Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

by Christopher Cokinos

A prizewinning poet and nature writer weaves together natural history, biology, sociology, and personal narrative to tell the story of the lives, habitats, and deaths of six extinct bird species.

Genres: Birds, Nonfiction, Nature, Science, History, Natural History, Animals

359 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Christopher Cokinos is the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, both from Tarcher/Penguin. The winner of a Whiting Award, Cokinos has traveled across the world, from Greenland to Antarctica, in search of the stories of science and history that inform his writing. Committed to weaving memoir into research-driven narratives, Cokinos loves to explore the connections between lives and landscapes. With his partner the writer Kathe Lison, Cokinos lives along the Blacksmith Fork River in northern Utah.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I read more and more nature/travel kinds of non-fiction, I see more overlap. Overlap in locations, histories, species, passions. Cokinos is a man who reveals a robust passion for birds (and fact-seeking) in Hope is the Thing with Feathers. He annotates his personal quests to learn as much about six recently extinct birds, which entails trips around the country and beyond, visiting various locations, museums and speaking with distantly related people. His travels were of interest, and I appreciated that his location during the initial inspiration of this book was in my neck of the woods - Kansas. I cannot quite relate to his keen sense of loss for these six birds, nor for his drive to find the minutiae of their histories. But, having read these chronicles, I am imbibed with a sense of importance in awareness. We can live our lives, as small or as big as we want/can, and for the most part, our scope should be narrow. We take personal care in our livelihood, and that of our family. Our land/homes, health, and of course, we should have a goodwill towards those around us. Self-care, but not excessive selfishness. But it is important to be aware of the bigger scheme of things. Cokinos highlighted many instances where deforestation and mass hunting were attributing factors to these birds' extinctions. I believe there is a natural, spiritual and ancient flow of the universe and our Earth. Death, destruction and extinction are parts of that flow. The mass boom of humans has proven to impact the small as well as the big ecosystems of the world. Part of that is unavoidable. I lament the loss of the woods around my neighborhood, all for more apartment complexes and cookie cutter homes. I know humans can be greedy and excessively wasteful. But I do not believe we carry a burden of vast guilt, akin to original sin, because some flora and fauna are no longer in existence. At the end of his book, Cokinos outlines some thoughtful ways to be aware - recycle, lessen car usage, educate and speak out. Definitely. Yes, for sure. I am grateful for many modern technologies, but if I had it my way, I'd be living a quiet self-sustainable life in the woods, with not too much of it. But I do not agree with this statement: "It's as if we live in a house from which, each hour, we remove a foundation stone, a joist, a rafter. The house could fall to wreckage surrounded by weeds." Even within these species, during the segment on the auk, Cokinos noted that with the auk gone, and the walrus gone, seals then thrived on the Bird Rocks. We destroy, but we also create. So, I conclude, that it is important to care, but not to despair. In regards to our place on this earth, there is another comment of Cokinos I can agree with: "Do we act like gods or do we live as acolytes? Imagining vanished lives helps answer that question. Knowing whatever we can about these vanished birds restores them, after all, to a habitat we still can save: our moral imagination."

Notes on each bird (more for personal reference) -
Carolina Parakeet: I found nothing too interesting about this bird. TBH, there are other kinds of parakeets around. The most interesting thing about the birds, were that they were a larger, colorful bird in North America; mostly, you have to go to South America for those.
Ivory Billed Woodpecker: What I enjoyed about this segment, was the description of Cornell's expedition into the Singer Tract, to record auditory and visual footage of the woodpecker. Muddy travel, camping - utterly unromantic, yet interesting.
The Heath Hen: what interested me most about the tales of this bird - besides the micro level of the species, on Martha's Vineyard - was that it had several people championing for their survival, and the species hung on for a long time, through decades of disaster. But there was quarreling amongst the individuals. Sometimes, even those with good intentions, do not know the right thing to do, it can only be known through hindsight.
The Passenger Pigeons were fascinating. I'd never known about the gargantuan flocks of these birds. Actually, their mass quantities almost seemed to be their undoing - people got in the habit of mass hunting for food and feathers, and they were so easy to kill when in the big flocks. The pages dedicated to the shooting of the last passenger pigeon seemed excessive. I enjoyed the description of Press Clay Southworth's life, the young man who shot Buttons, the last wild passenger pigeon. But I failed to find the squabbles to find the exact date and location of the event important. Labrador Duck: while Cokinos notes it as the bird he'd most like to see cloned back into existence, he failed to shed impressive light into the characteristics of the bird.
The Great Auk: another fascinating bird I had not come across until now, seemingly part goose, part penguin. I particularly enjoyed reading about Cokinos's travels to the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Canadian waters) to see where the auk used to breed.

[Darlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, though it was depressing to read story after story about how people worked hard to help the heath hen, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet and ivory billed woodpecker only to be met with ultimate doom. But, I found the second half more tedious to read. There are two detailed chapters on the "afterlife" of two stuffed passenger pigeons (Martha and Buttons, the last in existence and the last in the wild). I don't really think we needed to know every detail about where Buttons was shot, for example. I also found the details of Martha's life and living conditions a little lacking. I found the Labrador duck and great auk stories lacking in actual information about the birds in general. It's possible that it's hard to find such information.

Nonetheless, I did learn something from this book that might help me with my future work with helping endangered species. And, I did learn a little more about most of the species mentioned in the book.

[Mark Lawicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers is a brilliantly written amalgamation of the natural history and biology of six extinct North American bird species. The author infuses his own narrative into this account describing several important locations in historical context, and traveling to many of these locations in the present day. His exhaustive research provides readers with many fascinating tales of these unique birds. One can tell this is a labor of love on his part. At times the book delves into modern issues like developments in de-extinction technology, but this in no way detracts from the potency of the authors storytelling. In fact, it generates more questions than it answers. This is one sign of a good book to me. This story was both engaging and enlightening.

The historical descriptions of man’s cruelty and wholesale slaughter of these six birds is a necessary evil in this narrative- and one I found especially difficult to bear. The anger and resentment I felt for the plight of these defenseless birds was assuaged by the heroism of so many dedicated individuals who attempted to save these birds from extinction. The conservation movement as we know it began in the time of these stories.
In fact, the now extinct subjects of this tome were in large part responsible for changing public perceptions and shaping modern conservation approaches for many other endangered species.

All things considered, this book ends on a positive note. I’m a firm believer that education, knowledge, and empathy towards Mother Nature are the best ways to ensure the preservation of all species- including our own. Activism is important.
Politicians and philanthropists won’t save-can’t save- what they don’t know exists. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to readers of natural history and wildlife enthusiasts. 5 stars aren’t enough.

[Paulette · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world is diminished with each passing of a species into extinction. That is the clear point of Christopher Cokinos book in which he traces the history of vanished birds, the Carolina Parakeet, the Heath Hen, the Passenger Pigeon, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Labrador duck and the Great Auk. It is a personal odyssey for this author who writes very movingly of his research and what he discovers as he visits some of the places where these vanished birds once existed. The story of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, is especially well written and Cokinos evokes great sadness in her final days, when all her last handlers could do was watch her--and consequently her species--fade out of existence. I highly recommend this book and hope that it serves as a wake up call to humankind that we need to fight harder than ever to preserve the species we still have but may not have for the next generation.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that can be appreciated on a number of levels. Of course, it is instructive about the life cycle of the extinct species. But, it is even more revealing of human nature and its strange attraction to the rare. It seems that no matter how beautiful something is, if it is common, we regard it as less valuable (indeed, "common" can sometimes be used as a pejorative term). When that which was common becomes rare, we often come to regard it as valuable and struggle mightily to save it. What a perverse and conditional set of values we have.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-written, amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful book that everyone, not just bird lovers, who lives on earth should read.

[Tim Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In _Hope is the Thing with Feathers_ (the title is taken from a line in an Emily Dickinson poem), author Christopher Cokinos sought to relay some of the natural and human history of six vanished birds of North America.

