by Christopher Cokinos
Hardcover: 352 pages; J. P. Tarcher; 2000
ISBN: 1585420069

Reviewed by Christian Lawrence, Book Review Editor, CP

Extinction has been an inexorable force for as long as anything has slithered, flitted, crawled, taken root or otherwise evolved on this planet. Indeed, the great majority of species that have populated the earth over the last 3.5 billion years have come and gone in an evolutionary blink of an eye, leaving their legacy only in rocks and in the characters of extant ancestors.

In his book Hope is a Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, author Christopher Cokinos takes an in-depth look at how this ancient phenomenon operated in the cases of six extinct North American bird species. Each of these species vanished within the last century or two – so so we're not talking dinosaurs or wooly mammoths here. Instead, Cokinos deals with species that lived and breathed within many of our great-grandparents' and grandparents' lifetimes, a fact that makes these events more real, and personal for himself - and for us. 

A writer by trade, Cokinos also belongs to the legion of amateur birders, a group that spends hours of free time chasing birds through forest, field, and stream to add to its "life-list." On one such trip, Cokinos has a brush with an exotic (and no doubt escaped from captivity, as we later learn) parakeet species on the plains of Kansas, of all places. He is struck by the brilliance of the bird and is surprised when he later learns that, at one point in the not so recent past, a native parakeet species enlivened the skies over North America – the Carolina Parakeet. He needs to know more. What was it like when this species was common? How could it have become extinct? 

Thus, the impetus to write Hope is a Thing with Feathers was born. A personal experience – the sight of a brilliantly colored and oddly misplaced bird flashing over a drab, early spring marshland in the American Midwest – triggers the author to embark upon a personal odyssey. His search for answers will ultimately take him across the better part of North America, from the heath barrens of Martha's Vineyard to the once-vast bayous of Louisiana. 

Cokinos' subsequent quest for more information on the life, times, and eventual death of extinct species makes up the book. Readers are taken along his fact-finding missions – first with the Carolina Parakeet, and then with five other notable species: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Heath-Hen, Passenger Pigeon, Labrador Duck, and Great Auk.

Demonstrably the fruits of years of exhaustive research, Cokinos' treatment of each species is comprehensive. He travels to small towns across the country and knocks on doors, pokes around dusty county records storage facilities, views university skin collections, interviews numerous experts, and even braves a harrowing boat ride to a historical breeding site of the Great Auk in the frothy seas off northeastern Canada.

As a result, each species account is practically brimming with historical information and the author's personal perspective. It isn't enough for Cokinos merely to have someone tell him the whereabouts of the exact geographic spot that the last Passenger pigeon was shot he has to actually see it and feel it for himself. His relaying of these experiences, often in lyrical, poetic fashion, makes this book worth reading.

Another reason to pick up Hope is a Thing with Feathers is to get a feel for how extinction occurs. Extinction may be an age-old natural process, but conservationists the world over are most alarmed at the increasing rate at which the reductions in species are occurring today. Insidiously, this current extinction "spasm" correlates well with human population growth and economic activity.

This is exemplified by the examples in the book. By all accounts, all six of the bird species in question were abundant (at least five were staggeringly so) at or prior to the time of Anglo contact in North America. Yet within a period of two to four hundred years, truly only a fraction of a hiccup in evolutionary time, they had vanished.

Human fingerprints were all over the scenes of the crimes. The birds were shot, clubbed, strangled, netted, poisoned and stoned for sport, meat, pest control, feathers, and in some cases, for the pure love of killing. Nestlings were toppled from nests. Collectors and hunters took eggs from nests. Forests were cut down for timber extraction and for conversion to agriculture. Ecological processes crucial to life histories of some species, such as fire, were suppressed. Specimens were captured for the pet trade and for scientific study. The list goes on an on.

Many of the tales of wasteful destruction are difficult to swallow. Cokinos recounts one scene describing the killing of Great Auks on Funk Island (off the coast of Newfoundland) for the purpose of collecting their feathers:

"The crews built stone corrals into which they herded hapless Great Auks. Each summer, men boiled vats of water and threw the live birds in to loosen the feathers for plucking; that accomplished, the corpses were either thrown by the wayside or used as oily fuel for the fires boiling the water in which more of their kin died."

In the case of the demise of each of the six species, the blame lay squarely on the shoulders of Homo sapiens. In some cases, the rapidity with which a species was dispatched is truly breathtaking. At the time of European conquest, it is estimated that eastern and central North America supported somewhere between 3 to 5 billion Passenger Pigeons. By 1900, they were gone from the wild.

The lesson learned from Cokinos' investigations is that although extinction is a natural process, it can be greatly, and needlessly, accelerated as a result of human activities. As barbaric and wanton as some of these historical accounts of slaughter and waste might seem, the same problems are still with us today. One of the many important questions that arise from Hope is a Thing with Feathers is whether or not we have learned from our mistakes of the past. It is Cokinos' hope that we will.