For someone who dislikes being cold—indeed, disapproves of it, on a moral level—it is with perplexity that I explain my fascination with Patagonia. Remote, wind-scoured Patagonia, an earth flat and low beneath an epic weight of sky. Loping to the horizon before exploding into its full power, leaping into mountains. Mix Patagonia fever with a foolish passion for remotest islands, and it’s clear where my heart lies: las Islas Malvinas, the Falkland Islands. Until we can travel there in real life, let’s puzzle together over a mystery from the islands’ past: the Falkland Islands wolf.
Its various names—Antarctic wolf, Falkland Islands fox, Falkland islands dog, and warrah, a corruption of aguara, the Argentinean term for “fox”—signal a fundamental confusion about the species’ place among the canids. The original French settlers of the islands named it loup-renard, or “wolf-fox: so called, because it digs itself an earth and because its tail is longer and more fully furnished with hair than that of a wolf… It is the size of a dog, and also barks like one, but weakly.” Charles Darwin, on his 1834 voyage through the island, assigned it the taxonomy Canis antarcticus, squarely among the domestic dogs, wolves and coyotes.
Perhaps more mysterious than who they were is the question of where they came from. Their existence in utter isolation, with no related species, gave rise to the following theories:
- Brought as domesticated pets by prehistoric settlers, the original population on South America later becoming extinct
- Crossed from South America by a long-lapsed land bridge
- Survived from a distant pre-glacial past when forests, and other woodland species, covered the islands
However mysterious their beginning, the wolves’ end is brutally concise. Darwin foresaw it, writing that “[w]ithin a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth.” Between the fur trappers on East Falkland and the sheep ranchers on West Falkland, death came quickly. A farmer with a chunk of meat in his hand could easily lure a wolf to arm’s length—and the knife he held in the other hand. This fatal tame trust, common in species that have evolved in an environment free from natural predators, is commemorated in their name: the currently accepted binomial Dusicyon antarcticus means “foolish dog of the south.”
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Bonus! The second in our series of extinct species trading cards and greeting cards. Check back often to collect them all… Download the Falkland Islands wolf trading card. |
were driven to extinction in the twentieth century. With only a single island to call home, the Bali tiger was particularly vulnerable to habitat destruction. As population pressures deforested the landscape, a craze for destination hunting among wealthy Europeans sealed the tigers’ fate. The last known example, an adult female, was shot in September 1937. Unconfirmed sightings were reported over the next decades, but whatever their truth, Bali’s forests were soon too small and fragmented to support even a solitary tiger.