The first bird he examined is the Carolina Parakeet, once a relatively common bird that ranged in noisy flocks across the eastern U.S., north to Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and New York, south to the Gulf Coast states, west to Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado. This bird with a "luminous plumage of green, yellow and red" frequented wooded rivers and bottomlands. Once a delight to many Americans the birds unfortunately were persecuted as a threat to crops, for the caged bird industry, and for the demands of women's fashion. Cokinos suggested though that the main cause for its extinction was habitat destruction. Two related theories of extinction were that the thick bamboo canebrakes once common in the bird's range were mostly cleared out for farmland. In addition to providing food, the bamboo may have given a vital breeding stimulus to the bird (as like bamboo, the parakeets apparently did not breed each year). The second theory is that the bird may have been denied the hollow trees it required for roosting and nesting by the rapid spread across the continent by the European honeybee.

Next Cokinos had a lengthy section on the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, once known as the Lord God Bird (presumably because observers would blurt "Lord God!" when they spied the nearly two foot long bird with the two and a half foot wingspan). Once the second largest woodpecker in the world (Mexico's Imperial Woodpecker is larger) it ranged across bottomland forests and swamps in the South, west to eastern Texas, north to Missouri, southern Illinois, southern Indiana, and southern Ohio. Though hunted (later largely by collectors, shooting it in fact because they were going extinct), the bird appears to have perished due to habitat destruction. An extreme specialist, it occupied a niche "almost as slender as a feather;" it primarily fed upon beetle larvae from trees that had only been dead for two or three years. Though they also included seeds and fruits in their diets, they became extremely site dependent on places that yielded the larvae that they favored. Interesting coverage of the Brand-Cornell University-American Museum of Natural History Ornithological Expedition led by Arthur Allen that set out in 1935 on a 15,000 mile scientific expedition to record the sounds of wild birds using brand new technology - one of the places they visited was the Singer Tract in Louisiana where news came out that the last Ivory-bills were found; and the bitter (and lost) fight to save the Singer Tract from destruction by loggers.

Next Cokinos examined the Heath Hen, an extinct subspecies of Greater Prairie Chicken. The bird once favored dry, brushy habitat with low trees as well as meadows from Maine to the Carolinas (though primarily from New Jersey up to Connecticut and Massachusetts). Once called by naturalists - along with its western cousin - the pinnated grouse owing to the dangling neck feathers on the males called pinnae - the bird perished on the American mainland by 1870 thanks to loss of habitat due to fire suppression and farming as well as relentless overhunting. The bird survived on the island of Martha's Vineyard and Cokinos covered at length the intense struggle as well as the political infighting over trying to save the bird there. Despite intense hunting of "vermin" (including feral cats, rats, owls, and hawks), planting of crops to feed the Heath Hen, and other efforts, through a run of bad luck the bird finally perished; the last of its kind apparently died in 1932 in the wild, known from close examination to have been an incredibly old male seven to nine years in age (average lifespan in the wild was one year). The author discussed efforts to reintroduce the Greater Prairie Chicken to Martha's Vineyard while highlighting the plight of the possibly doomed Attwater's Prairie-Chicken of Texas and Louisiana, which in 1999 has a total population of 146.

The Passenger Pigeon was the next subject. After impressing upon the reader just how astronomically abundant it once was (one early 1800s flock was estimated to have 2.2 billion birds and a nesting colony in Wisconsin as late as 1871 covered 850 square miles and had 135 million birds), Cokinos related how this bird was systematically destroyed by market hunters, for a time by the cruel trapshooting business (birds were collected to serve as live target practice), and due to habitat clearance (the birds were heavily reliant on the massive amount of mast (nuts) produced by oak, chestnut, and beech trees). The author went into a great deal of detail about the last known wild pigeon ("Buttons," so called because once mounted its eyes were in fact buttons for a time) and the last pigeon period ("Martha" from the Cincinnati Zoo).

A smaller chapter focuses on the Labrador Duck. A handsome sea duck also called the Skunk Duck and Pie or Pied Duck, this somewhat poorly known waterfowl had a large and odd-looking bill that aided the bird in its search for sand-buried shellfish. The range of the bird was the eastern seaboard though where it bred is still open to conjecture. Cokinos and others speculated that the bird - never common to start with - may have perished due to loss of shellfish due to overharvesting and sewage runoff and thanks to increased ice packs from the Little Ice Age (which lasted till the 1850s), which may have interfered with breeding sites and aided some predators.

