Don McKay

The Greek word aornis a combination of the private "a" (as in, say, "atemporal") and "ornis" the root of "ornithology" means "land without birds." The poetic though-experiment in this piece — imagining the absence of a cherished creature — is one way to remind oneself of its losability, and hence its value. The epoch we inhabit has been called the Athopocence by some earth scientists, because so many of its changes originate with us. Among these, are extinctions so vast that they already rival the mass extinctions of Permian and Cretaceous.