Stalking the Ghost Bird

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This past week I started a new book.

Sometimes, within a week, one subject can open up a door to so many new things for me to learn about. This time it was the Wetlands which lead to the Atchafalaya, logging/old-growth forests, conservation, Louisiana Native Plants, the Coastal Prairie, planting Natives for the birds, Louisiana birds, and then to this.
And this book pulls many of these subjects together for me.



Below:
Photos from the Singer Tract, Louisiana 1935, by James Tanner.
The last known habitat of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
This old-growth virgin bottom-land forest, the last in the US, was destroyed shortly after these photos were taken by logging.
The birds were thought to have been extinct since the 1940s.





Read more about it here: Stalking the Ghost Bird

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a wonderful website dedicated to the Ivory Billed Woodpecker loaded with news, photos, and info which can be viewed HERE

This is a really fantastic talk...
From University of California Television:
John W. Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University discusses the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker as well as the broader issues of species protection and conservation.


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