Cokinos closed with a by comparison slim chapter on the Great Auk, an interesting chapter that could have been a bit longer. I was struck by the long human contact with them - their images have been found in 20,000 year old French cave art and bones in 4,000 old Newfoundland graves - with care they could have survived to today.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work compiles the stories of the extinction of six North American bird species. The demises seems to cluster between the last half of the Nineteenth Century and the fist half of the Twentieth. There is an uncomfortable sameness to the final years: too little too late organized action and almost frenzied destruction triggered by the nearness of extinction. Much of the writing is poetic and evocative as this is obviously a heartfelt subject to the author. Some of the stories are really cruel tragedies: one of the last Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers imprisoned and dying in a hotel room to serve as a model and Martha, perhaps the last Passenger Pigeon, shuffling alone and scruffy in a Cleveland zoo. Other subjects are the colorful Carolina Parakeets, there social clustering good defense against hawks but poor for shotguns. Watching the last of the Heath Hens waste away on Martha's Vineyard could be a stand-in for the shape of all the species' demises, including the Labrador Duck and preyed upon Great Auk.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book includes every single detail the author discovered no matter how small, when a summary would have sufficed.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was recently reminded of this book while discussing the demise of the dodo bird with my sons. The dodo is ancient history from some nowhere in the Indian Ocean. Christopher Cokinos brings the story of bird extinction to our very doorstep, with parts of the history occurring within 1 generation of the present.

It is an eye opening reminder of how careless man can be with the natural resources around him. In some cases 11th hour revelation by a few early conservationist are not enough to stem the tide. And the heartbreaking documentation of the last of a species dying in a zoo hit hard.

This is a beautifully written book with photos and Audubon prints the illuminate the text. I recommend it highly.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Time is the deepest wilderness in which we wander,” writes author Cokinos.

This book was something of a watershed moment for me. Cokinos introduced me to the detailed story of six lost species of birds that once lived in North America. But now they are gone. His personal peregrinations and resultant chronicle are highly moving.

“I have learned much from this history and have realized, finally, that sadness at loss is our best first response. It should not be our only response. We know the world gives us life, beauty and solace. We would be ungrateful if we failed to give that back.”

[Kendra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is heavy with information, and sometimes (I'll admit) I wasn't in the mindset to sit down and digest all of it. It was very well written, and I found myself wanting to find other birds that I could help. I only wish that the end of the book was a little more optimistic, although I realize that the topic is sad, I think there's always room for optimism.

[Betsy Curlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful testament to the amazing bird species that we have lost through our own greed and insensitivity. The writing is thoughtful and poetic, and one can genuinely feel the writers' regret at the loss of these national treasures.

[Carroll Rudy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most depressing book I have ever read. The stories of poor little birds dying alone in their cages after all other of their species were gone had me in tears. The greed, selfishness and stupidity of the human race disgusts me. And they haven't changed. Even now poachers are busy trying to kill every last one of many endangered species so they can make some money. They will probably succeed too, as long as other equally thoughtless, stupid people are willing to buy. It 's always the same old story. Certain people cannot survive unless they can kill the last specimen, or use the magic medicine made therefrom, but after they kill it, they unfortunately do survive, and continue with their greed. This sort of book makes me despise the human race for it's inability to change or ever learn any compassion for non-humans. How are we so unable to learn from our mistakes and be so unable to care.
The stories were interesting to me and I wanted to know all the details. Of special interest to me were that I personally knew some of the people involved in the Heath Hen and Ivory Billed Woodpecker stories. I found the Great Auk Story lacking in that there was so little information about the bird. and I'd never even heard of the Labrador Duck. Perhaps the species were exterminated so fast that there wasn't enough time to document their habits and life stories. Today we are exterminating species every day about which nothing is known. Some remain undiscovered before the last one is gone along with its habitat because we absolutely have to cut down the last tree or extract the last drop of oil or clear the land for farming, just as we have done from time immemorial. Even as I write this, wildlife "Refuges" are being freed up for hunting and oil drilling. Humans are sorry species indeed to think everything on the planet is theirs to exploit.
I'm glad I read the book for learning the information included and the details about the six species, But I can't shake off the depression. I hope the book changes somebody enough to think twice about exploiting shrinking habitats and endangered species or to care about wild creatures. But I don't think the truly selfish people would ever read such a book, because they don't care. It will probably only appeal to people like me who care about nature. My disgust will probably offend some people, but I have always felt empathy for extinct birds. I'd be happy if they were cloned back into existence. But it would be an exercise in futility, because we destroyed their habitats so thoroughly the species would have gone extinct anyway. I am a citizen scientist who volunteers to census animals,some of which are endangered, and they are disappearing at an alarming rate. I count less of several bird species every year. and several species have disappeared from my area entirely in the last few years. Extinction is going on all the time and faster than I ever imagined that it would.

