The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking and the Search for Lost Species - Hardcover

" Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species)." -- Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
" At the core of Weidensaul' s book are fundamental questions about who we are, the state of our planet, and the faltering health of our ecosystems . . . [It] is as much about people as the animals they search for." -- Anthony Doerr, "The Boston Globe"
" Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists-- Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind-- whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy." -- Janice P. Nimura, "Los Angeles Times"
“Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species).” —Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
“At the core of Weidensaul’s book are fundamental questions about who we are, the state of our planet, and the faltering health of our ecosystems . . . [It] is as much about people as the animals they search for.” —Anthony Doerr, "The Boston Globe"
“Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists—Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind—whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy.” —Janice P. Nimura, "Los Angeles Times"
"Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species)." --Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"

"At the core of Weidensaul's book are fundamental questions about who we are, the state of our planet, and the faltering health of our ecosystems . . . [It] is as much about people as the animals they search for." --Anthony Doerr, "The Boston Globe"

"Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists--Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind--whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy." --Janice P. Nimura, "Los Angeles Times"

Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species). "Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"

At the core of Weidensaul's book are fundamental questions about who we are, the state of our planet, and the faltering health of our ecosystems . . . [It] is as much about people as the animals they search for. "Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe"

Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists--Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind--whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy. "Janice P. Nimura, Los Angeles Times""

"Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species)." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"At the core of Weidensaul's book are fundamental questions about who we are, the state of our planet, and the faltering health of our ecosystems . . . [It] is as much about people as the animals they search for." --Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe

"Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists--Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind--whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy." --Janice P. Nimura, Los Angeles Times

A round-the-world detective story about rediscovering vanished species. - 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 haemorrhage of thirty thousand irreplaceable life-forms each year. And yet, every so often one of these lost species re-surfaces, such as the Indian Forest Owlet, considered extinct for more than a century when it was rediscovered in 1997. 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. The search takes Weidensaul to the rain forests of the Caribbean and Brazil in pursuit of long-lost birds, to the rugged mountains of Tasmania for the striped, wolf-like marsupial known as the Thylacine, to cloning laboratories where scientists struggle to re-create long-extinct animals, and even to the moorlands and tidy farms of England on the trail of mysterious black panthers whose existence seems to depend on the faith of those looking for them. The Ghost with Trembling Wings is a book of exploration and a survey of the frontiers of modern science and wildlife biology. It is, in the end, the story of our desire for a wilder, bigger, more complete world.