Cokinos, Christopher. Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, Tarcher/Putnam, New York: 2000
Few educated realists today will dispute the fact that we are riding the crest of an extinction period unseen since the demise of the dinosaurian hegemony, and that human action is the prima causa of our current dilemma; indeed, the unraveling of the variegated skein of life, billions of years in the making, is the central issue of our time. The inevitable outcome of an unappeasable desire for natural resources perpetually exacerbated by our boundless fecundity, the present spiral of habitat destruction and genetic depletion is already pushing thousands of species over the edge of the abyss each year, creating an accelerating planetary disaster that if not halted and reversed will leave humanity and its slaves alone in the cosmos.
In Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos recounts the demise of six species of American bird life, creatures whose existence on earth was snuffed out by overzealous hunting, landscape alteration, and deliberate persecution. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the author’s careful descriptions of the animals’ final days, including, in the cases of the Carolina parakeet, the great auk and the passenger pigeon, the deaths of the last known individuals to exist.
The specific reasons for each species’ annihilation are carefully recorded: the Carolina parakeet, the country’s only native psittacine save for the endangered thick-billed parrot of the Mexican borderlands, was slaughtered due to its predilection for fruit orchards as well as for its decorative plumage. The passenger pigeon, one flock of which was estimated by naturalist Alexander Wilson in the early 1800s as being composed of approximately 2,230,272,000 birds (“the multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky”), was ultimately vanquished by the destruction of the eastern hardwood forest upon which this mighty biological storm depended. Similarly, the ivory-billed woodpecker—if truly extinct as a majority of ornithologists now fear—was dependent on an ecosystem that was targeted early on for commercial exploitation: southern hardwood bottomlands. The Labrador duck, a marine species formerly native to the northeastern seas, was destroyed chiefly by overhunting, as was the heath hen of New England, a northeastern subspecies of the greater prairie chicken, which was extirpated from the mainland and reduced to a pitiful few and susceptible individuals on Martha’s Vineyard.
The author reminds us that as with critically imperiled species alive today, such as the Florida panther and the whooping crane, any “population that breeds with an insufficient gene pool merely bides its time; limited genetic information can expose a population to disease by lowering resistance and introducing genetic mutations.” The current policy of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, charged with defending and propagating the nation’s wildlife, often disregards the recommendations of its own biological staff and for political reasons delays the listing of biologically needy species until population levels have become perilously low, enhancing the likelihood of extinction through genetic impoverishment.
Cokinos notes that as healthy populations became significantly impaired enough to draw notice, the persecution actually increased. Collectors vied for last specimens and eggs … pseudo-scientific mercenaries presciently condemned by Audubon as “assassins, who walk forward exultantly, and with their shouts mingling oaths and execrations … See how they crush the chick within its shell, how they trample every egg in their way with their huge and clumsy boots.” Egg collecting helped to finally exterminate the Labrador duck, preceded by market hunting and the destruction of eelgrass habitat due to pollutive effluents from the mushrooming eastern seaboard, and finally the inevitable genetic bottleneck that snuffs the flickering flame of a dying species. (Only forty specimens of this species survive, making the dried bodies valuable enough for an individual to have been included in the general looting of what was left of Dresden by Soviet troops in 1945.)
Processes similarly motivated by avarice and ignorance doomed the great auk, the flightless alcid of the North Atlantic whose final moments are so gracefully depicted by Peter Matthiessen at the opening of his essential Wildlife in America. The great auk’s flightlessness is an illustrative case of convergent evolution, resembling as it does the penguins of the southern hemisphere in its terrestrial locomotion and powerful swimming flight. Pathetically unused to threats posed by land animals, it allowed itself to be herded by the thousands aboard fishing vessels off the Grand Banks for eventual use as food and fertilizer.
The means of slaughter that brought these species to and over the brink are described with cool precision, often quoting contemporary records, and grimly illuminate our own species’ genius for overwhelming carnage. In the course of a mass netting of roosting passenger pigeons destined for Eastern grocery stores,
“One witness said that after a net sprung, ‘Confusion ten times confounded follows and such a fluttering of wings and straining to get free you never saw … The pigeons, frightened beyond any power to describe, put their heads through the meshes of the net to fly.’ This actually made the exhausting work of killing the pigeons easier: Netters walked across the undulating mass and broke the birds’ skulls or necks. The netters used pinchers to do this, which was speedy but bloody, or snapped the bones with their fingers. This could go on for hours, leaving hands so sore the fingers couldn’t move. Biting the heads to crunch the skulls also worked, but here too one’s mouth and teeth grew sore by day’s end.”
