Bird

From tiny corpses to obsessive scientists, hot sauce on the Gulf and tears in the Hall of Asian Animals, Bird is at once a quirky natural history and a personal journey, one that says as much about humanity as about the feathered creatures we have eaten, shot, studied, extincted, protected, and, sometimes, watched. As I write these words, science tells us North American bird populations have declined by a third. Reading this book is one of the steps we can take toward giving birds back to the air that belongs, first, to them. * Christopher Cokinos, Associate Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA, and author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (2009) and Bodies, of the Holocene (2013) *