A Bat's End

It is the evening of 26 August 2009 on Christmas Island. The last known pipistrelle emerges from its daytime shelter. Scientists, desperate about its conservation, set up an elaborate maze of netting to try to catch it. It is a forlorn and futile exercise – even if captured, there is little future in just one bat. But the bat evades the trap easily, and continues foraging. It is not recorded again that night, and not at all the next night. The bat is never again recorded. The scientists search all nearby areas over the following nights. It has gone. There are no more bats. Its corpse is not--will never be--found. It is the silent, unobtrusive death of the last individual of a species. It is extinction; an unusual extinction in that it was both witnessed and its timing precise, and in that its fate was predicted--and seen--with hindsight, its pathway to that destiny was like watching in slow motion the frightening inexorability of a car crash.

This book is about that bat; it is about those scientists; it is about that island; but mostly it is an attempt to understand that extinction. It is a story with many components and many voices.