Birds Books

Every good idea in a book deserves a wipe of a highlighter pen. My copy of this book ended up with over half of the page real estate in fluorescent yellow.

Why? It's full of excellent tips, encouragement and dry humour for anyone who communicates in print - and that's most of us. And for once, the testimonials are accurate; his ex-employer, David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy & Mather fame) says "Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone else in the world. His book about it is pure gold".

His only deviates from his own advice once - there is no address to reply to him. Apart from that, I recommend this to all my friends - and hide it from my enemies!

_Extinct Birds_ is not a dry catalogue ticking off each species we have lost. Besides the lovely illustrations, Fuller has written about the birds with a dry wit not found in a mere catalogue. Fuller writes, "...extinct birds are, by and large, a quite spectacular bunch. Although there are some fairly unexceptional exceptions among the ranks of the extinct, not a few of the world's most memorable birds are now among the lost. The dodo, the great auk, the moas, and the great elephant birds are all obvious qualifiers. Are there any conclusions to be drawn from this? Perhaps only the notion that a raised head is more likely to be chopped off!" The lovely pictures in this volume, often from sources that could draw the bird from life, come from Audubon, of course, from Edward Lear, who is now more famous for his nonsense verse, and from Fuller and some of his friends.

Some of the stories behind the birds are decidedly odd. The funniest and saddest of the stories is that of the Stephen Island wren. Stephen Island is a square mile rocky place near New Zealand. There was a lighthouse on the island, and the lighthouse keeper had a cat named Tibbles. As cats are wont to do, Tibbles would go hunting, and would bring his dead prey back to his human. Tibbles brought the tiny birds to the keeper in around 1896 and thus can be credited with finding a bird that no one had previously recorded. He can also be credited with wiping out the entire species. The specimens he collected are in various museums. Fuller quotes an anonymous correspondent to _The Canterbury Press_ at the time: "And we certainly think that it would be as well if the Marine Department, in sending lighthouse keepers to isolated islands where interesting specimens of native birds are known or believed to exist, were to see that they are not allowed to take any cats with them, even if mouse-traps have to be furnished at the cost of the state."

A gorgeous volume, _Extinct Birds_ is paradoxically full of lively stories.

I think the second edition has not evolved too much from the first. Pehaps a few maps and a greater sense of urgency in an overview chapter could have made this book more than just a collector's book. It could have lists of organisations you can join to help prevent extinctions and notes about endemic bird areas - in the style of Roger and Petersen.

This remains an important reference though its traditional format has obviously not helped sales as I got mine for a fraction of the published cost.

In the introduction Fuller mentions Jerdon's Courser and the Four-colored flowerpecker, two species previously thought extinct (the flowerpecker since 1900). Both have since been rediscovered. This illustrates one of the dramatic changes in recent times with regard to the whole subject of extinction. Rediscovery is news and extinction is big business. It long ago shrugged off it's dry and dusty, stuffed-exhibits-in-a-museum image, and is now firmly embedded in popular culture and is the subject of bestsellers and box-office hits. This is especially true for birds and dinosaurs. Fuller says as much and gives a nod to the huge role JURASSIC PARK played in this. The story of the Coelacanth is even more remarkable than the rediscovery, after 100 years, of a small flowerpecking bird in a stand of forests on the Phillipine island of Cebu. Nonetheless we'll probably have a long wait before we see a prehistoric fish starring in a movie. The Coelacanth does have its own book though. Its rediscovery in 1938 after being gone for 400 million years is the subject of Samantha Weinberg's A FISH CAUGHT IN TIME. Fuller acknowledges another recent trend which is heightening interest in extinction - the recent scientific work using DNA technology - and its hint that we may be able to restore species in the not too distant future.

As part of useful background information Fuller talks about the special role of islands in the extinction process. There is much that is known about the peculiar sensitivity of these ecosystems. There is a correlation between islands and high rates of extinct, and threatened but still extant, bird species. Fuller makes referrence to David Quammen's appropriately titled book THE SONG OF THE DODO which explores the whole subject of island biogeography. Small fragile ecosystems, loss of habitat (especially forest cover), the impact of agriculture and other man-made environments, introduced species and competition; all of these are subjects scientists are very familiar with and whose impact on bird extinction has been studied.

Where the recent popular interest in extinction becomes slightly problematic for professionals is that we all want to know what's happening, but quantifying bird extinctions and arriving at loss rates still remains an inexact science. This book covers the 85 bird species that are known to have gone extinct since 1600. There is immediately a problem with this simple statement. "Known" is very subjective and the starting year of 1600 is artificial. Fuller explains: "The year 1600 heralds a period during which relatively reliable records have accumulated; before this time the records are sparse and, where they do exist, it is usually difficult to know what to make of them." As for the difficulty of statistical methods in estimating loss rates, consider the following. For ease of calculation use the number of species lost as 80 and years at 400 (1600 to 2000). This works out to 5, which a dishonest person could report as saying that on average over the last 400 years we have been losing bird species at the rate of 5 per year! ... That works out to 2000 extinct species but we know that the correct figure is 85, so it simply means that for many years there were no extinctions. What we do know is that the rate of extinction in recent years has been increasing. The most commonly accepted bird extinction rate today is Colombia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservations' figure of 0.01 percent or one species per year. This little exercise illustrates the statistical chicanery employed by THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST with his estimate of the overall extinction rate at "0.7 percent over the next 50 years". This works out to 0.014 percent which is barely higher than the most conservative estimate for bird extinctions alone!

Statistics aside, and regardless of whether you accept that there will be an estimated 1200 more bird species extinct in the next 100 years there are a couple of things that are certain. The next edition of this book will be as beautiful as this one and depending on how soon it's published it will be bigger. How much larger and by how many species remians the sad unknown.