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my favorite Audubon's:
Ivory-billed woodpecker
A species near and dear to my heart since I spent four years writing a book about them. Audubon writes:
"The ivory-billed woodpecker confines its rambles to a comparatively very small portion of the United States, it never having been observed in the Middle States within the memory of any person now living there
I wish, kind reader, it were in my power to present to your mind's eye the favourite resort of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Would that I could describe the extent of those deep morasses, overshadowed by millions of gigantic dark cypresses, spreading their sturdy moss-covered branches, as if to admonish intruding man to pause and reflect on the many difficulties which he must encounter, should he persist in venturing farther into their almost inaccessible recesses, extending for miles before him, where he should be interrupted by huge projecting branches, here and there the massy trunk of a fallen and decaying tree, and thousands of creeping and twining plants of numberless species!”
"The ivory-billed woodpecker confines its rambles to a comparatively very small portion of the United States, it never having been observed in the Middle States within the memory of any person now living there
I wish, kind reader, it were in my power to present to your mind's eye the favourite resort of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Would that I could describe the extent of those deep morasses, overshadowed by millions of gigantic dark cypresses, spreading their sturdy moss-covered branches, as if to admonish intruding man to pause and reflect on the many difficulties which he must encounter, should he persist in venturing farther into their almost inaccessible recesses, extending for miles before him, where he should be interrupted by huge projecting branches, here and there the massy trunk of a fallen and decaying tree, and thousands of creeping and twining plants of numberless species!”
By Audubon the naturalist, from his Ornithological Biography.
On January 20, a complete first edition boxed-set of Audubon's The Birds of America including his five-volume Ornithological Biography will be auctioned in New York at Christie's. There are only 120 known copies of this huge work. As big as a coffee table, weighing over 200 pounds, it contains 435 hand-colored engravings printed on handmade paper measuring 29.5 X 39.5 inches. Assembled into four volumes, it's massive.
I'll be speaking at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge today at 1 p.m. about my book "Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Ivory-bill."
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