On Sunday morning, I walked through the Claremont Farmers’ Market, where, at a book stall manned by volunteers, I found Christopher Cokinos’ book, Hope is a Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (2000).
The book is part natural history, part travel narrative, and part elegy for recently extinct avian species, including the Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Heath Hen, Passenger Pigeon, Labrador Duck, and Great Auk.
The title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson:
I find the book inspiring in the attention that it brings to the loss of birds from their native habitats due to human exploitation and in the strange but wondrous idea that we might be able to revive currently extinct avian species someday using the science of de-extinction (also called resurrection biology) and cloning.
BIRD-WATCHER'S DIARY 