In 1836, as HMS Beagle cleared Ascension Island in the Atlantic on the final leg of its voyage, ship鈥檚 naturalist Charles Darwin began to organise the notes from his five-year adventure. When he got to his jottings from the Galapagos islands, he described how the Spaniards could tell which of the islands a giant tortoise had come from by looking at the shape of its scales, its size and the form of its body. Then he added a now forgotten sentence: 鈥淭he only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant asserted difference 鈥� between the wolf-like Fox of East and West Falkland Islds. 鈥� If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of Archipelagoes 鈥� will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of Species.鈥� It was his first, if rather vague, statement about the possibility of evolution.
Later, when Darwin got down to some serious thinking on the origin of species, he concentrated on the Galapagos. But the Falkland islands fox is well worth a footnote in the story of evolution.
IN THE 400 years since humans began tracking modern extinctions, only one species of canine has disappeared: the warrah, otherwise known as the Falkland islands fox or sometimes wolf. If HMS Beagle had not stopped off at the Galapagos islands, then the fox might have gone down in history as Charles Darwin鈥檚 muse. Instead, it became extinct, an enigmatic creature to the end.
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The Falklands archipelago consists of two large islands and several hundred smaller ones some 600 kilometres east of Argentina in the south Atlantic ocean. They were discovered and claimed for England by John Davis in 1592, but it was another century before Captain Strong and the crew of the Welfare landed there and encountered the warrah. One of the Welfare鈥檚 officers, a Mr Stimson, was the first to describe the animal. He thought it was a fox of some sort, albeit twice the size of an English one.
The warrah has always been puzzling. How did so large a carnivore end up on such remote islands? And was it a fox, or a wolf 鈥� or what? A local theory is that the warrah was descended from the culpeo, a South American fox. The Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego used culpeos as hunting dogs and often carried them aboard their canoes. Perhaps the Yaghan paddled to the Falklands and left a few dogs behind. Or maybe the animals drifted there on a stray canoe. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that people ever lived on or even visited the Falklands before the English. And the prospect of crossing the wild south Atlantic in an open boat with a wolf or even a part-domesticated fox in the bow is daunting. In any case, the animal must have been on the islands for quite some time to have evolved into the unique species it had clearly become by the time Darwin saw it. Darwin himself speculated that the foxes may have been carried there by wandering icebergs. The question remains unanswered.
As does the warrah鈥檚 identity. To Darwin it was Canis antarcticus, a member of the same genus as the domestic dog, the wolf and the coyote. The warrah certainly looked more like a North American coyote than a fox. Its back and sides were reddish-brown or yellowish with a sprinkling of black. And the frontal bones of its skull gave the animal a slightly bulbous look, a little like a golden retriever. In 1880, zoologist Thomas Huxley compared the skulls and teeth of all the dogs and concluded that the warrah and the coyote were closely related. Opinion among taxonomists about the animal鈥檚 pedigree gradually shifted towards the foxes, and in 1914 Oldfield Thomas moved it into the genus Dusicyon, with the culpeo and other South American foxes. Modern zoologists are still divided, and DNA studies of old museum specimens have so far failed to settle the matter.
When Commodore John Byron arrived in the Falklands in 1765, he sent some men to West Falkland to study the island鈥檚 south coast. When they tried to disembark, they were driven back into the boat 鈥渂y four creatures of great fierceness resembling wolves鈥�. The next day, Byron went ashore himself and saw nothing more alarming than a giant sea lion. But as he was dispatching this monster, a warrah came running towards him. He shot it. His crew killed five of them that day. 鈥淭hey were always called wolves by the ship鈥檚 company, but except for their size, and the shape of the tail, I think they bore a greater resemblance to a fox. They are as big as a mastiff and their fangs are remarkably long and sharp.鈥�
In 1813 Charles Barnard, captain of the American sealer Young Nanina, was marooned on Weddell island. Starving, he went 鈥渋n search of something to eat, and luckily procured some seal鈥檚 flesh, two foxes and three geese鈥�. As food, the warrah was a failure. 鈥淚 ate some of their flesh,鈥� Barnard wrote, 鈥渂ut it is so very strong that nothing but the sauce of extreme hunger could force it down.鈥�
In March 1833 and again the following March, the Beagle anchored at East Falkland. The place, wrote Darwin, was 鈥渄esolate and wretched鈥� covered by a peaty soil and wiry grass, of one monotonous brown colour鈥� The only quadruped native to the island is a large wolf-like fox鈥hich is common to both East and West Falkland. I have no doubt it is a peculiar species, and confined to this archipelago; because many sealers, gauchos and Indians who have visited these islands, all maintain that no such animal is found in any part of South America.鈥� And although the warrah鈥檚 population was healthy, Darwin predicted that 鈥渨ithin a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo鈥�.
Darwin saw warrahs only on East Falkland, but he heard reports that those of West Falkland were smaller, redder and darker, with finer fur. He had no chance to investigate before the Beagle headed off. When he reached the Galapagos 18 months later he found a host of animals that differed slightly from one island to the next, and which eventually persuaded him that species were not fixed. In the tortoises and finches of the Galapagos, he found abundant evidence 鈥渢hat natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good鈥�.
But Darwin dropped the warrah from his own scrutinising. He had no specimens to compare. And by the time he began to write On the Origin of Species he may have decided the two foxes were not different species after all. In 1844 Bartholomew Sulivan, second lieutenant on the Beagle voyage, wrote to Darwin: 鈥淚t is quite incorrect what we were told respecting the difference in the Foxes of the two Islands. They are the same both in size and colour. We have never been able to detect any difference.鈥� But Sulivan might have been wrong. When Oldfield Thomas measured skulls of the East and West Falkland animals, he concluded that they were two distinct species, Dusicyon darwini of East Falkland and Dusicyon australis of West Falkland, although he conceded 鈥渘o certainty is possible鈥�.
In any case, Darwin was right about one thing: the fox didn鈥檛 have much of a future. In 1836 there were plenty of them. In 1839 the American Fur Company sent a vessel to the islands for skins. Not long after, a bounty was introduced to protect settlers鈥� sheep. Little more was heard of warrahs until November 1868, when the London Zoological Society register records that keeper Adolphe LeComte had visited the Falklands, bringing back one 鈥淎ntarctic wolf鈥�.
Then in December 1870 the zoo took delivery of another 鈥渨olf鈥�, the surviving half of a pair sent by Mr Byng, the acting colonial secretary of the Falklands. With it came word from Byng that 鈥渁s Mr Darwin prophesied would probably be the case, the animal, formerly so common, has now become almost extinct on the Falklands, the depredations it commits upon the Sheep having rendered its extirpation necessary.鈥� The last warrah was killed at Shallow Bay, West Falkland in 1876.