by By Todd McLeish
University Press of New England, 2007
In Golden Wings and Hairy Toes: Encounters with New England’s Most Imperiled Wildlife, Todd McLeish takes the reader on a lively and enlightening adventure with field biologists working to better understand the natural history, ecology, habitat requirements, and conservation status of 14 of New England’s rarest plants and animals. Throughout the book, McLeish clearly demonstrates his fascination and reverence for the natural world and his understanding of the complex challenges faced by conservation biologists in a rapidly changing world.
In the introduction, McLeish chronicles the extinction of the last known heath hen on Earth – a small population on Martha’s Vineyard, which, by 1931, was down to a single bird. One year later, the species was gone and, as McLeish points out, became “the first ornithological extinction observed in the wild down to the last individual.” The author weaves the heath hen story in with his own visit to the Martha’s Vineyard site where the last individual was observed and uses it to illustrate that, while much is being done to prevent future extinctions, immense challenges remain. He writes, “While extinction is indeed a natural process – as those advocating for progress at any cost emphasize time and again – the current rate of extinctions on Earth is anything but natural. Human actions have increased the extinction rate as many as one hundred to one thousand times greater than normal.”
Such a bleak outlook, however, is not pervasive in the 14 chapters that make up the book, each focusing on a different species: two fish, three mammals, three birds, three insects, one reptile, and two plants. Although many of the biologists he meets and tags along with express pessimism about the long-term prospects for the species they study, especially in light of major threats such as global warming and mercury poisoning, there are hopeful and positive elements in these chapters as well. He describes how industrial clearcutting in the North Woods of Maine benefits the lynx population, and how powerline corridors create excellent habitat for the golden-winged warbler, New England’s rarest songbird.
And, throughout the book, there is the adventure and excitement of being in the field with dedicated biologists – sharing their concerns and motivations, feeling their passions and frustrations, hearing their field humor, and gleaning little natural history tidbits that have taken years of field work to understand. Such as knowing what a Bicknell’s thrush “growl” sounds like and that it means the bird is “really pissed off,” or that the Karner blue butterfly can be identified by its erratic, “puppet-on-a-string” flight pattern. McLeish also makes it clear that field work is not always as glamorous as it may seem. Take his visit to Bird Island in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, to learn about roseate terns: he notes that in his first three minutes on the island, he had been defecated on more times than in his previous 43 years combined.
Whether he’s searching for right whales aboard the research vessel Shearwater in Cape Cod Bay, snorkeling in a Massachusetts pond to help capture red-bellied cooter turtles, or mist-netting the Bicknell’s thrush on Vermont’s highest peak, McLeish never fails to humbly connect us with his subjects. He treats the reader to the nuances and subtleties that make each of these 14 species unique – as well as the people who study them – and in the process provides plenty of reasons to, as he says, “help postpone permanently the day that they, like the heath hen, disappear entirely.”