Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (original 2000; edition 2000)by Christopher Cokinos (Author)
Work InformationHope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds by Christopher Cokinos (2000)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
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. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)598.168Natural sciences and mathematics Zoology Birds Specific topics [Reptiles now at 597.9] Categories of birds [Sauropterygia now at 567.93] Endangered and rareLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
I find it terribly sad that no one knows the exact date of the demise of the Carolina Parakeet, but then again that's probably true of many extinct species. Right? How do we really know when we have seen the very last whatever? Here are details from Hope is the Thing with Feathers that will stick with me for a very long time: the Heath Hen has been compared to the Greater Prairie Chicken for their myriad of similarities. Their mating sounds are practical identical. Is that why no one took the extinction of the Heath Hen seriously? Were they so abundant they fell victim to overhunting; were they that easy to massacre? Is that what happened to the Passenger Pigeon? The cruelty inflicted on these birds was difficult to read. Cokinos gets into the question of cloning. Can you clone a species which has gone completely extinct? Can we have a Jurassic Park moment on a less dangerous scale?
Besides hunting, another factor wreaking havoc on bird populations was deforestation. Singer Sewing Machine purchased the nesting grounds of Lord God birds. Then they sold the rights to logging companies who cleared the land, destroying everything in its path. This happened over and over again. ( )