This week Futures goes hunting for The last passenger pigeon in the company of Joy Kennedy-O’Neill. An English teacher at a college on the Texas Gulf Coast, Joy has written a number of stories and more details on her activities can be found at her website. Here, she discusses the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The last passenger pigeon

North American passenger pigeons once flew in the millions, in such numbers that they blotted out the sun, taking hours to pass overhead. The last one died in captivity in 1914. Christopher Cokinos wrote a lovely, haunting book on extinct bird species called Hope is the Thing With Feathers. I spoke with him at a nature writing conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He said writing that book had saddened him beyond belief. To distract himself, he had gone on an Antarctic expedition, looking for rare meteorites in the white expanses of snow.

That encounter stayed with me — writers and artists, lost things and the art of looking. In the 1990s, I explored caves with a local speleological society. We often ran into birders as we hiked the woods and hills. Literally. The birders were heads up, the cavers were heads down. On one occasion I walked right into a fellow looking for a golden-cheeked warbler, and we had an entanglement of binoculars, notebooks, a clinometer and compasses. But we understood each other.

And yet … what happens if we’re too late? Or when there have been generations of loss, looking, imitation, and loss again?