The Wells strain, as it came to be called, became the final proof of John Horner’s and Robert Bakker’s theory about at least one branch of the saurian lineage still surviving in the branches; but not even Horner and Bakker could draw much consolation from the proof. And it came to pass that what must have been a minor microbe in Mesozoic times was lethal to the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. Although a vaccine was found quickly, man’s ultimate misfortune was that the Wells strain was not a human disease in which all the potentially infected could be summoned by the media to local schools and hospitals for inoculation. It was impossible to find and inject, one at a time, hundreds of millions of birds.

With such grace did 1996 become the fulfillment of Rachel Carson’s predictions in Silent Spring. Throughout the United States and Europe, no cardinals or robins sang, and no geese flew north. As far away as China and Chile, there was nothing to stop the proliferation of root-eating grubs. The Wells strain had done its work with all-embracing thoroughness. By August it was clear that Africa, Asia, and the United States were faced with overwhelming plagues of locusts and scarab beetles, and a consequent failure of crops. The only defense against famine and anarchy was letting insecticides play the role of the now-extinct birds, but this proved barely as effective as the then-popular medical strategy of substituting chemotherapy for a cancer plagued immune system. Poisoning the insect swarms without also killing the plants, and the people who ate the plants, became an intractable problem.

For a time it was hoped that bats would increase in numbers and substitute for the birds. But they were, as a rule, nocturnal creatures that preyed upon moths. They had no inclination to attack locusts and other day flyers. One did not realize how large a role birds played in the delicate balancing act between nature and civilization until one saw CNN footage of the living black cloud that had blotted out the Sun and settled on the wheat fields of Kansas and Zaire.

Wheat, corn, and potatoes were the first to go. More than a third of the world’s harvest disappeared. Then the meat and dairy markets disintegrated as a rising tide of grubs undermined grasses and clover. Even among the insects there were casualties. With the death of clover there was little chance for the bees to harvest enough honey for the winter, meaning that even if the assaults on plants could be stopped, there would be fewer pollinators left to sustain them.

With the human species spreading from pole to pole, food intake was already stretching production to the limit when the poultry supply crashed. Only two years earlier, when North Atlantic fishing fleets had discovered that they were drawing no cod into their nets, some of the older, more observant fishermen had lamented, “We’ve finally killed the goose that lays the golden egg; we’ve caught them all.”