This is an excellent book that deserves wide readership. -- Marc Bekoff, editor of Ignoring Nature No More: The Case For Compassionate Conservation I love this book. van Dooren's thorough, detailed, and calmly passionate scholarship adds immensely to my understanding of caring, science and justice, and conditions for recuperation that take multispecies flourishing seriously. He is a leader in learning to learn without the tools of human exceptionalism, attuned to the nuances and specificities of situated worlds, including human worlds-in-relation with other critters. -- Donna Haraway, author of When Species Meet In this wise and fascinating book, van Dooren takes us into the fleshy, biosocial, and ethical consequences of extinction. His lively stories of five bird species open worlds -- both avian and human -- of care, dedication, and the most ardent commitment. Van Dooren draws on philosophy, ethnography, and ethology to conjure the beauty and perils of other creatures' worlds. By developing a deeper understanding of species as intergenerational and inter-species achievements, van Dooren helps us rethink both loss and conservation. Flight Ways is a profoundly realised exploration of why extinction matters, and how we may respond. -- Deborah Bird Rose, author of Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction Haunting, beautiful, and important: Flight Ways is extraordinary. This is ethnographic storytelling at its very best, and it carries the environmental humanities to new heights. You will never look at a bird in the same way again. -- Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz From the brink of existence, Flight Ways recovers a way of responding ethically to extinction. van Dooren's scientifically-informed case studies of particular bird species facing extinction give the lie to the trope of "the last one" by framing stories of the " distinct unraveling of ways of life" that had evolved over millions of years and whose passings are unevenly experienced as tragedies. Informative, heartbreaking, and deeply inspiring, the book serves as a compelling model for how animal studies scholarship can move beyond false competitions of individuals and populations in order to engage with the real problems of sustaining life in multispecies communities. -- Susan McHugh, author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines and Dog "Who are we bound to and in what ways?" This is the question at the heart of this wonderful book. But the "we" here is not limited to "us" -- it includes vultures who help the living take care of the dead, Little penguins who keep returning to deeply storied places, fledging albatrosses who are becoming more and more vulnerable, and mourning crows who can enrich our definitions of grieving. And that changes everything. Because this question is not a simple intellectual proposition. It creates links even as it explores those links in all their dimensions. One finds oneself differently attached after reading this book. A magnificent, sensitive, and marvellously intelligent book. It tells stories of extinction while reinspiring us with life and curiosity. In proposing to move beyond simplistic categories like the natural and the cultural, the biological and the social, the living and the dead, Thom van Dooren reconfigures, in an inventive and brilliant manner, traditional oppositions between species conservation and attention to individuals. With keen attention and contagious curiosity, he explores the multiple forms of living together in a multi-species world. Every page of this book teaches us something about other forms and ways of life, makes us think differently or more deeply than we have been in the habit of thinking, and helps us to do so in company with the beings of other species. Thom van Dooren teaches us that to care passionately can be a weapon of resistance against the forces of destruction. This book is guided by the most philosophical and lively of motives: curiosity with regard to other beings and their ways of life. A curiosity for fleshly creatures -- creatures who are real, concrete, surprising in their complexity, and who become, by way of their histories, more attaching, which is to say more capable of attaching us. This book is magnificent and brilliant. One reason -- not the only nor the least -- is because Thom van Dooren has spent time with the animals whose becoming he is examining. The ethical questions he poses are thus equally ethological questions, questions that demand not only care, but also interest and curiosity. Specific ways of living require specific modes of thought. The stories in this book -- since they are truly stories that enrich our storied worlds -- make this magnificent gamble succeed: to learn other ways of thinking from other forms of life. -- Vinciane Despret, University of Liege

Thom van Dooren is an environmental philosopher and anthropologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research is situated in the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Telling Lively Stories at the Edge of Extinction1. Fledging Albatrosses: Flight Ways and Wasted Generations2. Circling Vultures: Life and Death at the Dull Edge of Extinction3. Urban Penguins: Stories for Lost Places4. Breeding Cranes: The Violent-Care of Captive Life5. Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared WorldEpilogue: A Call for StoriesNotesReferencesIndex