[John Geary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book. The writer details his journeys around the United States to visit (or try to visit) spots where the last known sighting of six extinct North American bird species took place. It’s part ornithology/science, part history, and part a tale about his detective work trying to track down the details about the last sightings and get them confirmed.
It should come as no surprise that the Carolina parakeet, ivory-billed woodpecker, heath hen, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, and great auk all became extinct after Europeans started colonizing North America. Some of the species became extinct a mere 200 years after European settlements started popping up; some of them in just the last 90 years.
The book is 23 years old, and in the past decade alone, four more bird species have gone extinct on the planet, although those birds are not North American species.
It’s a very sad tale because it’s a tale of our lifestyle, our decisions, essentially destroying six species.
Hope is part of the title of the book, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson … but is there any hope?
The author thinks there is, but it does not come without action.
As he puts it:
“If we are to save what is left and restore what we can, then those of us who love birds must do uncomfortable things. Write to politicians. Write them again when their answers do not satisfy. Speak up at county and city commission meetings in defense of the green world. Take local
leaders on bird-banding trips so they can stand gape-jawed at the beauty
of a Cape May Warbler or that little feathered nova, the Common Yellowthroat. We ought not underestimate the elegance of individual decisions coupled with communal actions - a bird seen, a refuge protected, a
vote changed - especially as they accumulate, one by one, the way the barbs and barbules of a feather hold together.”

[Lisa Aboudan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every era has a shocking history of destruction. At the time it seems commonplace and acceptable. Someday we’ll look back at our history and wonder why we cut down every forest, built on every waterway and discarded plastics, styrofoam and electronics like we too didn’t know. We knew. We did it anyway. Somewhere in the book he talked about leaving nothing of the world but a bunch of weeds. Let’s not. Each of us is responsible to assist that we don’t repeat or continue on the path to destruction and more extinctions. It’s sad to know and watch it happening. The Loggerhead Shrike was mentioned in passing and his fear of its decline. Years ago I had one that frequented my yard. Haven’t seen one in probably ten or fifteen years. He might be next. Sad. In the future what will a beautiful day sound like with no birds?

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to stop reading this book halfway through and take a break, because I kept crying. The stories of these lost birds, the thought of never being able to see or hear them, and what humans have extinguished was too much. I finally picked it back up and finished it. The author's beautiful telling of these birds' lives and the people who tried to save them is worth the read, even if it is heartbreaking. I reread passages over and over, picturing the Carolina Parakeet or Ivory-billed Woodpecker in my mind's eye. It's an excellent, thought provoking read that examines the horrors of human action that drove these species to extinction and what we continue to do now, and how we haven't learned our lesson.

[EB]

This is a book I came across via a circuitous path (circuitous is common! altho this seems more circuitous than most). After the eclipse I was looking for eclipse poetry. I came across a poem by Cokinos in "Scientific American" - called "We Need the Sky." Overall I thought the poem is mediocre but I loved the first two lines: "That we need the sky / to tell us we don’t matter." Needing the sky, being in conversation w/ the sky, and not mattering - yes! I KNOW that experience of the bigness of sky. So I got curious abt him, esp b/c I could find surprisingly few poems about eclipses, and it turns out he gives a good interview, and in an interview he mentioned a forthcoming book called "Still as Bright" - about the moon! - which seemed fascinating - except there isn't an audiobook for it yet - and it's a very thick book - but I have it checked out from MCPL - but there's also this one. Which is older, and NOT abt the moon, but it's an audiobook, and abt birds, which I like, and Ellen loves, so I thought I'd give it a chance. Maybe his prose is better than his poetry?! Maybe I'll enjoy his take on nature writing?! (Esp compared to "Vesper Flights," which I *just* DNF'ed this eve, which is primarily personal observation, not research; my fav nature writing is a combo of both - see John McPhee.) And also - it's the quote Jill C. gave me during my divorce, which kept me going, despite being simple, but it meant a lot to me that she took the time to share. So! Hopefully I'll enjoy it! And if I do - extra incentive to work thru the physical copy of "Still as Bright"! B/c - how can I pass up not just stories but HISTORIES about the moon!?

