The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species
by Scott Weidensaul
Publisher: North Point Press, June 2002

book reviewed by Shakesha Coleman

"The stories I have to tell are about endurance against the odds, about faith and longing and hubris, or grief averted and grief confirmed. They are tales about animals, but really they're about people, and about how our species is, at long last, coming to grips with the consequences of its actions-scrambling in the embers of a global biological holocaust, hoping against hope to save something priceless."

In the face of estimates that as many as 80 unique plant or animal species vanish each day, Scott Weidensaul's Ghost with Trembling Wings is about the few that once thought to be lost are found and the possibility that cloning might save others. We learn a good deal about homo sapiens in the process.

Weidensaul writes about species preservation in terms of rediscovery, desire, and resurrection.

Of rediscovery, Weidensaul tells us that sometimes species are found, or "come back from the grave" by "chance" and by "calculation."

The coelacanth, a fish native of Comoros, was rediscovered by a woman and her biologist husband while honeymooning in Indonesia. Dr. Louise Emmons "found" an undiscovered species of the rodent family-a large tree rat-while hiking in Vilcabamba. A serpent-eagle that had not been seen for sixty years became entangled in the net of two Malagasy biologists. There are other accounts of this sort.

Jerdon's courser, a species of bird, on the other hand was found in Andhra Pradesh, India, after a calculated effort by the Bombay Natural History Society. The rediscovery of the Fiji petrel was also the result of a calculated effort. A calculated effort involves deliberate travel to a location suspected of being a habitat for the species in question.

But finding a "lost" species isn't the end of the story. "How joyful, really, is the resurrection of a species, if the modern world cannot find a single safe haven for it, and if it seems doomed to slip into limbo once more anyway?"

In addition to the problems of how to preserve rare species, there is also a matter of cost. Once found, naturalists then have the task of deciding how to regenerate and care for the rediscovered species. One example is the debate about whether or not to domesticate the Barbary lion-most noted as the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) Studios mascot-once it was "rediscovered." The price tag for propagating a black-footed ferret is $10,000.

Weidensaul warns that politics can also play a role in the survival of rediscovered species. After the "chance" re-sighting of the black-footed ferret, Wyoming Game and Fish (WGF) "refused" (page 108) to collect remaining ferrets, so that reproduction could begin, then took other actions and failed to act in ways that set back attempts to preserve the species.

Why do people get excited about loss species? According to Weidensaul people who believe in the existence of animals long thought to be extinct, are no different from people who believe that singer Elvis Presley is still alive. Their belief derives from humans' inability to recover from loss and to accept reality-specifically, the need to believe that things are not what they seem. People also tend to appreciate subjects-in this case species-after they cease existing. "People keep looking….for the same reasons that they go to mediums in hope of contacting dear, departed Aunt Louise. We're unwilling to accept that there isn't more to the world than what we can see."

On the subject of desire, Weidensaul suggests the characteristics of missing species often tell us about the people searching for them. In "The ABC's of Ghost Cats," he writes about the desire of some people to add excitement into their lives:

It is hard to see a red fox or a badger as the heirs to wilderness; they are beautiful but they cannot fill the empty space in the land or in a human heart. So sometimes, if the countryside does not supply them, people build these spectral beasts for themselves, from twilight, mist, and unspoken, unacknowledged yearning. In the Appalachians, the ghost cat is the Eastern Cougar, its legend built on the possibility, however slim, of truly wild relicts. In Britain, which never had big cats of its own-where the land is tamer and the psychological need perhaps greater-the great black cats have been pulled from even thinner air.

Though "Test-tube Babies" is mostly about the prospect of the thylacine-most commonly known as the Tasmanian "tiger"-and other ghost species still existing, this is the chapter to pay attention to if one is interested in the possibilities of cloning to save species. We are told that the prospects of cloning may be overrated. Weidensaul reports that many scientists-geneticists and other specialists-were not impressed with the movie "Jurassic Park." Given "how quickly DNA begins to degrade after death," the possibility of "extracting dino[saur]-DNA from the guts of mosquitoes that had blundered into tree sap, which then fossilized into amber, which then sat buried for tens of millions of years," as the story goes in "Jurassic Park," is a "looney" idea.

Weidensaul provides a thorough analysis of the history of various "lost species," and gives insightful information about popular myths such as that of the Loch Ness Monster. He does not speak in-depth about government policies regarding endangered species, and does not make any specific policy recommendations. He mentions CITES-the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species-but only to make the point that it is one of only a few regulations that address endangered life.

Trembling Wings is Weidensaul's sermon about peoples' inability to "let things go." The book is written so well, the reader may forget that he or she is reading a book about species that will probably never be spoken of again. The text is suspenseful and entertaining. In fact, if Weidensaul gets bored of reporting about the relationship between people and their search for "missing" items, he should consider a career in science fiction writing.

11/25/2002