An Ohio legislative committee wrote in 1857 that the passenger pigeon was “’wonderfully prolific … no ordinary destruction can lessen them or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced,’” yet “at or about 1 PM on Tuesday, September 1, 1914,” the last passenger pigeon on earth, an aged female named Martha, drew her closing breath at the Cincinnati Zoo, which is also the dying place of the final Carolina parakeet, a male named Incas who would die on February 22, 1918.
The environmental struggles being waged today in federal courts against the well-heeled forces of myopic greed are presaged in the struggle to preserve a copse of hardwood for the ivory-billed woodpecker in 1943. The Singer Tract, a wooded remnant of riparian bottomland in Louisiana that gave shelter to the last known population of ivory-bills, was denied repeated attempts at protection due to formulae now rancidly familiar: “The company [Chicago Mills] argued that less logging would mean financial loss and fewer jobs … But the offer of $200,000 from Louisiana would seem to have mitigated against the company’s argument. Furthermore, German prisoners of war now did the actual logging.” (Cokinos’s italics; the Germans POWs were “incredulous at the waste—only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.”) “The company refused to deal. ‘We are just money grubbers,’ said James F Griswold, Chicago Mills Chairman of the Board, during the meeting. ‘We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations,’” a remarkably candid assessment of a corporate mentality still predominant in the United States. With their enormous habitat needs (estimated at six square miles per breeding pair) and dependence on valuable old-growth trees, the ivory-bill was placed directly in the path of rapacious corporate demand. Astonishingly faithful to their roost trees, “even if that meant scaling bark [for grubs] from recently dead second growth instead of utilizing [preferred] old-growth trees” distant from the roost, the magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker was last authoritatively seen by wildlife artist Don Eckleberry in April of 1944; the lone female’s plaintive call could be clearly heard over the approaching clash and roar of logging equipment.
The heath hen, efforts at whose preservation were marred by incessant political infighting among Massachusetts authorities, was by 1932 down to a lone male; named Booming Ben for his species’ reverberating mating call, he was last seen on March 11. A few years before, a poignant scene involving this relic bird was observed by two conservationists from an observation blind.
“Burgess and Green huddled in the blind watching the lone bird mosey about Green’s field. Then they caught their breath as the bird flew toward an oak tree—but not to the low branches for shelter. Instead, the heath hen flew to the very top of the tree, as if proclaiming his presence from the altitude might compensate for his loneliness.
“Suddenly the bird—who had been silent so far that year—bobbed his neck, inflated his air sac, lifted his pinnae [spiky tail feathers] in the courtship V display, spread and pressed his wings against his body, lifted his tail and boomed. Far from the ground on which his companions once had walked, the world’s last heath hen displayed his valiance and desire from on high, the sounds of the moaning boom sliding downward to the drumming field where Gross and Burgess could hardly believe their eyes and ears.”
The ghost call of this forlorn final survivor, moving beyond desperation or despair, powerfully depicts the utter tragedy of our imposing obliteration on a fellow creation. For an individual to die is one thing; death, as our culture is beginning to understand, is part of and necessary to life. But to witness—not to say cause—the infinite extinction of an entire category of life would seem to be the ultimate “sin,” if we may use that term to signify absolute crimes of violent folly and indifference toward the earth and its originator.
The intimations of ultimate mortality described in this book are being reenacted daily in our own time, unseen and unmourned, from the felled rainforests of Amazonia to the fading coral reefs of the world’s tropical oceans. Unlike those who participated in the demise of the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, we now possess the scientific understanding of what is necessary to preserve and replenish the natural world; all that we need muster is the will and the courage. Near the end of his book Cokinos quotes the ornithologist Alfred Newton, then painfully investigating the last days of the recently extinct great auk: “Our science demands something else—that we shall transmit to posterity a less perishable inheritance.”
