Arrears

Census of Year 212

A point count is ten minutes of standing still. You arrive before light, you let the disturbance of your arrival drain out of the forest, and then for ten minutes you write down everything you hear. The rule is that you may not move your feet. My predecessor said the discipline of the count is the discipline of accepting that you will miss things, and that missing them consistently is worth more to the Survey than catching them brilliantly now and then.

I am the fourth Censor of the Lowland Fragment. Every tenth year I walk the forty-one stations my three predecessors walked, stand where they stood, and count. Halvorsen does the ferns. The mosses go to whoever can be spared. Nobody has ever counted the flies.

What I produce is one line of the Ledger. The Ledger has two columns: what the Lowland holds, and what it can keep.

The ships made land in Year 0, and the rats came with us, the way they always have. By Year 31 four-fifths of the lowland forest was under grain, and nobody called that a debt; it was called the Improvement. The Survey was founded in Year 60 to establish what the Improvement had cost, and its first and least welcome discovery was that the cost had not yet been incurred. The forest that remained was still full. It was fuller than it could stay.

The arithmetic is old, older than the ships. Count the species on islands of different sizes and richness rises with area on roughly a quarter power, which has the consequence that a fifth of a forest keeps about two-thirds of its species. At the Founding the Lowland held one thousand nine hundred and fourteen described endemic species. A fifth of its forest can keep about one thousand two hundred and eighty. The difference fell due the day the clearing stopped, and it has been being paid ever since.

Not at once. A species does not die of a map. It dies of a dry decade, a blight year, a nest predated once too often — the ordinary accidents that a large population absorbs and a small one does not. So the debt is paid in instalments, each one an accident, none of them foreseeable, their sum foreseeable to within a handful. The Survey’s word for this is relaxation. As of this census the Lowland’s standing debt is two hundred and seventy-three species, and it is paying about twelve a decade, and slowing, because the payment is always proportional to what remains.

The Ledger does not say which species. It says how many. This is the thing nobody outside the Survey has ever been willing to hear. The debt is not owed by the dead. It is walking around in the forest now, calling at dawn, setting seed, feeding its young, indistinguishable from the solvent.

Census of Year 222

The member for the eastern shelf came out to see me in the field, which I took for a courtesy until I understood it was an ambush.

“You’re carrying my district as insolvent,” he said, “and I’ve got mistfinches nesting in the roof of the members’ bar. My constituents can’t hang out washing without a mistfinch sitting on the line. Whatever your model thinks it’s owed, it plainly isn’t them. So name what it is owed, we’ll fund that, and you can stop publishing a number that reads like a famine notice.”

I told him what I tell everyone, which is the story of the Schedule. In Year 71 the Survey did exactly what he was asking. It published the Schedule of Anticipated Losses: every endemic, ranked by modelled risk. Within a decade, landholders who found a top-ten species on their ground had drained the wet paddocks that harboured it, quietly, because a name on that list was a liability with legs. Funding was stripped from the bottom of the list, because the bottom was safe. And then two species from the safe end went before anything in the top ten did, an accident being an accident. The Schedule was withdrawn in Year 84. Since then the Survey publishes the count, and only the count.

“You’re telling me you know two hundred and sixty-one species are going to go, and you can’t tell me which.”

“To within a handful. Yes.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s arithmetic. The curve has got the count right census after census for a hundred and fifty years. About the names it has never had an opinion.”

He funded a mistfinch monitoring programme anyway. The mistfinch is in no danger that I can detect. I signed for the equipment. You take what is offered.

Census of Year 232

The decade of the crake. Ferrier’s crake is flightless, dark, deliberate, and engraved on the two-dollar note, and by Year 224 it was down to thirty-one pairs in the wet margin of the Fragment, where the rats have always done poorly. The colony did what colonies do when a species is on the money. A predator fence round the margin, rats eradicated from Shear Island, eggs lifted for captive rearing. It worked. It generally works, when a species is loved. There are better than three hundred crakes now, and on still evenings you can hear them from the fence line, a sound like a gate being tried.

The same census recorded the loss of two filmy ferns of the southern gullies, which Halvorsen had been watching for thirty years, and of a syrphid fly known from four pinned specimens, last collected in Year 209 and noticed missing two censuses late, because nobody has ever counted the flies. Eleven paid in all that decade. On the curve.

The new member — they change; the Ledger doesn’t — asked me what, in that case, the crake budget had bought, since the owed column stood where the curve had always said it would stand.

“It bought the crake,” I said.

“Did the ferns go because we spent it there instead?”

“No. They went because they were four gullies of fern in a country that used to have forty. Nothing pays in another’s place. There is only the count, and it falls at the rate the remainder sets.”

What I did not say at the hearing, because it helps nobody, is that the fence is not a forest. The Survey carries the crake in a separate column now, the column for species that persist as expenditure. It lives the way money lives in a vault. The accident the fence prevents every year is not cancelled. It is waiting, and the debt does not care which accident.

Census of Year 242

There is one lever that moves the second column, and it is area. Everything else — the fences, the monitoring, the love — moves nothing but our feelings, which are not carried in the Ledger.

The Restoration Act proposed retiring the grain farms of the eastern shelf: land that was forest at the Founding, about a twelfth of what was cleared. Regrowth is not forest either, so the Survey’s rule discounts young growth to a third of its area until the canopy closes, which takes sixty years. Even discounted, the arithmetic moves. The supportable column rises by about forty species. Forty instalments that were owed simply cease to be owed, and they cease quietly, decades before they would have fallen due, long after everyone voting is dead.

The committee asked me to state in plain terms what the colony would receive for the shelf. I had prepared remarks, and set them aside, because the truthful answer is short.

“Nothing will happen,” I said. “No species will return that is gone; nothing you can visit or name or put on a note. Some accidents that were going to occur in your grandchildren’s censuses will not occur. For the price of the shelf you are buying the ordinary dawn of a century you won’t see, and it will sound exactly like this one. That is the whole of what I can offer you.”

The Act passed by three votes. I’m told the mistfinches in the roof of the members’ bar were mentioned in the closing speeches.

Census of Year 252

The shelf at ten years is scrub and pioneer oilwood, loud with the common birds that like an edge, and there are ferns in the gully heads again, which Halvorsen did not live to count and her successor did. This census the Survey recomputed the second column for the first time since its founding. Supportable rose by forty-one. The standing debt fell by forty-one in a single line, the largest movement in the Ledger’s history, and not one of the forty-one has a name, and no one will ever be able to say of any living thing in the Lowland, this is the one that was redeemed. When the canopy closes, around Year 300, the line moves again, by roughly seventy more. Someone else will enter it.

This census I also added a station, the forty-second, the first added since Year 60. The Ledger holds the count. The field book holds the names, and always has.

0614, shelf transect, station forty-two. Calm, light dew, ten minutes.

Mistfinch, four. Harlequin wren, two. Grey saddleback, one, moving east through the scrub. Ferrier’s crake, heard only.