The Race to Save the Lord God Bird Read Online Free

proudly (but incorrectly) to W. D. Rogers, acting president of Tulane, “it is doubtful whether any other institution outside of the U.S. National Museum possesses more than a single specimen of this species. This one group alone as it now stands in the [Tulane] Museum represents easily a value of $250.”
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    In the 1930s, a few years after George Beyer’s death, the stuffed specimens from his Big Lake trip were transferred from Tulane to the LSU museum. Seventy or so years later I hold the adult male of the family, now LSU specimen number 60803, in my hands as Dr. Remsen waits for me to finish with it. I feel transported for a few moments to the great lost forest over which this stiff, faded object once reigned. This bird heard Red Wolves howl and panthers scream. While the drumbeat of rain pelted the
shiny green leaves of its poison ivy curtain, it protected its eggs in a cozy hole high above the ground.
    Finally it is time for me to put 60803 back into its case. I’m filled with questions as I think about how the Ivory-bill survived so well for many thousands of years. But then, in the ninety years that passed between 1809, when Alexander Wilson shot his Ivory-bills to paint them, and 1899, when George Beyer shot his to exhibit them in a museum, the Ivory-bill’s world collapsed. What happened? I’m determined to find out. To start, I have to go back to the early 1800s and meet another great painter of birds.
    The Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s powerful bill could pry the bark back from even the stoutest limbs
    Audubon’s original watercolor painting of the Golden Eagle includes this tiny figure of a hunter crossing a chasm on a log. Many believe it is a miniature self-portrait reflecting Audubon’s own struggle to track down birds and complete The Birds of America

CHAPTER TWO
    AUDUBON ON THE IVORY-BILLED FRONTIER
    He neglects his material interests and is forever wasting his time hunting, drawing and stuffing birds, and playing the fiddle. We fear he will never be fit for any practical purpose on the face of the Earth.
    â€”John James Audubon’s brother-in-law
    Southern Rivers and States—1820-1835
    O N OCTOBER 12, 1820, THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD JOHN JAMES AUDUBON PUSHED HIS flowing, shoulder-length hair back from his face, kissed his wife, Lucy, and their two young sons goodbye, and climbed aboard a flatboat bound for New Orleans from Cincinnati. His worldly possessions included his gun, his drawing supplies, a roll of wire, a few books, a brass telescope, and the buckskin clothes on his back. His lone companion was thirteen-year-old Joseph Mason, a boy with a genius for painting flowering plants and trees, perfect for the backgrounds Audubon would need to complete his great project.
    The white area shows the wide expanse of the Ivory-bill’s original distribution. The bird might have been found within this area—although only in places where the habitat was suitable—but not outside it
    Audubon didn’t even have enough money to book passage. He signed on as a hunter whose job would be to shoot game to feed the crew and passengers. But as they pushed off down the Ohio River, Audubon must have felt like a rich man, for he was finally following his dream. He was fed up with teaching dancing and giving drawing instructions to students with modest talents; he was tired of being a shopkeeper. Now he was determined to do what he cared about most: paint birds. Not just a few species, either, but all the birds of America.
    As a free-spirited boy in the French countryside, Audubon had filled his room
with nests and birds’ eggs and animal skins, which he practiced drawing over and over. His father sent him to America in 1803 to take care of property he had recently bought there, and to avoid having his son serve in Napoleon’s army. Arriving in Pennsylvania at the age of eighteen, Audubon was only about ten years younger than the United States of America