UPDATE 5/30 - DNF'ing after a little more than an hour in. The story just isn't holding my attn. I don't especially care abt him, his move to Kansas (Nebraska?), or his experience seeing an unexpected bird near his new home and then talking to expert birders about it. If he were more interesting I might keep going? But he seems like a fairly dull, plodding (though good-hearted) fellow. I'm also realizing birds are not my thing. Again - if he told a better story I would probably keep going. But it's falling short. It's also pretty out of date (the first chapter takes place in the very early 90s - '91 or '93 I think). He has some FANTASTIC quotes w/ FANTASTIC insights abt life, nature, writing, etc. But not compelling enough to keep at it. Another perfectly good book that I wouldn't steer anyone away from. It's just not a book for me.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was extremely, lovingly, detailed. It was a bit too much at times, but likely only because I've read a few books on the same birds he's chosen. I think if I came into this book fresh, it would of been a complete home run- and that's who I recommend this book for

[Aspen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes the author's prose and attempts at novel poetry were a bit much, but learning about birds that i will never see or hear from again was a very rewarding experience and I appreciate the amount of work and research the author dedicated to this project.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a nice book, but think I feel too strongly about this issue to appreciate this book.

[marylou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book that touched my heart and sometimes made me cry

[JKR · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We must confront loss rather than deny it and, in doing so, nurture the energies to cope with the difficulties of loving a world we have systematically diminished.”

[maya rose]

DNF - borrowed from library and had to return lol but i liked the first couple chapters …. my eyes started crossing at the dancing hen chapter tho

[Cheryl]

suggested for purchase OKC... meant to request ILL, but turns out that means registering at https://metrolibrary.illiad.oclc.org/......

[Krista · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stalled on page 61 after I flipped through the very end of the book (not something I usually do) and read the author's conclusion that "we are frightened enough of the future and certain enough of the toll 6 billion humans are taking on the planet that we have decided not to have children." That plus the author's admitted profound depression during portions of the times he describes of his own life make for a far less optimistic tone than I expect from a book whose title starts with "Hope." Even a book about extinct species.

The history of the Carolina Parakeet was well-written and interesting, if outside my usual wheelhouse, so I hope (haha) to go back and read some of the other chapters eventually. I like the lyrical, meandering and informative writing style, but the tone is too melancholy for my taste.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking and interesting history of the extinctions of six North American bird species or subspecies. Cokinos covers the Carolina Parakeet, the Heath Hen (eastern subspecies of the Greater Prairie Chicken), the Passenger Pigeon, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Labrador Duck and the Great Auk, all extinct within the last 100 to 150 years.

A comprehensive meditation on loss and the evolution of our thinking about the exploitation of wildlife, particularly birds, Cokinos lays out the factors that led to the decline and ultimate loss of each of these bird species, most of which were once numerous -- almost fantastically so in the case of the Passenger Pigeon.

[Sherrida Woodley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was the defining resource for my writing Quick Fall of Light. Without it, I would've had far less to go on (re: the passenger pigeon), not to mention getting a much clearer understanding of the earth's most notable bird extinctions. It will make you cry and wish and hurt for what we've lost.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just loved this book. A beautifully written requiem for lost species. I especially enjoyed the section on the Carolina parakeet, you can tell it was the spark that started the whole book. I think the heath hen chapter got a little bogged down in the politics, but apart from that it was a very engaging read.

[Elizabeth Humphries · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me years to finish this book. Not because it's bad - it's well-written and includes interesting anecdotes about the extinct North American birds. It's just so depressing when you see the impact of humans on nature laid out in chapter after chapter after chapter. Normally I'll reread books in a heartbeat, but I don't think I can for this one.