By discarding the decaying remains of the last dodo in 1755, a British museum curator unwittingly rendered the flightless, foul-tasting fowl the forever poster bird for “extinction in our lifetime.” The few salvaged pieces were the only soft-tissue remains of a species suddenly known only from drawings, bones and an egg. So no surprise when, in 2007, news agencies excitedly reported the most complete dodo skeleton ever found, in a cave in the bird’s native Mauritius. As with dinosaurs and other touchstones to past life, we find extinction titillating — more so when we are the cause.

Ornithologist Glen Chilton fondly channels this fascination in The Curse of the Labrador Duck, a modern travelogue concerning another species that, well, went the way of the dodo. But the handsome, black and white shorebird’s untimely exit was a good deal better managed from the specimen standpoint. And this forms the core of Chilton’s tale: 19th-century folk had the foresight not to eat every specimen of the species they were propelling to extinction. Between the great auk, passenger pigeon, ivorybilled woodpecker and Labrador duck, taxidermists of the time did a brisk business. Thus, after no small amount of sleuthing and preparation, Chilton is able to embark on a quest to view each of the 55 Labrador ducks lodged in collections around the globe. The dead ducks’ backstories — blasted by shotguns along the East Coast — are fairly uniform. It’s post-mortem that concerns Chilton: the stuffed mounts or prepared skins were shipped, bombed, auctioned, purchased, possibly stolen and generally traded like hockey cards among collectors, institutions and countries. Some of the specimens sought by Chilton disappear; others, unheralded, materialize. His obsession to account for all becomes, we imagine, the curse referenced by the title.

We also imagine intrigue, and the early going indeed finds Chilton on a wild goose chase for eggs. As it turns out, no Labrador duck eggs exist. When due diligence reveals that all so-labelled ovoids were laid by other species, we anticipate a payoff elsewhere. It comes, but not as expected. We’re soon in a monotonous shuffle from one duck to the next, each ending in a tableau of Chilton hunched over a specimen, making notes and taking measurements — a curse for writer and reader both. And here the book’s failings begin to emerge. We never find out what information these measurements yielded, rendering Chilton’s descriptions mere dissertations on entropy and the liberties taken by taxidermists: a tattered feather here, a broken foot there, a painted bill, a glass eye. Presumably looking to spice things up, Chilton fleshes out each episode with “getting to” details, ignoring the old travel-writing adage of “never start a journey at the airport.” We start in many a metaphorical airport and suffer unnecessary vignettes of the author wandering his destination in search of food and drink, speaking foreign languages badly. Sharp travel writing this is not.

Chilton’s wry digressions and cutesy observations aside, the occasional halfgrin can’t carry the book into what — given the stuffed-bird-guarding phalanx straight out of central museum casting — should have been true comedy. Instead, it’s low-octane adventure, where the biggest challenges are truculent receptionists and late-running trains.

Given all the stuffing of one sort or another, one might well wonder whether the duck’s inevitable rarity had, at some point, inspired a scramble to bag specimens and whether this last “blast” actually did in the species. Chilton rightly dismisses the possibility: “judicious collecting has very little impact on bird populations and … without those few stuffed specimens, we would have no tangible reminder of the finality of their elimination.”

What, then, was the cause of the Labrador duck’s extinction? Mentioned only in passing, the possibilities are never assembled into any cogent analysis or even a best guess. A related lack of meditations on evolution, extinction and the loss of biodiversity comprises glaring missed opportunities in a book that offers plenty of room to explore larger themes.

— Leslie Anthony

Whistler, B.C.-based Leslie Anthony is the author of Snakebit: Confessions of a Herpetologist. His next book, White Planet: A Mad Dash through Global Ski Culture, will be published by Douglas & McIntyre/Greystone in 2010.

I’m always a little afraid when new books about bears arrive at my local bookstore. Sometimes they’re insightful explorations of one of the planet’s most intelligent animals — and sometimes they’re not. This year, we got one of each.

Else Poulsen’s Smiling Bears is the yin to the yang of Jake MacDonald’s Grizzlyville. Poulsen, a field biologist in Alberta’s oil patch, took a temporary position at the Calgary Zoo after losing her job in the mid-1980s. The unexpected change turned into a lifelong career as a zookeeper that has taken her as far afield as Denmark and Indonesia. But Smiling Bears is not a travelogue; it is about bears, not people or places. It does include a great deal of interesting historical and scientific information, but its narrative foundation comes from Poulsen’s countless intimate experiences with the incarcerated grizzly, black and polar bears she comes to know as “emotional, thinking and self-aware beings.”

