Nonfiction books about extinct creatures face a particular challenge in trying to bring their subjects to literary life. So authors often tell the stories of the places the animals lived and the people -- scientists and sleuths, lovers and killers -- that surrounded them. That's the approach that the Canadian ornithologist Glen Chilton takes, with mixed results, in The Curse of the Labrador Duck, which he conjured after completing a comprehensive account of the bygone duck for the Birds of North America series.

The Labrador duck, a black-and-white piebald bird with a face Chilton describes as "cute," probably bred along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and wintered as far south as Chesapeake Bay. (No nests have ever been found, and no known eggs are preserved.) It is unclear why the duck went extinct: it wasn't particularly tasty, and its habitat by then hadn't significantly shrunk, although the growth of cities certainly polluted its main food source, mollusks. The last preserved Labrador duck specimen was shot in 1875 on Long Island, and the last known bird was shot, and eaten, in Elmira, New York, in 1878. (The city was experiencing food shortages because of flooding, hence the culinary stretch.)

Chilton, intrigued, reports that he "embarked on an adventure to examine and measure every stuffed Labrador Duck specimen, no matter where it was, without exception." But "adventure" is a bit of an overstatement. Measuring taxonomic mounts, it turns out, produces only numbers. Chilton examines carcasses with magnifying lenses and calipers, but his investigation reveals only wires and odd paint schemes. (Most of his ducks were shot as trophies, not scientific specimens, and their taxidermists took wide liberties in selecting eye and bill color and deciding how much stuffing a bird's head deserves.)

The author stuffs his own narrative with historical vignettes about museum acquisitions and long asides about specimens gone missing, but he can't hide the fact that his main challenges are posed by museum bureaucracy and public-transit schedules. Still, he's an amiable writer, good with quips and one-liners. (One duck has a jaunty look on his face, "as though he were about to be fed.")

The measuring and describing of all those museum specimens, as dusty and tedious as the endeavor seems, is in fact critical to the identification of existing species and the discovery of new ones. Unfortunately, Chilton offers only a vague and meager defense: natural history collections can help us "appreciate the unity and diversity of the natural world," while judicious collecting "has helped ornithology to advance as a scientific endeavor." Nor does he put these museum specimens in the context of emerging online databases, which are breathing new life into biodiversity studies.

Chilton has tried to make the collection of basic taxonomic information amusing, and for that he deserves credit. And he successfully conveys the sense of loss at this species' extinction. But if he's going to write a book about his perambulations, he ought to reveal or learn something in the process -- about himself, the nature of obsession, the value of preserving living biodiversity, or extinction itself. After all, his seagoing ducks rub wing coverts in back rooms with passenger pigeons, great auks, Carolina parakeets, and Eskimo curlews -- surely an opportunity to discuss the common factors that contributed to their extinction (or not), the beleaguered state of wildfowl today, or current efforts to rescue them. By the time he applies his calipers to specimen number 19, out of 55 birds in 30 cities, the reader may wish there were even fewer individuals remaining.