The Last of the Heath Hens

Guest Blogger Dept.: It’s refreshing to learn that, along with all of his other passions, Robert Benchley nurtured an environmental awareness, as his report on the Heath Hen reminds us.

                                                                                      

WELL, THE HEATH HEN has gone! We might as well face it. The sole surviving specimen of Tympanudius cupido, which has been hopping and flitting about the island of Martha’s Vineyard for the past few years under the fascinated gaze of the ornithologists, has disappeared, and, it is feared, has died without issue. It was not enough that the world should be tottering, its reason going, its standards gone. The Heath Hen must be taken from us.

Robert Benchley
Drawing by Gluyas Williams

We knew that it would have to happen some time, but it is hard to believe that there will never be another Heath Hen. We didn’t mind so much when we were told that the Great Auk was extinct, or the Labrador Duck, or the Passenger Pigeon. Even the news about the Eskimo Curlews (although there is hope that there are still a few Eskimo Curlews left who are just playing possum or sulking) didn’t give us that sinking feeling that we experienced when we heard about the Heath Hen. No more Heath Hens – ever! Thank God, John James Audubon did not live to hear that gloomy pronouncement. (He missed it by just three-quarters of a century.)

It seems only yesterday that I saw the Heath Hen at Martha’s Vineyard. She looked as well then as she ever did, but she never was what you would call a robust bird. They did not keep her captive. She was too proud a spirit for that. 

 But on one occasion, when she had lighted for a chat with Mr. McKinstry, her observer (Mr. McKinstry was paid by the state or somebody just to hang around Martha’s Vineyard and keep tabs on the Heath Hen), they did attach two metal bands to her ankles, so that if she ever got lost or drunk, people would know that she was no ordinary grouse. She didn’t like the bands, and felt that when one is the only surviving member of a proud race of birds, any sensitive person should recognize one without leg bands. “I don’t like the idea of it, Joe,” she said to Mr. McKinstry on one occasion. “Either I am a true princess or I am not.”

One of the greatest sorrows in Mr. McKinstry’s professional career as Heath Hen-watcher was that he could never find a mate for Miss Helen. (He called her Miss Helen because it seemed to suit her best.) The More Game Birds Foundation was very anxious that Miss Helen marry, not only because it would have made the bleak winters on Martha’s Vineyard happier for her but because then, if things worked out right, she might not be the last of her breed in the world. And it was more or less up to Mr. McKinstry.

But either because there were no suitable mates for Miss Helen or because she rather fancied herself in her tragic role as the Last of the Heath Hens and deliberately snubbed any eligible suitors, the fact remains that she made no alliances and was always seen alone when she alighted on the farm of James Green every spring. It made it hard for Mr. McKinstry to make out his report, but there wasn’t really very much that he could do about it.

“I see the position it puts you in, Joe,” she said to him once, “but somehow I feel that I am in the right. I can’t take anybody that comes along, and you wouldn’t want me to. And if the Heath Hens are to go on, they must be the very best Heath Hens, worthy to carry on a fine tradition. And you don’t know this Martha’s Vineyard riffraff as I do.”

And with that (according to Mr. McKinstry) she waddled into a thicket and wasn’t seen again for weeks. Mr. McKinstry thinks that she spent a lot of her time in daydreaming and was really close at hand when she was supposed to be off on a tour of the island. It was also his idea that she had an independent income and kept to herself out of choice. When you are the Sole Surviving Specimen, you have a certain dignity to maintain.

And now she is gone. Spring has broken through again and no Heath Hen has come to James Green’s farm. Somewhere on the hard-bitten ground of Martha’s Vineyard Miss Helen lies in state, with two metal bands about her patrician ankles, and her proud spirit wings its way to the home of all those other Heath Hens who went before. We need sound no mournful tone for Miss Helen, for she kept her name unsullied to the end and her fame is secure on the records of ornithological royalty. But what, what is to become of Mr. McKinstry?

– Robert Benchley, The New Yorker, 6 May 1933; collected in Chips Off the Old Benchley, Harper Bros., NY, 1949