Lonesome George and Fausto Llerena's forty-year friendship was legendary in the Galápagos.
(Galápagos National Park)

The Man Who Made Lonesome George Less Lonely

Endlings force us to reexamine animals as individuals. But Fausto Llerena understood that already.

This story was published as a companion piece to Orion‘s Winter 2023 Love Issue, a tome about devotion. Subscribe here and learn more here.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PACIFIC, the black, volcanic ruins of Pinta Island were once dotted by thousands of “living rocks,” Galápagos tortoises chomping prickly cacti, hatching their babies, slowly chasing the equatorial sun. But the island was stripped bare over the 19th century, as hungry whalers discovered that they could be stored as fresh meat for a year without food or water in their ships’ holds. By 1906 the last three documented Pinta tortoises were captured and preserved in arsenic by Stanford’s California Academy of Sciences.

However, one particularly shy tortoise had escaped their survey and would go on to survive, unnoticed, for the next seventy years—a young age for a creature who might grow for nearly two centuries. It wasn’t until 1971 that he first encountered a human, an unsuspecting snail scientist, who soon realized what he’d stumbled upon. This was an endling, the very last of his species.

They named him El Solitario Jorge: Lonesome George.

^{Left: Lonesome George (Creative Commons) | Right: (Michael Zysman)}

To protect him from poachers, a Galápagos National Park team carried his 165-pound frame across Pinta’s jagged rocks, placed him into a small boat, and sailed him to a breeding center on Santa Cruz Island. Plans were quickly made to stud him with other tortoise species to reverse the imminent extinction of his genetic line. Two good-looking females were moved into his enclosure from nearby Wolf Volcano, but Lonesome George maintained a platonic distance. “He didn’t much care for other tortoises,” recalled Craig MacFarland, former director of the Charles Darwin Research Station. Zoos and cloning geneticists were consulted. Personal ads popped up in newspapers around the world: “Searching for a female Galapagos tortoise, Pinta Island…” A research intern named Sveva Grigioni took on the project of fondling him for three months, two hours at a time, in hopes of producing semen. Nothing. Two females with more similar genes were located and switched out with his spurned corralmates, but he ignored them too. For a time, he was bunked with other males in the hopes that observing their exploits might get him going, but he simply claimed a corner of the enclosure for himself and dug in. ”The other tortoises stayed away and let him be,” said Linda Caycot, former science advisor for the Galápagos Conservancy. “He lives up to his name.”

Through the years of will-he-won’t-he hubbub, Lonesome George’s caretaker, a park ranger named Fausto Llerena, rode his bike to visit him every day. Each morning, George met Fausto at the gate with his neck outstretched. “He had a complex personality,” said Fausto. “It was as if he would say, ‘What’s on the menu today?’ and I would reply, ‘Well, it’s the same menu as every day.’” George would stay with the ranger for hours while he completed his work, and afterward slowly walk Fausto to the gate to say goodbye. He never did the same with anyone else. “They just liked to be together, to sit together,” recalled James Gibbs of the Galápagos Conservancy (whom George intensely disliked because he often drew his blood). “I think Fausto understood things that no one else did about George.”

“I think Fausto understood things that no one else did about George.”

What passes between two beings in the comfortable silences of a forty-year friendship? What trust is built, slowly but surely, on tortoise time and tender kindnesses?

One Sunday morning in June 2012, George failed to meet his friend at the gate. He had died unexpectedly in the night at over one hundred years old. With his death, Earth’s line of Pinta Island tortoises went extinct.

News broke and the world reeled with the finality and failure of it all: “Death of the world’s rarest creature.” “Farewell to Lonesome George, who never came out of his shell.” “Lonesome George, last of his kind, dies.”

But to Fausto the tragedy was much simpler. “He was my best friend,” he said.

^{Lonesome George (Creative Commons)}

The Endlings

Beloved endlings, like Lonesome George, focus painstaking human devotion to a single point: Najin the northern white rhino lives protected under armed guard; Laña the Pyrenean Ibex was resurrected as a short-lived clone; Turgi the Polynesian tree snail’s passing was marked with international obituaries and a gravestone. Yet right now there are only fifty-one Rice’s whales in the Gulf of Mexico. Three hundred and seventy black-footed ferrets in the west’s endangered grasslands. And over 1 million other species at risk of extinction. Can we care for the individuals of the herd—the pod, the kaleidoscope, the flock—as much as the endling? Their survival depends upon extending the same intensity of devotion to those who precede their own Lonesome George.