Few educated realists today will dispute the fact that we are riding the crest of an extinction period unseen since the demise of the dinosaurian hegemony, and that human action is the prima causa of our current dilemma; indeed, the unraveling of the variegated skein of life, billions of years in the making, is the central issue of our time. The inevitable outcome of an unappeasable desire for natural resources perpetually exacerbated by our boundless fecundity, the present spiral of habitat destruction and genetic depletion is already pushing thousands of species over the edge of the abyss each year, creating an accelerating planetary disaster that if not halted and reversed will leave humanity and its slaves alone in the cosmos.
In Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos recounts the demise of six species of American bird life, creatures whose existence on earth was snuffed out by overzealous hunting, landscape alteration, and deliberate persecution. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the author’s careful descriptions of the animals’ final days, including, in the cases of the Carolina parakeet, the great auk and the passenger pigeon, the deaths of the last known individuals to exist.
The specific reasons for each species’ annihilation are carefully recorded: the Carolina parakeet, the country’s only native psittacine save for the endangered thick-billed parrot of the Mexican borderlands, was slaughtered due to its predilection for fruit orchards as well as for its decorative plumage. The passenger pigeon, one flock of which was estimated by naturalist Alexander Wilson in the early 1800s as being composed of approximately 2,230,272,000 birds (“the multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky”), was ultimately vanquished by the destruction of the eastern hardwood forest upon which this mighty biological storm depended. Similarly, the ivory-billed woodpecker—if truly extinct as a majority of ornithologists now fear—was dependent on an ecosystem that was targeted early on for commercial exploitation: southern hardwood bottomlands. The Labrador duck, a marine species formerly native to the northeastern seas, was destroyed chiefly by overhunting, as was the heath hen of New England, a northeastern subspecies of the greater prairie chicken, which was extirpated from the mainland and reduced to a pitiful few and susceptible individuals on Martha’s Vineyard.
The author reminds us that as with critically imperiled species alive today, such as the Florida panther and the whooping crane, any “population that breeds with an insufficient gene pool merely bides its time; limited genetic information can expose a population to disease by lowering resistance and introducing genetic mutations.” The current policy of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, charged with defending and propagating the nation’s wildlife, often disregards the recommendations of its own biological staff and for political reasons delays the listing of biologically needy species until population levels have become perilously low, enhancing the likelihood of extinction through genetic impoverishment.
Cokinos notes that as healthy populations became significantly impaired enough to draw notice, the persecution actually increased. Collectors vied for last specimens and eggs … pseudo-scientific mercenaries presciently condemned by Audubon as “assassins, who walk forward exultantly, and with their shouts mingling oaths and execrations … See how they crush the chick within its shell, how they trample every egg in their way with their huge and clumsy boots.” Egg collecting helped to finally exterminate the Labrador duck, preceded by market hunting and the destruction of eelgrass habitat due to pollutive effluents from the mushrooming eastern seaboard, and finally the inevitable genetic bottleneck that snuffs the flickering flame of a dying species. (Only forty specimens of this species survive, making the dried bodies valuable enough for an individual to have been included in the general looting of what was left of Dresden by Soviet troops in 1945.)
Processes similarly motivated by avarice and ignorance doomed the great auk, the flightless alcid of the North Atlantic whose final moments are so gracefully depicted by Peter Matthiessen at the opening of his essential Wildlife in America. The great auk’s flightlessness is an illustrative case of convergent evolution, resembling as it does the penguins of the southern hemisphere in its terrestrial locomotion and powerful swimming flight. Pathetically unused to threats posed by land animals, it allowed itself to be herded by the thousands aboard fishing vessels off the Grand Banks for eventual use as food and fertilizer.
The means of slaughter that brought these species to and over the brink are described with cool precision, often quoting contemporary records, and grimly illuminate our own species’ genius for overwhelming carnage. In the course of a mass netting of roosting passenger pigeons destined for Eastern grocery stores,
“One witness said that after a net sprung, ‘Confusion ten times confounded follows and such a fluttering of wings and straining to get free you never saw … The pigeons, frightened beyond any power to describe, put their heads through the meshes of the net to fly.’ This actually made the exhausting work of killing the pigeons easier: Netters walked across the undulating mass and broke the birds’ skulls or necks. The netters used pinchers to do this, which was speedy but bloody, or snapped the bones with their fingers. This could go on for hours, leaving hands so sore the fingers couldn’t move. Biting the heads to crunch the skulls also worked, but here too one’s mouth and teeth grew sore by day’s end.”
