhaps the feeling is that the people who let the species slip away forever must not have been observant of the declines that led to the dark end of a unique legacy of life on Earth.

That was not the case with the heath hen.

The tragic loss of the heath hen was pondered a few weeks ago as the Bowdoin College Library and Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum co-sponsored the first public screening of film shot nearly 90 years ago by famed Bowdoin professor and ornithologist Alfred Gross. After graduating from Harvard, Gross became a professor at Bowdoin in 1913 and continued in that position for 40 years until retirement in 1953. Gross was amazingly active as a researcher, with projects across the country and internationally. He published hundreds of scientific papers, books, and articles.

Perhaps one of his most well known research projects was his study of the last population of the heath hen on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The heath hen was, depending on your perspective, either a subspecies of or a close relation to what we know as the greater prairie chicken. That bird is, as its name suggests, a species of mid-western prairies that occurs no closer to us than Illinois and Wisconsin. Its populations are now also in trouble, having been lost from most of the species’ historic distribution.

The exact range of the heath hen has been difficult to piece together for the sad reason that it was quickly decimated in the early years of the colonization of the East Coast by European settlers. Early historical accounts mention it and its abundance as an easy food source. In fact, heath hens were so common around Boston and other parts of eastern Massachusetts that they were not to be fed to the poor more than a few times a week. From these various historical sources, the range of heath hen was thought to have extended from southern Maine to the Carolinas. Sadly, by 1870 they were not known to exist anywhere but on Martha’s Vineyard, off Massachusetts.

Professor Gross became involved in research to try to save the birds apparently beginning in the 1920s; he published the authoritative work on the subject in 1928. He continued his research and writing about the birds and, it seems, wanted to try to use the new technology of film to document and perhaps increase public awareness and support for conservation efforts. In the spring of 1928, he traveled to Martha’s Vineyard with his student, Olin Sewall Pettingill (who himself became a famous ornithologist and film maker, and who had a Maine connection) and famed naturalist and writer Thornton Burgess. They filmed and photographed the last three remaining male heath hens as they displayed for a mate that no longer existed—the females had already gone extinct. Gross returned in April of 1931 and filmed the banding of the last surviving heath hen. That trip was the last time that he ever saw a heath hen. The local man who lived near where the bird lived reported seeing it the following spring and then it disappeared for good. The heath hen became extinct in 1932.

The films that Gross had taken on these trips had never been shown and were found in storage by one of his descendants who donated them to the Bowdoin College Library. The restored film can now be seen online at this link: https://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/mss/aogg.shtml Although the film does not have a happy ending, it is worth watching in honor of the species, and to help ensure extinctions become a thing of the past.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of “Birder’s Conservation Handbook”. His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the best-selling book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” and the recently published “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao” from Cornell Press.