Van Dooren also studies communities that have attributed a symbolic quality to an animal and how those cultural narratives are experienced when animal populations ebb, become rarer and perhaps more exotic, or when they are extinguished. Take the huia (not one of van Dooren’s subjects, but nonetheless illustrative): a red-cheeked wattlebird, favored by hatters and taxidermists in early twentieth-century New Zealand, which turns up in field recordings of Maori hunters long after the bird’s extinction.