An Ohio legislative committee wrote in 1857 that the passenger pigeon was “’wonderfully prolific … no ordinary destruction can lessen them or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced,’” yet “at or about 1 PM on Tuesday, September 1, 1914,” the last passenger pigeon on earth, an aged female named Martha, drew her closing breath at the Cincinnati Zoo, which is also the dying place of the final Carolina parakeet, a male named Incas who would die on February 22, 1918.
The environmental struggles being waged today in federal courts against the well-heeled forces of myopic greed are presaged in the struggle to preserve a copse of hardwood for the ivory-billed woodpecker in 1943. The Singer Tract, a wooded remnant of riparian bottomland in Louisiana that gave shelter to the last known population of ivory-bills, was denied repeated attempts at protection due to formulae now rancidly familiar: “The company [Chicago Mills] argued that less logging would mean financial loss and fewer jobs … But the offer of $200,000 from Louisiana would seem to have mitigated against the company’s argument. Furthermore, German prisoners of war now did the actual logging.” (Cokinos’s italics; the Germans POWs were “incredulous at the waste—only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.”) “The company refused to deal. ‘We are just money grubbers,’ said James F Griswold, Chicago Mills Chairman of the Board, during the meeting. ‘We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations,’” a remarkably candid assessment of a corporate mentality still predominant in the United States. With their enormous habitat needs (estimated at six square miles per breeding pair) and dependence on valuable old-growth trees, the ivory-bill was placed directly in the path of rapacious corporate demand. Astonishingly faithful to their roost trees, “even if that meant scaling bark [for grubs] from recently dead second growth instead of utilizing [preferred] old-growth trees” distant from the roost, the magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker was last authoritatively seen by wildlife artist Don Eckleberry in April of 1944; the lone female’s plaintive call could be clearly heard over the approaching clash and roar of logging equipment.
The heath hen, efforts at whose preservation were marred by incessant political infighting among Massachusetts authorities, was by 1932 down to a lone male; named Booming Ben for his species’ reverberating mating call, he was last seen on March 11. A few years before, a poignant scene involving this relic bird was observed by two conservationists from an observation blind.
“Burgess and Green huddled in the blind watching the lone bird mosey about Green’s field. Then they caught their breath as the bird flew toward an oak tree—but not to the low branches for shelter. Instead, the heath hen flew to the very top of the tree, as if proclaiming his presence from the altitude might compensate for his loneliness.
“Suddenly the bird—who had been silent so far that year—bobbed his neck, inflated his air sac, lifted his pinnae [spiky tail feathers] in the courtship V display, spread and pressed his wings against his body, lifted his tail and boomed. Far from the ground on which his companions once had walked, the world’s last heath hen displayed his valiance and desire from on high, the sounds of the moaning boom sliding downward to the drumming field where Gross and Burgess could hardly believe their eyes and ears.”
The ghost call of this forlorn final survivor, moving beyond desperation or despair, powerfully depicts the utter tragedy of our imposing obliteration on a fellow creation. For an individual to die is one thing; death, as our culture is beginning to understand, is part of and necessary to life. But to witness—not to say cause—the infinite extinction of an entire category of life would seem to be the ultimate “sin,” if we may use that term to signify absolute crimes of violent folly and indifference toward the earth and its originator.
The intimations of ultimate mortality described in this book are being reenacted daily in our own time, unseen and unmourned, from the felled rainforests of Amazonia to the fading coral reefs of the world’s tropical oceans. Unlike those who participated in the demise of the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, we now possess the scientific understanding of what is necessary to preserve and replenish the natural world; all that we need muster is the will and the courage. Near the end of his book Cokinos quotes the ornithologist Alfred Newton, then painfully investigating the last days of the recently extinct great auk: “Our science demands something else—that we shall transmit to posterity a less perishable inheritance.”
