Amazon.com: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds: Christopher Cokinos: Books

Amazon.com
A decade ago, new to the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas, poet, journalist, and amateur birder Christopher Cokinos spotted an unusual sight: a pair of green parrotlike birds in flight, chased by a hawk. Uncertain of what he had seen, he turned to his guidebooks and neighbors to discover, eventually, that he had likely spotted a couple of escaped pet conures, tropical birds that were likely to offer some lucky predator an exotic lunch.

In sifting through the ornithological records, Cokinos learned that another brightly colored bird once haunted the skies over eastern Kansas: the Carolina parakeet, long ago driven to extinction by hunting and habitat destruction. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, a mournful and beautifully written book, offers a powerful meditation on the parakeet's fate, as well as that of other extinct species that lived in North America until the early years of the 20th century: the great auk, the Labrador duck, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon. In a rejoinder to Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America, Cokinos celebrates these ghost species, urging the protection of those that remain. "These days hope asks much from us," he allows, grimly observing the carnage that has gone before us. But hope remains, he adds, that some day endangered species will flourish once again. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Even readers with no special interest in birds will be caught up in this marvelous book, a deeply moving cautionary tale about how we have systematically diminished the planet. In recounting the histories of six extinct North American birds, along with stories of the people who killed them off and those who tried to save them, Cokinos, a professor of English at Kansas State University, transforms each extinction into a deeply disturbing tragedy--both for the species itself, and for human civilization. Relentless, wanton hunting, more than ecosystem pressures, obliterated Cokinos's feathered protagonists, including the Carolina Parakeet, which once colored the skies with its green, yellow and reddish-orange plumage; the hardy Passenger Pigeon, flying for hours at a time in endless flocks before it vanished around 1900; the exquisite Labrador Duck; and the Heath Hen, daily fare for the Pilgrims, a holdout on Martha's Vineyard until 1932. Cokinos seamlessly weaves together priceless anecdotes, historical detective work, birders' reports, natural histories of the vanished species and his travel notes ranging from the Louisiana bayous to the steep-cliffed Bird Rock islets in the St. Lawrence Gulf, once the nesting ground of the extinct Great Auk. We also meet memorable humans like wildlife artist Don Eckelberry, who in 1944 made the last authenticated sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker as its forest was being decimated. Cokinos weighs the "fantastically remote" possibility of using DNA cloned from extinct birds to resurrect these vanished species, but the real hope engendered by this extraordinary saga--beautifully illustrated with photographs, engravings, paintings and memorabilia--lies in its insistent plea to restore ecological sanity. Agent, Natasha Kern. (Mar.) FYI: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (the title comes from a line by Emily Dickinson) will be published on March 24, the 100th anniversary of the shooting of the last documented wild Passenger Pigeon.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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

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