Hoose, Phillip. The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

What a shame that this book came out just before the first confirmed sightings of an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker inside the US in decades; as it is it feels just a bit unfinished, like a book that drops off before its last chapter.

It covers a couple of centuries of the history of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and its apparent extinction, from its discovery in the swamps of the southern US in the late 18th century to its last confirmed sightings in the 1940s. In so doing, it touches upon wildlife collectors, the craze for feathers in hats, the Civil War, and World War II, working in the historical context so that the story of extinction isn't told as a story of mean, selfish and greedy people, but--for the most part--as a story of innocent ignorance and places where there are no good choices.

It is very educational, and there are a lot of nice photographs. For the most part, it strikes a good balance between focusing on its subjects and broadening out its scope to give a wider historical context. Nevertheless, it struck me as quite dry. This is despite the awkward attempts at human interest detail, which make me want to cry out for a citation, but are thankfully rare:

Twelve-year-old Billy Fought scuffed his boot in the red dust as he waited for his school bus to come where Sharkey Road crossed the Chicago Mill railroad tracks. It was a late autumn day in 1943. The leaves were already starting to turn. Billy and his ten-year-old brother, Bobby, were new to the countryside.

(I must note that the book does have a very nice and extensive listing of sources; nevertheless, I don't know that it's provable that John James Audubon kissed his wife goodbye as he set out on a long bird-collecting trip).

Perhaps it's that the book never seems to have a clear mastery of how one should write to the target age group; sometimes it seems too hard, sometimes it seems to talk down to children. It's written at a ninth-grade level, by Amazon's text stats, yet the sentences seem oddly stilted sometimes. Perhaps it's simply that 150 pages isn't enough time to do more than race through the high points; the longer sections focusing on the recent past are the most interesting.

Still, I have to say that this book does a lot better than the majority of environmentally focused books targeted at children and young adults; it's in favor of saving endangered species, obviously, but it doesn't hit you over the head with messages, and there are no evil black-hat villains. One really feels, not so much for the rare and shy birds, but for the people trying desperately to preserve the last bits of virgin Louisiana swamp in the face of logging and development. And the book leaves open the tantalizing possibility of surviving Ivory-bill populations in Cuba and Louisiana--it makes for a happier story than "they're all dead now, there aren't any more," and so much better that the slightly hopeful ending found itself vindicated.

Hoose, Philip. The Race to Save the Lord God Bird. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.