Tue, Jun 16
|Mimi's Cafe
Birds and Books
The book for June/July is: Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen.
Time & Location
Jun 16, 2026, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Mimi's Cafe, 5090 Kietzke Ln, Reno, NV 89511, USA
About the event
Birds and Books
Meets on the 3rd Tuesdays of the month.
The book for June/July is: Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen.
From the publisher's page: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Song-of-the-Dodo/David-Quammen/9780684827124
A brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope and far-reaching in its message, The Song of the Dodo is a crucial book in precarious times. Through personal observation, scientific theory, and history, David Quammen examines the mysteries of evolution and extinction and radically alters our understanding of the natural world and our place within it.
In this landmark of science writing, we learn how the isolation of islands makes them natural laboratories of evolutionary extravagance, as seen in the dragons of Komodo, the elephant birds of Madagascar, the giant tortoises of the Galapagos. But the dark message of island studies is that isolated ecosystems, whether natural or human-made, are also hotbeds of extinction. And as the world’s landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, are carved into pieces by human activity, the implications of this knowledge are more urgent than ever.