David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

In 1938 an English sportsman found an eight-year-old boy living with a leopard and her cubs in the north Cachar Hills of India. The boy, who had been carried off by the leopard five years earlier, was returned to his family of peasant farmers. Although nearly blind, he could identify different individuals and objects by his extremely well-developed sense of smell.

When she was seven years old, Misha’s mother and father were seized by Nazis. She was hidden in a safe house, but, worried that she might be turned over the Germans, she ran off and lived in the wild. For the next four years, as World War II raged, Defonesca wandered through Europe, covering more than 3,000 miles. During this time she lived on raw berries, raw meat and food stolen from farmhouses. On occasion, she lived with packs of wolves. She later recalled: ‘In all my travels, the only time I ever slept deeply was when I was with wolves… The days with my wolf family multiplied. I have no idea how many months I spent with them, but I wanted it to last forever — it was far better than returning to the world of my own kind… Those were the most beautiful days I had ever experienced.’

In September, 1960, Basque poet Jean Claude Armen discovered and observed a boy who was approximately eight years old living with a herd of gazelles in the desert regions of the Western Sahara. For two months Armen studied the boy, whom he speculated was the orphaned child of some nomadic Saharan Moorish family. The boy travelled on all fours, grazed on grass dug roots, and seemed to be thoroughly accepted by the gazelles as a member of the herd. Since the boy appeared happy, Armen left him with his gazelle family. American soldiers attempted to capture the boy in 1966 and 1970, but without success.

This boy was taken to the Catholic mission at Sultanpur, a town in Punjab, India, by a man who allegedly had found him living in a forest with wolves. The boy, estimated to be three or four years old at the time, was covered with matted hair and had calluses on his elbows, palms, and knees. According to Father Joseph de Souza, Shamdeo learned to stand upright in five months, and within two years he was doing chores around the mission. He communicated by sign language. Father Joseph also noted that the boy no longer caught and ate live chickens, but he was still drawn by the scent of blood. That Shamdeo actually lived with wolves has not been authenticated.

In 1991, Ugandan villagers treed and captured a little boy living with a pack of monkeys. One of the villagers identified the child as John Ssebunya, who had fled the village three years earlier when his father had murdered his mother and then disappeared. John was adopted by Paul and Molly Wasswa, who ran an orphanage. Several experts who studied John were convinced that John really had lived with monkeys. When left with a group of monkeys, he approached them from the side with open palms in classic simian fashion. He also had an unusual lopsided gait and pulled his lips back when he smiled. He tended to greet people with a powerful hug, the way that monkeys greet each other. After some time in the orphanage, John learned to talk and to sing. In 1999, he visited Great Britain as part of the Pearl of Africa Children’s Choir. That same year, he was the subject of a BBC documentary, Living Proof .

In 1996, a boy about two years of age was found by hunters living with chimps in the Folgore forest in Nigeria. He was taken to the Maliki Torrey children’s home where the staff named him Bello. Mentally and physically disabled, with a misshapen forehead, sloping right shoulder and protruding chest, he was apparently abandoned by his parents, members of the nomadic Fulari tribe. When he first arrived at the home, Bello walked like a chimp, moving on his hind legs and dragging his feet on the ground. As of 2002, he still could not speak, but made chimp-like noises.

The great auk was a large, flightless bird which lived in the Arctic regions of the North Atlantic. It was the first bird known as a ‘penguin’ and, when explorers from the northern hemisphere came across the similar but unrelated species in the Antarctic, they transferred the name to the new bird. The last recorded breeding place of the great auk was Eldey Island, off the coast of Iceland. At the beginning of June 1844, three men, part of an expedition funded by an Icelandic bird collector called Carl Siemsen, landed on the island. They found and killed two auks among other birds gathered on the island’s cliffs and took away an egg, which was later sold to an apothecary in Rykjavik for £9. There has since been no confirmed sighting of a great auk on Eldey Island or anywhere else.

A small black and white duck indigenous to North America, the Labrador was considered to be a strong and hardy species, and its decline is still mysterious. The duck bred on the east coast of Canada but flew as far south as Philadelphia in the summer. Hunting no doubt contributed to its demise. The last reported Labrador duck was shot down over Long Island in 1872.

A large brown hawk with a black head and grey striped wings, the caracara was last seen alive and collected by R. H. Beck in 1900. One of the few cases where a bird was deliberately exterminated, the caracara was poisoned and shot by goatherds, who thought it was killing the kids in their herds.

These brownish-gray pigeons were once so numerous that a passing flock could darken the sky for days. As recently as 1810, an estimated 2 billion pigeons were sighted in one flock. But massive hunting by settlers and a century of forest destruction eliminated the passenger and its native forest habitat. In 1869, 7,500,000 pigeons were captured in a single nesting raid. In 1909, a $1,500 reward was offered for a live nesting pair, but no one could be found. Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons, died of old age in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.

The striking green and yellow Carolina parakeet was once common in the forests of the eastern and southern US, but because of the widespread crop destruction it caused, farmers hunted the bird to extinction. The last Carolina parakeet, an old male named Incas, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. The zoo’s general manager believed it died of grief over the loss of Lady Jane, its mate of 30 years, the previous summer.

An east coast US relative of the prairie chicken, the heath hen was once so common around Boston that servants sometimes stipulated before accepting employment that heath hen not be served to them more than a few times a week. But the bird was hunted to extinction, and the last heath hen, alone since December 1928, passed away in Martha’s Vineyard at the age of eight, after the harsh winter 1932.

Known only from two specimens and one sighting, Euler’s flycatcher was an 8½-inch olive and dusky yellow bird. The flycatcher was believed by James Bond (the authority of Caribbean birds, not Ian Fleming’s 007) to have perished on Jamaica in 1955 during Hurricane Janet.

This sparrow was once common in the marshes of Merritt Island, Florida, and along the nearby St John’s River. In the 1960s, Merritt Island was flooded to deal with the mosquito problem at the Kennedy Space Center, while the marshes along the St John’s were drained for highway construction. Pesticides and pollution also contributed to the bird’s demise. In 1977, the last five dusky seaside sparrows were captured. Unfortunately, they were all male, with no female to perpetuate the species. The five were relocated to Disney World’s Discovery Island to live out their last days. The last one, an aged male blind in one eye, named Orange Band, died ten years later.