Toughie, the last Rabb’s fringe-limbed treefrog, lived in Atlanta's Botanical Garden until 2016. His species once thrived in Panama's rainforest canopy–using their webbed hands and feet to glide through the air. Males guarded water-filled tree cavities where they would protect and care for their tadpoles. (Creative Commons)
Thirty-two year-old Najin, one of the two last surviving northern white rhinos with her caregiver, Zachary Mutai. Najin and her daughter Fatu live in Kenya under armed-guard protection from poachers. In 2021 Najin was retired from a breeding effort seeking to revive the species through assisted reproductive techniques and surrogacy. (Justin Mott/Ol Pejeta Conservancy)
The quagga, a type of zebra with brown hindquarters from South Africa, was hunted to extinction in 1883. The only photographed quagga is pictured here with her keeper in the London Zoo. Naturalist H.A. Bryden wrote in 1889, "That an animal so beautiful... to be found not long since in so great abundance, should have been allowed to be swept from the face of the earth, is surely a disgrace to our latter-day civilisation." (Creative Commons)
The dusky seaside sparrow, a non-migratory songbird, used to nest in southern Florida’s fresh and brackish marshes. The last known individual, “Orange Band,” died at Walt Disney World’s Discovery Island zoological park in 1987. (Birdsinfo.org)
George, an endemic O‘ahu tree snail named after Lonesome George, was the only successful offspring born out of a captive breeding program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Toward the end of George’s life, caretaker David Sischo described him as “old and grizzled” and a “bit of a hermit.” George passed away at age fourteen in 2019. (David Sischo/Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources)
淇淇 (QiQi) a freshwater baiji river dolphin is nursed back to health by Liu Renjun in 1980 following an injury from fishing hooks. Liu Renjun went on to care for QiQi for twenty two years until the dolphin's death in 2002. Once called the "Goddess of the Yangtze," QiQi's is the first dolphin species in the world driven to extinction by humans. (Institute of Hydrobiology Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Martha the passenger pigeon was bred in captivity and lived for most of her life in the Cincinnati Zoo. It's thought that passenger pigeons once comprised up to 40% of the total bird population in the U.S. One nesting site in Wisconsin was estimated at 850 square miles–observers reported migrating flocks would darken the entire sky. With Martha's death at twenty-nine years old, the species went extinct in 1914. (Creative Commons)
"Benjamin," the last known female thylacine, suns herself in Hobart Zoo in 1936. Thylacines, also called Tasmanian tigers, were carnivorous marsupials endemic to Tasmania, Australia and New Guinea. Recent analysis of reported sightings indicate that isolated, wild populations of thylacines may have persisted into the 1980s before they went extinct.(National Sound and Film Archive of Australia)
The only individual of Hyophorbe amaricaulis lives in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on the Republic of Mauritius. The island species was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered growing in the Curepipe Botanic garden in 1942. At over eighty-years old, the "loneliest palm" produces male and female flowers at different times during the flowering season, but efforts to propagate it have been unsuccessful to date.(Creative Commons)
Xerces blue butterflies once fluttered among the deerweed of San Francisco's coastal dunes. No photographs exist that capture a living Xerces blue. In 1941, future entomologist W. Harry Lange unknowingly caught the last recorded Xerces in his butterfly net. “I always thought there would be more." he said. "I was wrong.” (Kristen Grace/Florida Museum of Natural History)
The Carolina parakeet, with its brilliant green feathers and a red-tinged yellow head, was the only parrot species native to the continental U.S. Highly social, they'd gather in flocks of more than 300 and roosted in hollow tree cavities of swampy eastern forests. After the death of his mate, Lady Jane, the last known Carolina Parakeet, Incas, passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918. (Creative Commons)
Fern, a long-lived Fernandina Island giant tortoise, was discovered in 2019, more than one hundred years in the Galápagos after her species was thought to be extinct. But similar to Lonesome George, her species' situation is dire: subsequent expeditions to the difficult terrain of the island have turned up no other Fernandina tortoises. (Galápagos National Park)

This is a companion piece to the Field Note in Orion’s Winter 2023 issue, Romance in the Climate Crisis. Special thanks to the NRDC for their generous funding of this issue.

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The Man Who Made Lonesome George Less Lonely

Endlings force us to reexamine animals as individuals. But Fausto Llerena understood that already.

The Endlings

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