Field Notes from an Extinction is the Irish writer Eoghan Walls' spellbinding second novel about a nineteenth century ornithologist who studies the last auk colony on an uninhabited island off the coast of Ireland. The "field notes" of the title refers to the diary Ignatius Green uses to record his observations. But early on, his gaze must turn from his beloved birds to an unwelcome human presence, and although he wants only to be alone on the island, he becomes the unwilling guardian of a child who arrives in a basket hidden within his monthly delivery of rations. How a half-feral Irish girl tumbles into the provenance of a deeply prejudiced Englishman who belittles the Irish and is utterly lacking in caretaking instincts (except when it comes to his Auks) is the mystery at the center of this novel purporting to be a lost manuscript penned in 1847.

In this excerpt he is running into the sea, holding the child he'd found in his food basket, imploring the men in the boat to retrieve it:

"Myself: Take it back. I cannot take it. Take it back!

"Waded into my waist. Soaked my good green trousers, my boots wet thru, undergarments too. Shouted, at length, holding the child over the sea, a writhing thing, squealing, its apparel stinking.

"The men had their backs to me now, & the boat disappeared behind the waves.

"Myself: Take it back. It will die here. It will die!

"My face and ears stung in the hail and the child's most likely too, tho it gave up kicking and screaming to simply hang, until I stumbled back to the shore & dropped it to the shale" (10).

The utter incompatibility of this pairing is plain to see. First, Green focuses on his wet garments, clearly more troubling to him than the child's suffering, and then, the verb "dropped," shows a total lack of empathy. Indeed, it was this harsh reception that firmly established my sympathy for the child.

In the next excerpt, as he examines the basket holding the orphan, he lists her properties as though she is a biological specimen:

"At her continued silence, I peered into the depths where she was coiled like a beast among her particulars, namely:

"Clothing she wore;

a shitten, once white dress;

one blanket (utterly soiled);

one pair of wooden clogs;

one cracked chamber pot, once affixed to the base, now unmoored;

one rubber-bunged pewter flask.

"The latter despite the age of the girl. Eight? Five? Twelve? I can age a puffin reliably to the season but with a human child could easily be off by four years, give or take. Malnourished, by the look of her, which makes the judgment harder. Just over my waist at full extension I would estimate, closer to four foot than three, skinny & dull of wit, lacking in vigour, filth-cauled and whimperish" (12-13).

Green's inability to age her is more evidence of his insufficiencies, the range between five and twelve showing a blindness to humans in general. But he had enough food and clearly, was not a sexual predator. Later, I will learn that these are the reasons he's been chosen as her guardian. But by whom?

The trickle of clues is beautifully timed and keeps the mystery alive. As the Irish child gains strength and learns enough English so they can communicate in a rudimentary fashion, her behavior is still more animalistic than civilized, and against the backdrop of the worsening famine on the mainland, news of which reaches Ignatius only sporadically, her desperation to secure enough nourishment once the delivery of food stops altogether, is so fierce that she, more than Ignatius, becomes the hunter, and their fragile caretaking relationship is, in some ways, reversed. The girl's transformation from a weak and sickly child to a strong and resourceful ten year old, but one lacking in any experience of civilized behavior, takes this story to strange and wholly unpredictable places as Ignatius finally learns who she is and discovers what it is to care for another human being.

Field Notes from An Extinction is on my shelf of favorites, right next to Paulette Jiles' News of the World, another novel set in the nineteenth century about a child thrust into the care of an unwilling guardian.

Walls, Eoghan. Field Notes From an Extinction. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2026.

Filed under: Sustaining a core mystery