商品簡介
Naturalist James T. Tanner was a twenty-one-year-old graduate student when he saw his first ivory-billed wood-pecker, one of America's rarest birds, in a remote swamp in northern Louisiana. The year was 1935. At the time, Tanner was part of an ambitious expedition traveling across the country to record and photograph as many avian species as possible, a trip organized by Dr. Arthur Allen, founder of the fmed Cornell Lab of ornithology. Two years late, Tanner hit the road again, this time by himself and in search of only one sepcies---that ever-elusive ivory-bill. Sponsored by Cornell and the Audubon Society, Jim Tanner's work would result in some of the most extensive field research ever conducted on the mangnificent woodpecker.
Drawing on Tanner's personal journals and written wirh the cooperation of his widow, Nancy, Ghost Birds recounts, in fascinating detail, teh scientist's dogged quest for the ivory-bill as he chased down leads in eight southern states. With Stephen Lyn Bales as lur guide, we experience the same awe and excitement that Tanner felt when he returned to the Louisiana wetland he had visited earlier ans was able to obseerve and document several of the "ghost birds"---including a nestling that he handledm, banded, and photographed at close range. Investigating the ivory-bill was particularly urgent because it was a fast-vanishing species, the victim of indiscriminant specimen hunting and widespread logging that was destroying its habitat. As sightings became rares and rarer in the decades following Tanner's ramarkable research, the bird was feared to have become extinct. Since 2005, reports of sightings in Arkansas and Florida made headlines and have given new hopeto ornithologists and bird lovers, although extensive subsequent investigations have yet to produce definitive confirmation.
Before he died in 1991, Jim Tanner himself had come fo believe that the majestic woodpeckers were probably gone forever, but he remained hopeful that someone would prove him wrong. This book fully captures Tanner's determined spirit as he tracked down what was then, as now, one of ornithology's true Holy Grails.
作者簡介
Stephen Lyn bales, shown above with Nancy Tanner, is a Natuaralist at the Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the author of Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley, published by UT Press in 2007.
