In Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos takes that longing one step further, traveling to swamps, prairies, forests, museums, and zoos to visit the last-known whereabouts of six extinct species. Cokinos chronicles the ignorance and greed of hunters, ordinary people, and even scientists that caused the demise of the Carolina parakeet, ivory-billed woodpecker, heath hen, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, and great auk. He also documents the heroic, but futile, attempts by a few to stop the destruction. Pete Dunne watches the gleam return to his recuperating father's eyes as he identifies his first redpoll at a backyard feeder. Bernd Heinrich regales us with the ways in which his everyday routines are turned upside down after he takes in an orphaned owl.
Some encounters are momentary but have a lasting impact on the writer nonetheless.
David James Duncan is changed forever by an encounter with a bird. After coming across and then turning his back on an injured grebe, deeming it too difficult to rescue, Duncan finds himself haunted by its eyes. He becomes unable to walk away from a bird in distress, to the point of occasionally jeopardizing his own safety, darting into traffic to remove a stunned owl, for example. Since the 1980s, when conservative political interests dismissed environmentalists as religious extremists and locked them out of government councils, a number of thoughtful environmentalists have tried to show that building sustainable community is part of protecting biodiversity. You might, depending on your personal cynicism or your proximity to an oil company lobbyist, regard this effort as just romantic fancy, a linking of unrelated things like morality and power or beauty and contentment.