WSJ ran the following AP story today on an ending that made me sad for a long minute:

A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for 20 million years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat. The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.

Apart from the larger reason of the diminishment of the universe that happens when a species simply vanishes, I have a more personal reason: one of my most magical memories from my college days in India was seeing a pair of river dolphins (which I think are related to the baiji, and are similarly endangered), next to the boat's stern in which I was travelling in the Gangetic delta. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry since I can't write an elgy for the baiji myself:

For The Future

Planting trees early in spring, we make a place for birds to sing in time to come. How do we know? They are singing here now. There is no other guarantee that singing will ever be.

Coming to cottonwoods, an orange rockshelf, and in the gully an edging of stream willows,

I made camp and turned my mule loose to graze in the dark evening of the mountain.

Drowsed over the coals and my loneliness like an inner image went out and shook hands with the willows,

and running up the black scarp tugged the heavy moon up and over into light,

and on a hill-thorn of sage called with the coyotes and told ghost stories to a night circle of lizards. Tipping on its handle the Dipper unobtrusively poured out the night.

At dawn returning, wet to the hips with meetings, my loneliness woke me up and we merged refreshed into the breaking of camp and day.

Note: The day was spent in the tiresome business of buying stuff, swimming among the endless shoals of Christmas shoppers. There is no worse place to shrivel the human soul than the typical multi-chromatic American mall (which makes me wonder if Whitman would have been able to include it in his sprawling American catalouges?) To compensate, I am in bed reading poetry, and this poem made me remember my own multi-day hikes in the Appalachians. I should head back there one of these days, to howl with the foxes and wade through rhododendron "hells".