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

Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds by Christopher Cokinos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

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