NEW WORLDS - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 18

The legacy of these escapes lingers. Philip Hulme of Lincoln University, New Zealand, checked out
the likely origins of thirty-four plant species on a list of the top one hundred invasive species compiled
by the IUCN. He found that nineteen of them had initially escaped from botanical gardens. 19 Black
wattle, a species of acacia, began its spread across an estimated 6.5 million acres of South Africa this
way. The trumpet tree escaped the German-run Limbe Botanic Garden in Cameroon for the forests of
nearby Mount Cameroon, abetted by birds and bats that carried its fruit. Water hyacinth was dumped
over the fence at Bogor Gardens on Java and never looked back.
Domesticated animals also have a long history of being loaded onto colonial ships and then escaping
into the wild. With four legs to carry them over the horizon, they have often been spectacularly success-
ful colonists. Cattle and sheep were introduced widely by European powers as sources of food for hu-
man colonists, but some wandered off. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, there were huge migrating
herds of feral sheep from Mexico as far south as Santiago, Chile. By the following century, cattle grazed
North America from New England to Florida. By then, too, horses had been shipped to the Americas,
journeying on the first ships, including those of Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes. Many soon
ran wild.
The mid-nineteenth century saw a craze for taking a much wider variety of European species to
exotic lands, as well as taking exotics home. Many schemes were run by “acclimatization societies,” set
up from New York to New Zealand to London, where, in the early days, members laid plans for some
bizarre introductions to the green fields of England. On the agenda were wildebeest from Africa, bison
from America, and armadillos from South America. The leader of the Society for the Acclimatisation
of Animals in the UK, surgeon and zoologist Frank Buckland, who reputedly ate everything from moles
to bluebottles, drew up a menu for the inaugural dinner. It included bird's nest soup from Java, nerfs de
daim (a soup made from the sinews of axis deer from Sri Lanka), kangaroo steamer from Australia, cur-
ried chicken from Thailand, sea cucumbers from China, Syrian pig, Honduran turkey, Canadian goose,
sweet potatoes from Algeria, dried bananas from Reunion, and guava jelly from Dominica. 20 But des-
pite all the talk, and all the eating, introductions to England were few and the society was wound up in
1865. Its most notable legacy was the colonies of red-necked wallabies, which survived on Midlands
country estates into the twenty-first century before succumbing to one too many cold winters.
Exports worked better, not least because early colonists often pined for familiar landscapes with fa-
miliar flora and fauna, wishing to hunt familiar quarry and to spend their evenings dining on familiar
meals. In the Cape area of South Africa, European mountaineers are said to have taken packets of
European seeds with them on their climbs to sprinkle as they walked on Table Mountain and elsewhere,
with the hope of brightening up what they saw as dull scenery. Thomas Austin, the man who introduced
the European rabbit to Australia, was a member of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria.
So far as the colonists could see, there was plenty of room for introductions. New Zealand, as one
chronicle put it, had “few wild animals, few flowers, streams almost destitute of fish . . . with shy song-
birds and few game birds and no quadrupeds but lizards.” 21 So in came California quail, Egyptian geese,
Australian possums, Tasmanian trout, Arabian camels, American Chinook salmon, English red deer,
house sparrows, stoats, and ferrets. While many died off, others escaped their patrons and succeeded in
the wild. The common brushtail possum, shipped from Australia primarily for its fur, has grown bigger
than its cousin back home and now outnumbers humans seven to one.
The British took a small Indian mongoose called Herpestes javanicus to many places, employing its
lightning speed to kill snakes and chase down rats. It had fun in the Caribbean, eating chickens, devour-
ing innumerable turtle eggs, and attacking lambs, dogs, and cats. The French were up to similar tricks in