I found the last line of Chapter 9, “what has been destroyed can never be created again,” to be a particularly powerful closing sentence. McCully goes through all the different bird species that have either been hunted down or killed through pesticide consumption and it’s not like there’s a way to bring the extinct back to life. I never thought about there being any type of bird presence in the city besides the typical pigeon. To read about how owls are making a comeback seems strange to me because they seem so exotic for a location like New York. McCully mentions cormorant birds in Sheepshead Bay, which is my neighborhood. After Google imaging this species, it’s safe to say that I’ve never seen this sort of bird before in my life, which either means they’re no longer around, or I’m completely oblivious to my surroundings.
Reading about the conservation efforts made to stop hunting birds for the sake of hat production made me think about today’s PETA efforts to stop using animals for clothes production altogether. I’m guilty of wearing products made of animals, not necessarily birds, but the same principle still applies. It made me wonder if sheep were continued to be used in UGG production, would there be a point at which they’d be an endangered species? Additionally this made me think about how by where I work in Battery Park, there was a roaming turkey that would make guest appearances in the park whenever the weather would get warmer. After noticing I haven’t seen her this past summer, I googled her to find that she had been run over on the Upper East Side. It’s a shame that no action was taken to put the turkey in the appropriate environment, but even if the situation was taken care of I’m sure she would have ended up behind zoo cage bars.
