First published in 2000*, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers - a personal chronicle of vanished birds” is named - as many literate visitors to 10,000 Birds probably already know (and as a semi-literate Brit I have to admit to not knowing) - after an Emily Dickinson poem which uses the metaphor of birds and birdsong to describe hope. Hope, she says, ‘is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul’ and ‘that kept so many warm’…and after reading this deeply thoughtful and poetic book, I could have done with a little hope coming and perching in my soul, because the world, already somewhere I seem to fit into less and less well, seemed a thoroughly cold and hopeless place.

Written by Christopher Cokinos, a poet and environmentalist and the Assistant Professor of English and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environment and Society at Utah State University, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” is a beautifully-written book about the extinction of six bird species, icons all, which have vanished from North America in recent history: the Carolina Parakeet; the Ivory-billed Woodpecker; the Heath Hen; the Passenger Pigeon; the Labrador Duck; and the Great Auk. (So recent, in fact, that there are still people who - through hope and unwillingness to accept the reality of permanent disappearance - regularly mis-identify and report at least two of them (Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon), truly believe that one of them does somehow still cling on in miniscule numbers (the Ivory-billed Woodpecker), and - and I count myself amongst this last group - find it almost impossible to believe that somewhere, on some island we haven’t yet pillaged and emptied, in some place we’ve yet to reach, there may still be a small group of penguin-sized, stubby winged alcids, defying history and quietly breeding amongst colonies of their smaller relatives, that may yet surprise us all and re-appear (the Great Auk).

The fact is, of course, that these once common birds (though the Labrador Duck may never have been numerous enough to be described as ‘common’ - we killed them all before anyone was able to find out for sure) are gone. And the link between the extinctions of all six? The most rapacious predator on the planet, one that is right now condemning many more once common birds (and mammals, insects, plants etc) to a point of no return: us.

If that seems a harsh judgement then you really do need to read this book, because the author has worked incredibly hard on his research, unearthing facts and photographs, laying them out clearly and unflinchingly, and he leaves no doubt at all that the root cause of the huge avian loss detailed in “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” is human: human activity, human greed, and human thoughtlessness. Species as massively abundant as the Passenger Pigeon, as perfectly adapted as the Great Auk, as widespread as the Carolina Parakeet don’t just exist one day and become extinct the next without a cause, and reading through these chapters is a lesson in what happens - and is still happening - when humans run riot in eco-systems they neither appreciate nor feel a part of.

Once the world’s most abundant landbird, the Passenger Pigeon was hunted, shot, and slaughtered in numbers that hurt to read about (I’ve previously posted about this unlucky species at “In Memory of Martha“) - Christopher Cokinos has done a superb job detailing the final few minutes of this beautiful bird’s last moments on planet earth. The Heath Hen was seemingly finally condemned when “someone walking or riding or driving the road that slants northeast from West Tisbury to Vineyard Haven threw away a match or a lit cigarette”: if hunters, collectors, and our own population spreading into what was once Heath Hen territory had not pushed the entire population into one small area then one match or lit cigarette couldn’t possibly have done such damage, but they had, and the end was inevitable. The last known Ivory-billed Woodpeckers survived into the 1940s in a single shrinking patch of forest, the Singer Tract in Louisiana, but one James F Griswold, Chairman of Chicago Mill who owned the Tract and described his company as “money-grubbers”, cut down the trees (and apparently converted them into tea chests for the British Army!): maybe the so-called ‘Lord God Bird’ still hangs on somewhere but read this account which explains precisely what Ivory-bills need in terms of feeding and nesting sites, and it doesn’t leave much hope. Ever wondered how a large auk that lived on distant islands so far away could go extinct? Because once humans arrived and discovered how easily they could be killed, how ‘foolish’ these birds that had previously never encountered a hungry sailor were, they were rounded up and slaughtered in such huge numbers that it was inevitable: like the Dodo, the Solitaire, numerous flightless rails the world over, if it moved but moved only slowly then Man was going to herd it and smash it and thank whatever Deity they believed in for giving them such easy abundance while they did it.

Fortunately for anyone thinking of buying “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” - and I really do recommend it highly - Christopher Cokinos is not (it appears) as angry, dismayed, and world-weary as I am. His writing is more circumspect than mine in this review, a little more dispassionate (in a good sense, writing about extinctions like these could easily turn into an exercise of producing hundreds of pages of finger-pointing and hand-wringing text, but Professor Cokinos is a much better author than that), but it is extremely forceful nonetheless. This is a very affecting book, and I wish that alongside teaching our children extracts from ‘modern classics’ or Shakespeare plays we could put “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” in front of them and make them understand just what we’ve done - and what we’re still doing.

And it’s because we are still ‘doing’ that stories like this need to be told - and told repeatedly. It is criminally dangerous to ignore or gloss over our recent catastrophic collisions with the natural world, because they are ongoing. Right now we are wiping out vast swathes of life on this planet, and it sometimes seems that relatively very few of us are interested, concerned, or even prepared to talk about the reason why: too many of us simply still see other life-forms as something to be used, exploited, eaten, or traded.

I read this book wondering what an author with the same awareness and vision as Christopher Cokinos would write about in, say, thirty years from now: the way we ransacked the oceans of fish, perhaps; cut the fins off millions of sharks before throwing them back into the ocean to die until they reached functional extinction; emptied the forests of Asia for ‘traditional medicines’ made from Pangolins, Tigers, and snakes; pushed some of our closest living relatives into oblivion so that some hugely wealthy companies could make Palm Oil or create pasture for ever more cattle for us to turn into burgers or steaks; how we allowed life the world over to be snuffed out because a world recession made spending money saving us more important than saving a bunch of animals most of us never see anyway? The choices to that author might seem endless, but in reality, like the vast, vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons that once roamed the forests of the eastern United States they are of course neither endless, limitless, or infinite either…

According to the late, great Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the gale - is heard…” I hope she’s right because the gale is in full rage right now and if we don’t hear something soon to lift our hearts I really do fear that many of us will simply give up listening for it: Christopher Cokinos’s book is not light or easy-going or feel-good, but it sings a tune we need to listen to, and to listen to now.

*The publishers tell me that they are publishing this new edition now “due to a new hardcover by Christopher coming out this August, called The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, about the history of meteor-chasers”.

‘Hope is the Thing with Feathers’, by Christopher Cokinos
Softback, 370 pages,
Publisher: Penguin Group/Tarcher
Date published: 05/14/2009
ISBN: 978-1-58542-722-2