Feathered-friend Obits

by Rex Buchanan
Associate Director, Kansas Geological Survey

One Christmas I gave away six copies of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Warner Books, 2001), a book about extinct bird species by Chris Cikinos. Cikinos was an English professor at Kansas State University, and his book details the extinction of five bird species - the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the heath hen, the great auk, and the Labrador duck - along with one species thought to be extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker.

The book does more than just impart scientific information, though Cikinos does that well. It's written with an English professor's sensitivity for the personal (note the bow to Emily Dickinson in the title). He visits the places these birds were last seen. He describes their final days and checks out their stuffed remains in museums. Each chapter is like an extended obituary for a now-gone friend (or, in the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a friend who's since come back to life).

Even though Cikinos lived in Manhattan, I wasn't aware of his book until a couple of years after its publication, when I saw it mentioned in a New Yorker magazine article about the ivory-billed woodpecker. After reading the book, I decided that I needed to meet anybody who could impart science so eloquently (and lived just down I-70 a ways). But by the time I made contact with him through a mutual friend, he'd left K-State for greener academic pastures. Our paths never crossed.

We usually don't appreciate what we have until it's gone - though every once in a rare while we get a second chance.