Extinction Awareness Day

I started this blog  to point out animals you'll never get a chance to meet first hand.  No, I'm not talking about unicorns or centaurs, but about recently extinct animals.  2014 was a big one in extinction news because it marked the 100 year anniversary of the passenger pigeon, when Martha died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914 at 1pm.  I took my family to the Cincinnati Zoo, but Martha's statue wasn't there because they were building a memorial that opened a few weeks after our visit. My wife and I also got to see the real Lonesome George who was on display in New York at the Natural History Museum, before being shipped back to be displayed in the Galapagos.  

There are places you go in life that have a tranquil, slightly eerie feeling.  That is how I felt when my wife and I visited Iceland over the summer to celebrate 10 years of marriage.  We did all of the touristy places , but on the last day I told her I'd like to find the Great Auk statue that was somewhere an hour away from Reykjavik where we were staying. I had seen taken my family into DC last year to see the Museum of Natural History's presentation of "The Lost Bird" project by artist Todd McGrain.   http://www.lostbirdproject.org/ He had created 5 bronze statues of different extinct North American birds and placed each in the location where they went extinct.   He focused on the great auk, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the Labrador duck.  The first four birds are characters in my book, so of course I took an interest. Through reading about The Lost Bird Project, I found out where the statues were placed, which du...