The Ghost with Trembling Wings

Three or four times an hour, eighty or more times a day, a unique species of plant or animal vanishes forever. It is, scientists say, the worst global extinction crisis in the last sixty-five million years - the hemorrhage of thirty thousand irreplaceable life-forms each year. And yet every so often one of these lost species resurfaces - such as the Indian forest owlet, considered extinct for more than a century when it was rediscovered in 1997, or Gilbert's potoroo, an endearing marsupial lost for 125 years until it was found in western Australia in 1994. Like heirlooms plucked from a burning house, they are gifts to an increasingly impoverished world. In The Ghost with Trembling Wings, naturalist Scott Weidensaul pursues these stories of loss and recovery, of endurance against the odds, and of surprising resurrections.