The Lost World

Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists--Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind--whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy. Weidensaul never holds forth; he describes and explains as if you were hiking next to him, and, at least until you close the book and start thinking seriously about mosquitoes, scorpions and leaking tents, you wish you could sign on for his next field trip. “The Ghost With Trembling Wings” is more than a lament for species in peril, it is a meditation on the intersection of biology and hope, and a peripatetic exploration of the complexities of conservation.

If all you read is the jacket copy, Robert Twigger’s “The Extinction Club” sounds as if it might make a good companion volume. It promises to tell the story of the odd-looking Pere David deer, known in its native China as Milu, where for centuries it existed only in the emperor’s forbidden game park. On the brink of extinction a century ago, it was snatched from the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion and brought to the English estate of the 11th Duke of Bedford, where a herd still survives.

But though Weidensaul sets out to follow the faint traces of missing species through the remotest reaches of places such as Tasmania, Brazil and St. Lucia, as well as the dusty archives of natural history museums around the world, Twigger seems more interested in the circuitous and unmarked pathways of his own mind.

Weidensaul builds thoughtful, thought-provoking conclusions from meticulous (and sometimes painful) research. Twigger, magpie-like, assembles a collection of glittering historical curiosities and uses them to decorate a book that is essentially about himself.

You can learn a lot--about biology, natural history and human nature--from Weidensaul. “The Ghost With Trembling Wings” is, variously, history, travelogue, adventure story and ecological mystery, packed with intriguing data but never mired in it.

Weidensaul has a keen eye, a deft wit and a knack for narrative momentum. A subtitle as broad as his invites fuzzy thinking, but he presents the shape of his ideas in a crisp spectrum.

First, there are the species that haven’t been seen in a long time, relatively ordinary creatures whose gradual disappearance makes them suddenly notable, like “a relative who isn’t appreciated until she’s gone.”

Weidensaul opens the book with an account of his own search for the Caribbean Semper’s warbler, an otherwise “dull little bird” that has been sighted only a handful of times in the last 80 years, and then proceeds to cite a menagerie of tantalizing absentees from the Costa Rican golden toad to the ivory-billed woodpecker of the American South. But proving a negative is next to impossible--”an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and Weidensaul proceeds to list cases in which a species takes itself off the extinct list by showing up, like the Indian forest owlet or the prehistoric coelacanth, rediscovered by canny sleuthing or, sometimes, dumb luck.

Their stories make headlines, but the celebration may be misplaced--maintaining a viable population of a severely endangered species in the wild is like “trying to build an airplane without instructions,” a process of trial and error so intricate and expensive that each black-footed ferret bred in captivity for release back to the Great Plains costs an estimated $10,000 to produce.

And finally, there are the animals that probably aren’t there at all, but that humans keep on sighting anyway, from black panthers in the hedgerows of central England to the Yeti. So what keeps us fascinated, either by the missing species or the ones that may not exist at all?

“We want there to be hidden valleys and unclimbed crags, forests where the shadows linger, rivers whose sources remain unknown,” he explains, a desire that springs in part from the uncomfortable knowledge that the Earth’s extinction rate--roughly 30,000 species per year, the highest in 65 million years--is a direct result of our presence.

And, especially in the case of the larger carnivores, there is a spiritual component to ecological loss: “Our nerves remember, even if our waking minds do not. When wild country loses its pinnacle predator, that loss leaves a hole, and it’s one that we notice, if only subconsciously.” A big cat, in those terms, can become a “totem of wilderness,” and the unlikely reports of its presence “an unarticulated longing for a less denuded, less denatured environment.” What “lost” species provide, Weidensaul concludes, is “an opportunity for hope.”

“The Ghost With Trembling Wings” is vividly eclectic but somehow always unified; Weidensaul never loses sight of his Big Idea. Twigger, a British journalist, seems not to have had one in the first place.

“The Extinction Club” is composed of brief vignettes in many modes: historical, fictional, confessional, ironic, self-mocking and occasionally earnest. This kind of creative nonfiction demands a strong narrative voice, but Twigger too often hides behind a smirking sarcasm that makes him hard to trust. The phone call in which his agent suggests he write about Milu is cast as a mini-screenplay, at the conclusion of which author and agent exclaim together: “It’s Bambi with history!”

To be sure, there is a good deal of information here about the actual deer: its exalted place in Chinese lore, its identification by the Basque missionary who became its namesake, its life today in Bedfordshire. But in the course of his research, Twigger is willingly distracted, whether by the branching paths of history or by his own musings--the Pere David becomes a convenient platform for a zany meditation on extinction, survival and writer’s block. The endearingly eccentric veers perilously close to the annoyingly egocentric; the book’s subtitle could have been “What I Thought About While I Was Supposed to Be Writing About That Deer.”

What he thought about can be entertaining, ranging from the petty insecurities of the semi-obscure writer to the nature of truth to fin-de-siecle Anglo-Chinese pornography. But these jump-cut ideas pop like soap bubbles without a larger theme, and the best one Twigger can muster is that “everything old and interesting and valuable was just disappearing” --species, certainly, but also rare books, traditional skills and human individuality.

“The Extinction Club,” full of fascinating loose ends and unfinished thoughts, is a wasted opportunity. In “The Ghost With Trembling Wings,” Weidensaul comes across as the kind of guy you wish you’d had as a professor in college: expert, eloquent, unpretentious and infectiously excited about his material. Next to him, Twigger is a grinning undergraduate, clever but flighty, and too undisciplined to follow any path to a conclusion larger than himself.