It was September 1989 and Christopher Cokinos was a homesick mess. Two months earlier his wife, Elizabeth Dodd, had taken a teaching job that had led them to move from bustling Bloomington, Ind., which Cokinos loved, to Manhattan, Kans., which he did not. To cheer him up, Dodd suggested they go birdwatching, a hobby her husband had recently discovered. At a nearby pond they spotted a pair of green-and-yellow birds that looked like flying tropical drinks. In the process of trying to identify them in a field guide—they turned out to be exotic Black-hooded Conures, someone's escaped pets—Cokinos, 38, was riveted by a drawing of another bird, the Carolina Parakeet, whose flocks, he later learned from the writings of an early American pioneer, had once shimmered in the sky "like an atmosphere of gems." Heartsick to learn that that parakeet had been extinct since 1918, Cokinos asked himself, "How could we have lost, then forgotten, such a beautiful bird?"

That question transformed Cokinos into an obsessed bird detective who spent a decade stalking the causes of the demise of the Carolina Parakeet and five other feathered species. He emerged with an idiosyncratic elegy called Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, recently released in paperback. The book has been hailed by fans, from former President Jimmy Carter and author Barbara Kingsolver to a minister from Cincinnati who appeared on Cokinos's doorstep bearing a gift of a Carolina Parakeet poster. "At first, I'm ashamed to admit, I thought he might be a nutcase," says Cokinos, who now teaches poetry and creative nonfiction writing at Kansas State University in Manhattan. "But no, he was just a fellow birder."

There are plenty of them. As a group America's 69 million birders outnumber hunters and anglers combined—and they care deeply that 1,186 of some 7,800 species worldwide face global extinction.

But Cokinos did not have statistics in mind when he began his ornithological odyssey. "I just thought, 'Here's a story about wonderful birds and unsolved mysteries,' " he explains. "I believed I could do the detective work and tell it."

Beginning work on his book in 1990, he sneezed his way through thousands of musty library documents, recreating a 19th-century America rapacious for Passenger Pigeon pie, hats adorned with whole dead birds, and land that species relied on for habitat. No armchair academic, Cokinos also slogged through Louisiana swamps where the 2-ft.-long Ivory-billed Woodpecker hung on until the 1940s, when their habitat was cut down for timber, and braved the Gulf of St. Lawrence in a small boat to get to an island where Great Auks once bred. He even tracked down a descendant of the Ohio farmboy who in 1900 shot the last wild Passenger Pigeon—whose flocks were once so abundant they could extend 240 miles and darken the sky. "Calling this a bird book," wrote a Baltimore Sun reviewer of Hope Is the Thing, "would be like calling Moby Dick a fishing story." Still the book is first and foremost Cokinos's clarion call. "I wouldn't have written it if I didn't believe we could change," he says. "We cleared out a lot of species before we decided to start saving things, but I have to think that we have the capacity to do something."

For most of his life, Cokinos hardly considered birders his brethren. He made fun of his wife for recycling and waved bye-bye when she went hiking. "Nature boy," Cokinos concedes, "I was not." But he was intensely curious. "Even as a little fellow," recalls his father, George, 69, a retired chemist, "Chris threw himself completely into whatever captured his interest." Christopher and his sister Vicki, now 41 and a lawyer, were reared in Indianapolis. Their parents—mother Marge is a retired nurse—divorced in 1973. A bright, quirky kid, Cokinos listened to bagpipe music on the stereo, tuned in to the BBC on his short-wave radio and watched Star Trek, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on TV. "I was passionate about flying," says Cokinos, who devoured books on military history. "I wanted to be an Air Force fighter pilot."

Reality soon grounded that plan. "I bumped up against my inability to do advanced math and got kicked out of class," says Cokinos. He graduated from Indiana University in 1986 with a degree in English and a love for poetry, creative writing and fellow student Elizabeth Dodd. "I read French surrealistic poetry, watched football, drank beer and listened to music," Cokinos says. "She bought me duck shoes to get me to hike, saying we couldn't have a relationship if I never went outside." The couple wed in 1988, and Cokinos took a cataloging job in Indiana University's law library. There he met Greg Rutzen, who was amused by his slight, bespectacled colleague with a picture of Elvis on his coffee mug. He invited Cokinos to go birding at nearby Friendship Road, where over a season they watched a pair of Cooper's Hawks build a nest and raise their young. "Chris was just fascinated," says Rutzen, "and hooked."

Besotted is more like it. "Birds are so close to us, and yet they're still these beautifully independent bits of wildness," says Cokinos. Birding, working on the book and his own teaching gig at KSU that began in late 1991 slowly softened his view of Kansas. A popular professor with a dry wit and a limitless supply of power bars, Cokinos invited his students on birding expeditions to "the Konza Prairie at 5 a.m. on a really cold Saturday morning to see the goofy mating ritual of the prairie chicken," says former pupil Jennifer Johnson. "It says a lot about Chris that we actually took him up on it."

What Cokinos didn't share was his growing despair. After years of immersing himself in the lives and deaths of the Heath Hen, Labrador Duck and other birds that had captured his fancy, he was depressed. He no longer watched the nature specials on extinct species he'd once found fascinating. "What was the point?" he recalls thinking. "I know how they end." Says Dodd, a poet, who was separated from Cokinos earlier this year: "He'd come out of the study and say, 'I just killed off the last Passenger Pigeon,' as if the shaping of the story was an act of participation in the slaughter." He also had a mean case of writer's block. Though Cokinos had published a volume of poetry, Killing Seasons, in 1993, when he tried to write poems about the birds, "they were awful," he says. Then he tried writing essays about the birds. "They were ham-fisted and preachy," he says. "I had this emotional attachment to these birds I'd never see, but I couldn't bring them to the page."

Nature once again provided inspiration, this time in the form of the night sky. In the summer of 1995, while on a camping trip to Colorado, he saw a fantastic meteor shower. Cokinos went home, bought a telescope and let the stars set his course. He was comforted by the fact that stars are safely beyond the reach of human beings and can't be extinguished—at least not in his lifetime. So he decided to quit stewing and sent out his book proposal. Within weeks he had an agent, who six months later sold Hope Is the Thing—whose title is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson poem—to Tarcher/Putnam.

These days Cokinos is working on his next book—this one about stars. He pores through issues of Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason and plans research trips to Greenland and Australia. "He's a curious man," says former student Jessica Karns. "Who else would go to Arizona to talk to guys who sell meteorites out of motel rooms?" Says Cokinos with a shrug: "You don't choose your obsessions."

Nor get over them. On a recent morning Cokinos and his pal Ted Cable were birding along a bank of the Blue River, a favorite ornithological hangout. They share not only a love of nature but a fanatical devotion to the Chicago Bears. "We talk about everything from poetry to defensive linemen to birds," says Cable, 47, a professor of park management and conservation at KSU. But two sightings cause the friends to fall silent: a flock of fat wild turkeys pecking through a fallow field and an astonishing eight bald eagles perched on the branches of a single tree. "Those species were teetering on the brink of extinction, and we humans figured out how to save them," Cokinos says. "They remind me of what we can do right."