Archives of a Wild Planet

Photographer Joel Sartore was nine or ten years old when he first contemplated extinction. Martha, the world’s last-known passenger pigeon, was featured in a book about birds his mother gave him as a kid growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska. Passenger pigeons thrived until they were hunted to extinction. “I was amazed that you could take an animal with a population in the billions, just as populous as any animal could get on this planet, and knock it down to one animal at the end, so quickly,” Sartore recalls. Martha, and her entire species, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Sartore grew up with a menagerie of creatures—pheasants, quail, ducks, peacocks, a turtle and a tortoise, tropical and freshwater fish, snakes, and a few dogs. Though he might have liked to be a zoo director, math and chemistry were not his thing. Instead, he pursued journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and then got a job at the Wichita Eagle newspaper in Kansas. Sartore went