Extinct Birds, revised edition

Fuller, Errol

ISBN 10: 080143954X / ISBN 13: 9780801439544

Published by Comstock Pub. Associates, 2001

About this Item

1987/2001. Birds, Natural History, Conservation. Cornell University Press. Very good - fine boards and dust jacket 398p. Please allow for additional overseas postage 1/24.

Seller Inventory # -268755495

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Extinct Birds, revised edition
• Publisher: Comstock Pub. Associates
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080143954X
• ISBN 13: 9780801439544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

We learn from an early age that nothing is quite so dead as a dodo. We've heard stories of flocks of passenger pigeons once darkening the skies over North America, only to be reduced to a single bird, Martha, who perished in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914. Errol Fuller's illustrated "Extinct Birds" provides details of the natural history and fates of more than 80 species of birds now believed to be gone forever. Fuller conveys accurate scientific and historical information about the lives, times and disappearances of bird species since 1600. His species accounts are vivid reminders of what birds, precisely, the world has already lost. The physical evidence provided by preserved specimens is given narrative texture with Fuller's use of eyewitness accounts of the lives (and, in many cases, the last days) of bird species from all over the world. Nearly all the accounts in "Extinct Birds" are illustrated with colour plates, many by artists, including Audubon, Keulemans and Lear, who had the advantage of working from fresh specimens or even from living birds. These paintings are also primary sources of scientific knowledge. Birds for which appropriate illustrations did not already exist are shown in new paintings produced especially for this book. The revised edition of "Extinct Birds" includes several species - among them three from North America - not covered in the original 1987 edition. More happily, two species have been rediscovered in the intervening years and several others in danger of being declared extinct have been located again. By describing in words and pictures the beauty and diversity of those birds already lost to extinction, Fuller attempts to inspire us to do what we can to prevent future editions of "Extinct Birds" from drawing new chapters from the field guides of today.

Review

Ornithologists estimate that there have been some 150,000 avian species since birds first appeared millions of years ago. Errol Fuller points out in Extinct Birds that if that figure, based on incomplete evidence, is correct, then nearly 94 percent of those species have gone extinct over time.

Most have done so through more or less natural causes--through disease, say, or widespread climatic change. In historic times, though, many species have been hastened to extinction through human actions, inadvertent or deliberate. In the case of the Hawaiian rail, Fuller writes in this catalogue of birds that have disappeared since 1600, the introduction of alien species such as the mongoose, domestic cat and rat is likely to blame. Rats, too, killed off the Lord Howe Island white-eye when a ship accidentally grounded there in 1918. The Carolina parakeet disappeared a few years later, owing, perhaps, to the destruction of its forest habitat and its beautiful plumage, highly prized by hunters. Mosquitoes carried on other ships felled many other island species. And so on. Curiously, Fuller writes, the usual-suspect agents of extinction-hunting or egg collecting for example--have had a smaller effect on vulnerable bird species than have changes in the environment wrought by humans and their "accompanying menagerie".

Fuller's book makes for a sobering obituary, and one of particular interest to environmentalists engaged in habitat preservation and restoration. --Gregory McNamee