books:

	Hope Is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds Christopher Cokinos Tarcher, 2000 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Carolina parakeet, Heath Hen, Great Auk, Passenger pigeon, Labrador duck and Ivory-billed woodpecker have with their passing come to represent for Cokinos a lot more than simply another group of vanished species. They are emblematic of lost time, effort, habitat, environment, and are missing slice of life. Poignant as his descriptions of their loss is, there is always an element of hope that suffuses each of his chapters.

Cokinos with this book successfully blends history with a little bit of biology and adds just enough personal observation and insight. The mix works and his writing is excellent. There is enough science here to satisfy those who wish to remain at a respectable distance. For those who don't mind getting close there is sufficient reason - through what these birds represent about our past and future on this planet - to allow them to come and perch in your soul.

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A hidden gem - - beautiful poetic writing

This is a great book.

It's a sad one in realizing the destruction of various bird species. The chronicles of various species during the late 19th/early 20th century are astonishing to read. It was incredible to read and learn of biologists determined to collect species before they vanished - rather than attempt to preserve them.

Particularly entertaining (in an ironic and sick sort of way) was the tale of the last man to shoot the last Passenger Pigeon. The author did an incredible amount of research and weaves a delightful short story worthy of the purchase of this book in itself.

The writing is simple yet incredibly deep; it brings home an important and moving message that can be understood by a variety of audiences - even those who may not be particularly interested in nature, birds or environmental causes. Poetic and beautifully wrapped up. The only troubling portion of the book is the outcome of the fate of these species - obviously not the fault of the author, who provides a hope of preserving "what we still have" - it is moving, nonetheless ...

A wonderful book!!!

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Excellent coverage of six amazing birds

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.

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A wonderful book - definitely required reading

Although it chronicles several chapters of bull-headed human stupidity, this book also documents the painstaking efforts of the many people who worked hard to save these vanished creatures, and offers some hope that the future need not repeat the past. At times sad, but also funny, and even joyful despite the material.


The Lives and Demises of 6 Extinct North American Bird Species.

"Hope is the Thing with Feathers" profiles 6 North American bird species that are now extinct: the Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Heath Hen, Passenger Pigeon, Labrador Duck (Sand Shoal Duck), and the Great Auk. Most of these species became extinct -or were presumed to be extinct in the case of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker- in the early 20th century, although the Labrador Duck and Great Auk disappeared in the 19th century with less documentation. Author Christopher Cokinos takes the reader on his personal journey to learn about these birds and shares with us all that he finds. He discusses where these species were, what the birds ate, what is known of how they behaved, why they became extinct -which is not always clear, and the people who studied them. Of particular interest to me are the detailed accounts of the last living birds of these species, some of whom were closely observed.

I was surprised to learn that humans did try to protect most of these species at some point before they were wiped out. It was often a case of too little too late, but the disturbing thing is that legislation designed to protect the birds was sometimes passed with time to spare but was not adequately enforced. It isn't as if the extinctions took people by surprise. The greatest threat to the birds was loss of habitat, i.e. logging of old growth forests, but disease, politics and hunting played their parts. How extraordinary that the ubiquitous passenger pigeon, once the most populous bird in the world at a frightening 3-5 billion, up to 2 billion in a single flock, could be completely wiped out in about 50 years due to overhunting and loss of mast-producing forests. Even those familiar with the passenger pigeon's demise will find some new information here. Christopher Cokinos has dug up and verified the details of the shooting of the last wild passenger pigeon by Press Clay Southworth in 1900, including an account in Mr. Southworth's own written words.

I wish there were more photographs of the lovely Carolina Parakeet, but the 2 photos that are included are truly engaging. It's astonishing that this bright, affectionate, adorable parrot that could easily be bred in captivity was allowed to die out. If profit could not coax anyone to breed the birds for the pet trade, the degree of apathy is incomprehensible. I have often read that the Carolina Parakeet was hunted to extinction by farmers protecting their crops, but Cokinos takes issue with that claim, asserting that the major cause was habitat loss, but why the species died out entirely seems to be a mystery. "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers" is an evocative and informative chronicle of 6 North American bird species that are no more, some of which were quite common in their day. It must have been remarkable to look out the window and see a flock of shimmering green Carolina Parakeets in the trees -in the dead of winter, no less!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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