Christopher Cokinos

Cokinos spent ten years researching the life and subsequent extinction of six birds: Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Labrador Duck, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Heath Hen, and the Great Auk.
I find it terribly sad that no one knows the exact date of the demise of the Carolina Parakeet, but then again that's probably true of many extinct species. Right? How do we really know when we have seen the very last whatever? Here are details from Hope is the Thing with Feathers that will stick with me for a very long time: the Heath Hen has been compared to the Greater Prairie Chicken for their myriad of similarities. Their mating sounds are practical identical. Is that why no one took the extinction of the Heath Hen seriously? Were they so abundant they fell victim to overhunting; were they that easy to massacre? Is that what happened to the Passenger Pigeon? The cruelty inflicted on these birds was difficult to read. Cokinos gets into the question of cloning. Can you clone a species which has gone completely extinct? Can we have a Jurassic Park moment on a less dangerous scale?
Besides hunting, another factor wreaking havoc on bird populations was deforestation. Singer Sewing Machine purchased the nesting grounds of Lord God birds. Then they sold the rights to logging companies who cleared the land, destroying everything in its path. This happened over and over again.… (meer)

So, phew. It took me a while to get through this one. I found it very messy, especially at the beginning. It was as if Cokinos couldn't decide what kind of book he wanted to write. Would it be a scientifically-minded work? Would it be a memoir? Would it be historical? It turns out it's kind of the worst of all of those things, put together in a rather slapdash fashion.

That makes little sense to me, since he has apparently been gathering material for at least a decade. To give him his due, he did point out in his introduction that the book wasn't going to be your standard, run-of-the-mill work on meteorites. He just thought the book was more cohesive than it actually is.… (meer)