Sophie A. H. Osborn (Chelsea Green)
Wildlife biologist Sophie Osborn has spent a career working with birds that have been a feather鈥檚 breadth from extinction in the US. Her new book, Feather Trails: A journey of discovery among endangered birds, focuses on the Hawaiian crow, the California condor and the peregrine falcon (also found globally). We have pushed them to the brink, and Osborn describes in painstaking detail the Herculean work to pull them back.
Two conflicting feelings arise from reading the book. The first is despair at our mindless destruction of the natural world. Whether it is pesticide use thinning peregrine eggs so they crack prematurely, invasive species killing Hawaiian crows or California condors being poisoned by lead shot, at times it feels like a miracle that we have any birds left at all.
Advertisement
That is tempered with an awe at the ingenuity and tenderness shown in our efforts to save them. The devotion of Osborn and her colleagues leaves you with the feeling that, if we are capable of showing such care to other species, then whatever other damage we have done to the planet might equally be healed.
This is a book for the aspiring field biologist in your life. Describing both the adventure and the impact of her work, Osborn makes it sound the most alluring of career choices. When stories about the natural world feel hopeless, her book shows beyond doubt the difference a truly committed individual can make.
Yet once things unravel, it is terribly hard to stitch them back together. Osborn writes about months spent camping in remote locations, monitoring each released bird during every waking hour, in every type of weather. The time and money expended on each individual animal is immense, and for every hint of progress, there are losses to endure. While such devotion to a few creatures can seem profligate, the truth is that birds will only be saved if we also save their habitat, and they are the emblems that push us to try to restore whole ecosystems. Yes, it would have been so much simpler not to have pushed things to this point. But here we are, and now millions of years of evolution rests in the hands of a few determined people who refuse to take no for an answer.
Some sections of the book are overlong and the extended descriptions of bird behaviour assume a readership as devoted as Osborn. Yet it deserves to be read widely, because it is only in coming to understand these animals, suggests Osborn, that we can choose to love and help them.
We are introduced to the dazzling aerobatics of the peregrine falcon, the world鈥檚 fastest bird, the playful, sociable Hawaiian crow and the California condor鈥檚 dedicated parenting. When a species declines to a population you can count on two hands, individuals become personalities, more family member than animal, and Osborn describes each intimately.
Such familiarity makes each setback more heartbreaking. But in the words of ecologist Paul Banko, talking about a failed release of Hawaiian crows in 2016: 鈥淭here is no room for pessimists in endangered species recovery.鈥�
Thanks to conservationists, the peregrine is once again thriving in North America. And after almost 40 years of captive breeding, there are now 347 California condors flying free, although the population still isn鈥檛 self-sustaining. The Hawaiian crow, however, remains extinct in the wild.
The litany of threats many birds face, from poaching and disease to habitat loss and climate change, means wins are never easy and never assured. Yet the alternative is a landscape empty of birdsong, the hardest thing to endure of all.
Adam Weymouth is the author of聽Kings of the Yukon
麻豆传媒 book club
Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.
