The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was the last surviving member of an entire family of Hawaiian honeyeaters that had existed for over 15 million years. By 1981 only a single breeding pair remained on the island of Kauaʻi. That same year a hurricane tore through the forest and destroyed the tree they were nesting in, almost certainly killing the female. The male survived alone. For the next six years he continued to do the only thing his biology told him to do — he sang his mating call into the forest every day, the same two-tone whistle he had always used to call a female to him, in a forest that no longer had one. In 1987 biologist David Boynton recorded him singing. The recording still exists. If you listen to it, you can hear him give his call, then go completely silent, waiting for the response that would tell him a female had heard him. Then he calls again. Then silence again. He does this over and over, each pause the length of time it would take a female to answer, in a forest that had already lost everything he was calling for. He was declared extinct in 2000. The recording is 54 seconds long. In those 54 seconds you can hear the entire story of what extinction actually sounds like — not a crash, not a dramatic ending, just one animal calling into silence and waiting, and calling again, and the silence giving nothing back. Auckland Museum Collections from Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand CC BY SA 2.0