Last week, perhaps like many of you, we mourned the loss of the last male northern white rhino on Earth. Sudan (he was named for the country where he was born) had spent most of his life in a zoo in the Czech Republic. In the ensuing years, while Sudan lived in this zoo thousands of miles from where he was captured in Africa, the population of northern white rhinos plummeted. By the early 1980s only a few dozen remained. By 2008, they were thought to be extinct in the wild. Sudan and two females, the last three of their kind on the planet, all of whom had spent their lives in zoos, were living under the protection of armed guards in a wildlife park in Kenya. Now with the death of Sudan, the only hope for the northern white rhino is through some form of technological fertilization using his cells and those of the remaining females.

In the bird world there are similar emotionally moving stories. During our time at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology we had the opportunity to listen to the 1987 recording of the haunting song of the last surviving male Kaua‘i ‘o‘o (a honeycreeper) echoing across the highlands of the Hawaiian Island of Kaua’i as he tried to attract a mate, but there were no longer any females left. Heartbreaking is the only way to describe the experience.

Maine has lost its share of species as well. In the late 1800s, hundreds of Eskimo curlews were sometimes seen in August and September in open barrens and fields in coastal areas.  Ralph Palmer, in his 1949 seminal book, “Maine Birds,” recounts diary entries and letters from the 1870s describing thousands alighting in fields in North Yarmouth, South Portland, and Scarborough. After some detective work, Palmer also discovered that some of the last Eskimo curlews on the planet may have been four shot illegally at Schoodic Point on August 28, 1929.

Maine once had caribou, too, as evident by the various “caribou” names of mountains and bogs and streams and, of course, the Aroostook Country town of Caribou. But the last caribou in Maine disappeared around 1914. Several attempts at introducing Newfoundland caribou to the state have been unsuccessful.

But in all the sadness that comes from stories like these and that of Sudan, we must remember that we humans have the capacity to do what it takes to make things better.

We have success stories like the rebounding of populations of common eiders, wood ducks, terns, herons, and egrets after the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the 100-year anniversary that we are now celebrating in this Year of the Bird.

We can’t forget how ospreys, bald eagles, and peregrine falcons are thriving today after they bounced back from the DDT era as a result of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the historic Endangered Species Act.

Let’s not forget that piping plover populations tripled in size over the last three decades as efforts went into their protection in part because of the Endangered Species Act as well as state level protections and funding.

And though it is hard to believe now, wild turkeys were completely gone from Maine at one time. Reintroduction and management to bring them back to the abundance that we now see is a result of funding to Maine’s state fish and wildlife agency.

While stories of the loss of Sudan and the potential extinction of the northern white rhino evolutionary lineage are deeply disturbing, such a fate is not predetermined. All of us and any of us can be part of solutions that maintain our natural heritage and a healthy environment for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, and for generations to come.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of “Birder’s Conservation Handbook”. His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” and the newly published “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao” from Cornell Press.