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.

dalliance

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Forgive me.

I'm running behind, the past six months, concentrating on my family's needs, my job, finishing a book project, it's been somewhat overwhelming. (Sarah Brobst recently asked me: If you can be overwhelmed and underwhelmed, can you simply be whelmed? And, indeed, yes you can.)

There was a stack of forlorn mail that I haven't had time to sort, on the end of my desk, there in the breakfast nook, near the window with the hummingbird feeder, and tackling it recently, I soon uncovered this January/February issue of Audubon with their photography contest prize-winners.

The cover features the grand prize winner, a photo by Rob Palmer. Wow! Gosh! Outstanding! And whatever other superlative you care to use.

I'm sure I'm not the first to see it and think of Walt Whitman and his famous poem "The Dalliance of the Eagles." Dalliance means "amorous play," and please note like the extended play of eagles, the poem is one long extended sentence, a sort of word play, if you will...

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)

Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,

The rushing amorous contact high in space together,

The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,

Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,

In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling

Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,

A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,

Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting,
their separate diverse flight,

She hers, he his, pursuing.

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