Each bird, for Thom van Dooren, is a condensed knot of histories. A leading voice in the emerging field of extinction studies, he is an associate professor of Gender and Cultural Studies and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney. When a particular species of bird or any other plant or animal goes extinct, something larger than that particular species also vanishes.Extinction is a dominant theme of our times. So much diversity is being lost on such a large scale in