Starting with three black bears at the Calgary Zoo, Poulsen shows us how she tried to make up for all that was missing from the artificial environments in which her ursine companions lived. Her careful observations decipher the seemingly aimless shenanigans of Tiny, Ears and Patches, teaching her, for instance, that scattering food around the enclosure prevents conflicts and provides the bears with a more pleasant, more natural home.

Perhaps the most creative solution documented in the book also occurred at the Calgary Zoo, where Poulsen tried to cure Snowball, a captive-bred polar bear, of her obsessive-compulsive pacing habit. After years of “enrichment activities” that didn’t work, she decided to try giving the bear Prozac. Although the pharmacological remedy proved effective, it was too late for Snowball — at age 27, she suffered from severe arthritis and had to be euthanized.

If reading Smiling Bears is like spending a day or two with a sloth of bears, reading Grizzlyville is like listening to stories about bears in a small-town pub. Although it is divided into three sections based on the three North American bear species, the book is less about bears and more about the people who, for better or for worse, live with them.

Some vignettes document the author’s interactions with bears, while others explore the ursine experiences of an eclectic cast of contemporary and historical human characters. Although they are almost all engaging, in a Reader’s Digest sort of way, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed with the work of such an experienced journalist. The book lacks cohesiveness, which Jake MacDonald blames on the inscrutability of the mysterious “four-legged ink blots” about which he writes, and the content tends to emphasize the savage and predatory (but relatively infrequent) conflicts between people and bears, which simply reinforces unfortunate misconceptions about bears. (And, unlike Smiling Bears, there are no references or footnotes to provide sources for any of the author’s claims.)

To his credit, MacDonald admits that he isn’t a bear expert and that Grizzlyville isn’t one of those books which provides “good accurate information about” bears. But the bottom line is this: if there’s only room for one bear book in your budget and your favourite bookstore is sold out of Sid Marty’s The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, pick Poulsen.

— Jeff Gailus

Canmore, Alta.-based Jeff Gailus is working on two books about bears: A Grizzly Manifesto, which will be published by Rocky Mountain Books next spring, and Original Griz, about the Great Plains grizzly bear.

In 1974, Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, a zoology student at the University of Toronto, embarked on an epic three-year journey. His goal? To find and document the first boreal owl nest in Ontario and earn a master’s degree along the way. The owls had been spotted in Ontario when he set out, but nobody had located a nest. A Sound Like Water Dripping recounts Bondrup-Nielsen’s adventures at remote frozen logging camps and while tenting out on vast mining properties and his success at finding boreal owls across Northern Ontario and Alberta. He creates a scientific narrative of his discoveries, enlivened with tales of encounters with moose and bears. This is a story about trial, tribulation and an unrelenting passion for discovery.

The international Census of Marine Life, led by Ron O’Dor, a Dalhousie University biology professor and Canadian Geographic’s Environmental Scientist of the Year for 2009 (“The transparent oceans project,” June 2009), was an attempt to catalogue all the life in the planet’s oceans by bringing together the talents and resources of more than 2,000 scientists from 82 countries. This book, the first full overview of the census, compiles 10 years of scientific collaboration, exploration, research and analyses. It is a staggering amount of information. The creatures surveyed and discovered, from the tiniest microbes to vibrant new octopus species, are beautifully presented in colourful photographs that vividly complement the writing. While the text is heavy on the methodology, the authors explain everything in great detail so that the average reader can understand the more complex scientific procedures. Both hopeful and cautionary, this book reveals the wealth of life in the oceans around us.

Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend the incredible feats of birds. Why do Adélie penguins swim hundreds of kilometres between their breeding and feeding grounds? How can the tiny northern wheatear possibly migrate from Nunavut to Africa? These questions and more are answered in The Migration of Birds, which expertly navigates through the most vital questions of avian migration. Coupled with more than 70 powerful images, the book covers everything from the history of migration studies to the devastating effects of global warming and the mechanics of flight.

Our relationship with predators bigger and more fierce than us has always been complex. Graeme Gibson strives to bring this home in The Bedside Book of Beasts, using both visual and written excerpts from our collective past. An extensive compilation of experiences with great animals, both ancient and recent, the book ranges from purely factual accounts to poetry and paintings. Although this approach is choppy by nature (perfect for a five-minute read before bed), Gibson connects the pieces in each section with an introductory essay. These short prologues include fables about beasts and reflections on the relationship between hunters and the hunted. The essays give depth and meaning to the selections that follow and make the book a pleasure to read.