The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species
Scott Weidensaul

Every so often, amid the worst extinction crisis since the last ice age, a previously lost species—the Jamaican iguana, the Congo bay owl—rises, phoenixlike, to the light. Each of these resurrections creates an unquenchable and, at times, quixotic desire for the next one, a longing that forms the heart of Scott Weidensaul's The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species (North Point Press, $26). In this fascinating study of hope in action, Weidensaul travels from Brazil to Tasmania, watching scientific sleuths puzzle out missing species from the most tantalizing of clues. More often than not, their efforts lead to dead ends. Weidensaul rings a skeptical mind-set, for example, to such matters as whether college student David Kulivan really saw a pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers ("the avian equivalent of a unicorn") in a Louisiana forest. But throughout this finely wrought book, Weidensaul remains sympathetic to the impulse behind such sightings. "We are, at our core, an optimistic species. "The thought of cougars slipping through the hardwood forests of the Appalachians, or golden toads shining like embers in some hidden puddle on a Costa Rican mountain, adds luster to an ever-dimmer planet."

—Louis Bayard

Book excerpts:

The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species

• “It is a commonplace that if there is a Holy Grail of lost species, it is the ivorybill…
• “The ivory-billed woodpecker was nature's exclamation point, the personification of pizzazz – a full-throated yell of a bird with a scarlet crest, black-and-white wings like semaphore flags, and a walloping honker of a bill the color of old bone. It was big – as large as a duck or a crow with a 3-foot wingspan – and noisy, too, like someone blowing into a megaphone with the mouthpiece of a clarinet, blasting out single nasal tones that could be heard a half mile away. The ivorybill was a bird with impact…

  “It is a commonplace that if there is a Holy Grail of lost species, it is the ivorybill…”

  Scott Weidensaul
  Author, The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species

• “The ivorybill lived in old growth, and it needed a lot of it, because it occupied a peculiar ecological niche. Many woodpeckers chop away at live or dead wood to expose the insects that live deep inside. But the ivorybill focused its attention on a very specific resource – recently dead trees still clad in bark, beneath which lived the thumb-sized larval grubs of long-horned beetles. To find the bugs, the woodpecker would methodically peel away the tight bark, using its immense and powerful beak as a prybar, eventually denuding the whole tree and leaving the bar piled up around its base in heaps. Of course, only a few trees are going to be in this freshly-dead-but-not-too-rotten state at any given time, so a pair of ivorybills needed a lot of room to roam if they were going to find enough to eat. One later study found that the territory of a single Lord God bird might also support three dozen pileated woodpeckers, which were more flexible in their food habits.
• “Given what later befell the ivorybill, this high degree of specialization is usually portrayed as a maladaptive mistake – the classic case of a species courting extinction by veering too far from the safe, secure middleground of specialization. This overlooks the fact that the primal South was a buffet table for a bird of the ivorybill's tastes, with tens of millions of acres of ideal habitat…
• “There is something about any flamboyant lost species that whistles up the oddballs, and the ivorybill is no different. One of the groups searching for the ivorybill was, while in the field, in cell-phone contact with a self-described "animal communicator" in Florida who, in turn, claimed she was in touch with the spirits of the woodpeckers…”