Over a 40-year career, Sophie Osborn has evolved from a greenhorn volunteer for nature, doing mundane tasks in the wilds of Wyoming, to the manager of a captive-release programme for California condors in Arizona. This post placed her at the heart of perhaps the most sophisticated operation for a threatened bird anywhere in the world. Yet Osborn was as passionate in her first role as in her later one.
She describes her professional arc in Feather Trails, using three bird species as separate motifs to order her story as a play in three acts. The structure not only offers a way of organising an autobiography; it supplies a sequence of lenses through which to explore the challenges faced by all those acting for birds. The book is thus a personal tale and a meticulously researched environmental history of modern America.
The trio – the peregrine, the Hawaiian crow and the California condor – are united in their need for rehabilitation. But in some ways they could not be more different. The peregrine has been restored, by intervention, to its place as one of the most successful raptors in the world, spread across six continents, thriving equally in the heart of mega-cities and the Arctic tundra. The Hawaiian crow, however, is extinct in the wild; it was never found anywhere but in cloud forest above 1,000 metres and only on one island in its native archipelago.
The order of the birds turns the book into a story with a grim message but one that is bookended with hope. To bring out the darkness of her middle section, Osborn explains how Hawaii, with higher levels of endemism than any other island chain, is one of the world’s great evolutionary laboratories. The arrival of one species unleashed unimaginable devastation.
She makes clear that even as the first Europeans glimpsed and named Hawaii as a terrestrial paradise, its indigenous world was in freefall. Polynesian settlers had already wiped out half the endemic birds. But what brought catastrophe was not direct human action. It was the introduction of rats, cats, dogs, mongooses, pigs and the arrival of mosquitoes. For the intensely sociable, inquisitive, loud-cackling, forest-dwelling and apparently endlessly comedic Hawaii crow, these stowaways were disastrous.
As the complicated issues unfold, we see Osborn blending the personal and scientific. In Hawaii she is confronted by a predator control trap that has caught one of the mammals most threatening to the island’s crow. The offender, about to killed, is a domestic cat. Osborn loves cats and keeps them herself. And so she has to process the implications of her own habits as she explains how, worldwide, cats have contributed to the extinction of 123 avian species and kill more birds than the combined effects of vehicle strikes, pesticides and collisions with anthropogenic obstacles including power lines and wind turbines. In the USA, they consume up to four billion birds and 22 billion mammals per annum. Osborn unpicks all this in a way that avoids judgment and leads us to appreciate more completely her nuanced arguments.
Her years in Arizona working for the restoration of condors proved the inverse of her time in Hawaii. In 1987, North America’s largest raptor verged on extinction, with a total of just 22 birds, and a single female producing viable young. The last throw of the dice entailed catching them and focusing everything on captive breeding. No one had previously succeeded with such a scheme and it was a terrible gamble. But if one project offers hope for the future of all threatened birds, this one is it. Today there are 561 condors and climbing – and most of them are in the wild.
The quiet modesty which Osborn brings to bear on her story somehow underscores its astonishing challenges. One of her most telling descriptions is of a group of stakeholders gathering to discuss the release of captive birds in Utah – a moment that would see the first condors flying freely above the Grand Canyon for hundreds of years. But the participants were ‘heavily armed and bristling with rage’.
Ironically, it is this gun culture that offers the best hope – and casts a shadow over the end of Osborn’s superb book. Condors eat carrion, and the leftovers from hunters’ carcasses supply much of their food. Unfortunately, the hunters are wedded to lead-based ammunition and almost all condors suffer its toxic effects. Unless the lead is removed, and despite all the gains made by the author and her peers, America’s largest extant bird, with its 9ft wingspan, cannot avoid declining to extinction in the wild.
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