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The Race to Save the Lord God Bird.

Article Excerpt
The Race to Save the Lord God Bird written by Phillip Hoose, published by Melanie Kroupa Books/Farrar Straus Giroux

It is a story of amazing complexity and even suspense, involving German POWs, the nineteenth-century craze for feathered hats, Mrs. O'Leary's cow, scientific advances, politics, economics, environmental catastrophe, unpleasant journeys through swamps inhabited by "everything that crawled, howled, lurked, snapped, hooted, screamed, and slithered," and, inevitably, greed. Lots of greed. It is Phillip Hoose's The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, and the bird is the magnificent, possibly extinct, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the holy grail of birders. While following the woodpecker's mysterious path--or flight--readers also discover much about the interdependence of species, the tragedy of extinction, and the passions of brave individuals and dedicated environmentalists. Hoose weaves a multilayered tapestry and a can't-put-it-down narrative--fully illustrated, beautifully produced, and thoroughly documented--that leave us brokenhearted. But there may yet be a happier ending, as we will hear. L.S.

I'D LIKE TO tell you how and why I came to choose the Ivorybilled Woodpecker as the subject for a work of nonfiction. I did it to unite my two careers with one project: I am both an author and a conservationist (next week I will begin my twenty-ninth year as a staff member of the Nature Conservancy). In the past, I have written about everything from young people in U.S. history to racism in sports, from Hoosier basketball to an ant about to be squished by a child's basketball shoe--but not about my job.

It's never been easy to explain what I do. I have often found myself in a swamp or a prairie, or at the margin of a pond, standing beside a landowner and working up the nerve to ask him or her to make a financial...

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