Last Chance To See.... - Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

A mix of travelogue and environemental tract, encouraging us to care about endangered species by describing a few of them with affection and comic flair. I particularly liked the kakapo, a flightless New Zealand parrot with a notably useless method of courtship. This book was first published in the eighties, so I just Googled it and found that many of the animals described are still hanging on, although it looks like the Yangtze river dolphin is a goner.

This sums up the tone of the book - melancholy but funny;

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.