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droppers and sang them to sleep.
    In her office, there was a picture of her, knee deep in water, dressed as a giant crane. The summer before, she had gone to Texas and worked for a program that bred captive whooping cranes. All the workers dressed as birds so that the cranes would know how to feed their own babies when they were set free. My mother took the costume with her when she left and sometimes she put on the feathered head and talked through the beak to me.
    The clock struck eight. “Where is everyone?” my mother said. I went outside and waited for the bus. At a quarter after, it arrived, and all the kids got off and milled around the parking lot. Mrs. Carr motioned for me to get in line. Girls 1–9 already were. My mother clapped her hands. “Let’s begin,” she said. She led us down the hall and into a small auditorium. “Quiet, children,” Mrs. Carr whispered, holding a finger to her lips. My mother stepped behind a podium at the front of the room. Above her, a screen showed a picture of an empty sky.
    “Imagine, if you will, a world without birds,” she said. “It may be hard to picture, yet one day this may be. In the last thousand years, fifteen hundred species of birds have become extinct. Scientists estimate only eighty-five hundred species remain. Within your lifetime, at least a hundred more will disappear.” On the screen behind her, pictures of birds that were already gone flashed by. “The moa. The dodo. The great auk,” my mother said. Then there was a picture of thousands of birds flying in formation across the sky. These were the passenger pigeons, I knew. I hoped mymother wouldn’t tell the story of what happened to them, because it always made her cry.
    After the slide show, we went to the baby-bird room and my mother showed everyone the picture of when she was a crane. Then she put on a glove and brought out the hawk that sat on her hand. Mrs. Carr asked what the bird’s name was and my mother said that it was Hawk. Hawk had a black hood over his head like a tiny executioner. This was so he would think it was night and not make a fuss. With Hawk on her hand, my mother led us down the hall to see the picture charts of how birds evolved from dinosaurs. This was the part the boys liked best. In school, they talked on and on about dinosaurs, their tremendous teeth and pea-sized brains. One of them had a button that said “
I
killed the dinosaurs!” and he often wore this pinned to his coat.
    My mother took off Hawk’s hood. The bird blinked and looked around at the bright lights. Then he made a soft sputtering sound and fluttered his wings.
    “Can I tickle his feet?” Girl 4 asked.
    “No, you may not,” my mother said. She put Hawk back in his cage and brought out the skeleton of a small bird. “Birds have hollow bones,” she explained, “which is why they are light enough to fly.” She showed us a bird’s head which had been cut in half. The bones were shot through with tiny holes like a spiderweb. My mother held it up to the light and looked through to the other side. “Isn’t that extraordinary?” Mrs. Carr said.
    In the lobby, my mother paused in front of the extinction sign. “Five weeks ago, one of the last two dusky seaside sparrows in the world died,” she told the class. “Soon they will be completely extinct.” Her hands shook a little as she pointed to the bird’s name and the number beside it. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one was paying attention. Boy 6 was passing out gum and all the kids were holding out their hands to him.
    My mother turned away from the sign. “Follow me,” she said. She led everyone down the hall to a large glass case with two stuffed passenger pigeons inside. They were ordinary-looking birds, brownish gray with a spot of white on their chests.
    My mother turned on the light that illuminated the case. The two birds inside had dull eyes and moth-eaten coats. They were sitting on a fake branch against a