Audubon book review

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 The Long Goodbye

A new book traces one ornithologist's quixotic efforts to study and preserve the ivory-billed woodpecker

By Frank Graham Jr.

"They called and acted nervously when I approached," James Tanner writes of the ivory-billed woodpecker in his 400-plus-page travel journal in 1937. "Male whammed on stub two inches long, then flew a short distance, whammed and bammed. Female worked on a dead hackberry stub 25 feet high, 18 inches in diameter, mostly skinned and showed many [beetle] engraver burrows."

Tanner's journal is the chief source, the very substance, of the saddest book I have ever read about birds. Ghost Birds resembles the recollections and musings of a man at the bedside of a friend struggling against a fatal illness... fascinating in its detail of the day-to-day existence of the last known group of these magnificent birds, the book also records a dogged scientist's frustrating search through southern swamps for other ivory-bills."

For the rest of Frank Graham Jr.'s essay/review about my latest book Ghost Birds  that appears in the September/October issue of Audubon magazine click: Long Goodbye.