On 2009-06-04 Ashtar Command, Stockholm, Sweden wrote: ´Extinct Birds´ is a kind of encyclopaedia about all or most birds known to have gone extinct for the past 400 years. It´s lavishly illustrated, with reproductions of paintings or illustrations from old books on natural history. Some of the paintings turn out to be made by Errol Fuller himself!
The birds come in systematic order. All the well known cases of extinction are covered: dodo, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, the great moa birds, the ivory billed woodpecker, the great auk... A few extinct races are also covered, including the Tasmanian emu. The most intriguing chapter deals with ´mystery birds´. The author reaches the conclusion that the white dodo of Réunion never actually existed, except in the imagination of European Baroque painters! There are also some illustrations of ´lost´ birds of paradise.
The book is an excellent addition to any coffee table. You might also consider it as a birthday or Christmas gift. At the same time, it feels very tragic. Once gone, an extinct bird will never come back. Even apart from the fact that it takes longer for Mother Nature to evolve them, than it takes for us to exterminate them...
. And summed up by saying The tragedy of extinct birds. Currently Extinct Birds (Comstock books) has an overall rating of 10 over 10.
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Cornell University Press claimed Ornithologists estimate that there have been 150,000 avian species since birds first appeared millions of years ago. If that figure, based on incomplete evidence, is correct, writes Errol Fuller, 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 and deliberate. In the case of the Hawaiian rail, Fuller writes in this catalog of birds that have disappeared since 1600, the introduction of alien species, such as the mongoose, domestic cat, and rat, was probably to blame. Rats, too, killed off the Lord Howe Island white-eye when a ship accidentally ran aground 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, say, or egg collecting--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
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