I think one of my favorite books is called Swansong, a lot of my friends have done books about dinosaurs and I will never do a book about dinosaurs because other people have done it and I don’t want to do what they do. But I’m fascinated by the subject of extinction, so I did a book called Swansong.
And all of the animals in this book are four hundred, have been extinct less than four hundred years, so obviously no dinosaurs, which went extinct sixty five million years ago. And I had to do research on every single one of them, but it was, I won’t say it was the happiest book I ever did because it was about death, but it was the most fascinating book because of the research.
And how these animals, how the last one died, I always loved telling kids about the passenger pigeon. There was at one time, one out of every two birds in America was a passenger pigeon, there were billions, James J. Audubon once said he saw a flock of them. Three hundred twenty miles long and one mile wide.
It took three days for them to fly over, if you shot a gun in the air you would kill two hundred birds with one shot, if they landed on tree branches, the thick as piano legs they snapped them like twigs. If they landed in fields and flew up again the fields were white with bird droppings.
This is where the idea of stool pigeon came from. They would get one of these birds, I don’t mean to be gross here, they would sew its eyes shut and they would hammer its feet into a piano stool or a tree stump, and the other birds would see it flapping, flapping its wings in pain, they would fly down to inspect, bang, shoot them out of the air.
Out of the billions and billions of these birds the last, the very last passenger pigeon at one o’ clock in the afternoon on September 1st 1914 in the Cincinnati, Ohio Zoo her name was Martha, she was 29 years old, obviously she died from, from either old age or loneliness, or both.
If you ever go to the Cincinnati Zoo you’ll see a huge display of Martha and the passenger pigeon, they’re doing wonderful things with DNA these days but none of these animals: Stellar sea cow, um, the laughing owl, the Arizona cougar, the bally tiger, none of them will ever be coming back again.
And they’re all gone because of the greatest predator on earth, which of course is us, so. That makes I think for a compelling story to fourth and fifth graders who are becoming interested in non-fiction.
You know my poems don’t have a message per say but if they can provide some information to kids in a way that sticks with them, I mean, every time I hear that story or tell it, it’s just not a story I’m ever going to forget.
