The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

By: Phillip Hoose

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Binding: hardcover
Publisher: Melanie Kroupa Books
Pages: 196 pages, 8 3/4 x 9 3/4
b&w photographs
Weight: 1 pounds
ISBN:  0-374-36173-8
Published:  August 2004

“The most thorough and readable account to date of the personalities, economics, and politics that combined to bring about the demise of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker."

—David Allen Sibley

“A marvelous book . . . a powerful argument for the conservation ethic."

—E. O. Wilson

The tragedy of extinction is revealed through the dramatic story of a legendary bird, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and the people who tried to paint it, shoot it, sell it, and, in a last-ditch effort, save it. This powerful saga sweeps through two hundred years of history, introducing artists like John James Audubon, bird collectors like William Brewster, and, finally, a new breed of scientist in Cornell's Arthur A. "Doc" Allen and his young ornithology student James Tanner, whose quest to save the Ivory-bill was to culminate in one of the first great conservation showdowns in American history—an early round in what is now a worldwide effort to save the species. As hope for the Ivory-bill fades in the United States, Phillip Hoose turns his focus to Cuba, where the bird was last spotted.

This revelatory narrative provides a window into our country's changing ideas about conservation and prompted Paul R. Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, to call it "a groundbreaking book . . . A spellbinding mystery and a haunting look at how a species can suddenly lose ground."

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