Seeking the Sacred Raven
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007tags: birds, book review, conservation, Hawai'i
Conservation is all about saving endangered species, right? Well, not always. In this book, Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawai'ian Island by Mark Jerome Walters (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), the author tells the heartbreaking story of how people who were fighting to save the endangered `alalâ, the Hawai'ian raven, Corvus hawaiiensis, actually hastened the bird's extinction in the wild.
The `alalâ is the Hawai'ian name for a sacred bird; a indigenous raven that is honored by Hawai'ians as a guardian spirit that…