Volume 40, Number 5 · March 4, 1993
Death in the Family
By George Plimpton
Birds in Jeopardy: The Imperiled and Extinct Birds of the United States and Canada, Including Hawaii and Puerto Rico
by Paul R. Ehrlich, by David S. Dobkin, by Darryl Wheye, illustrations by Darryl Wheye
Stanford University Press, 259 pp., $17.95 (paper)
A Shadow and a Song
by Mark Jerome Walters
Chelsea Green, 238 pp., $21.95
Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species
by Paul Ehrlich, by Anne Ehrlich
Ballantine, 384 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Where Have All the Birds Gone? Essays on the Biology and Conservation of Birds That Migrate to the American Tropics
by John Terborgh
Princeton University Press, 207 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Federal and State Endangered Species Expenditures: Fiscal Year 1990
compiled by the US Fish and Wildlife Service
Some years ago I went along on a pack trip into the high pine country of the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico to look for the Imperial Ivory-billed Woodpecker. My companions were John Rowlett and Victor Emanuel, both highly qualified bird watchers who now lead nature tours. The bird we were looking for was a huge woodpecker, the world's largest, almost two feet in height, the size of a raven. The bird was thought to be extinct—not seen authoritatively since 1954, when a dentist named W.L. Rheim spotted a pair 100 kilometers south of Durango; four years later, returning to the Sierra Madre, he met an Indian on the trail carrying a dead Imperial, very likely one of the pair he had seen earlier.
Review, 7022 words
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