![]() ![]() ![]() His liveliest chapters concern James Tanner, the Ivory-bills' champion, who camped in swamps and climbed giant trees to document a few birds in the 1930s. In restrained language, he tells a tragic tale. In 1924, a pair of Ivory-bills were spotted in Florida, but soon vanished " had asked the county sheriff for a permit to hunt them." Further, Hoose explains how wars and the changing economy brought timber companies-and the free labor of German POWs-to devastate the Ivory-bills' virgin forests. Hoose also charts pre–Endangered Species Act collecting, when people responded to a rare bird by killing and stuffing it. With memorable anecdotes from naturalist writers, he tells how researchers such as John James Audubon shot Ivory-bills for study later, binoculars, cameras and sound equipment changed scientific methods. ![]() Yet Hoose shares a compelling tale of a species' decline and, in the process, gives a history of ornithology, environmentalism and the U.S. ![]() ), were neither as swift nor as wealthy as those who raced to shoot it and turn its preferred sweet-gum trees into lumber. habitat, reports Hoose ( We Were There, Too! Those who raced to save the Ivory-bill and its Southern U.S. Despite this chronicle's suspenseful title, this particular race seems to be over, and the Ivory-billed woodpecker (whose observers gasped, "Lord God!") appears to have lost. ![]()
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