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Chapter 16 Q From the Santee to the Sunshine State In the Santee region the birds had been seen by several observers, most frequently by Alexander Sprunt Jr., but very little was known about their numbers and distribution there. —James T. Tanner Late in 1938 the gathering storm in Europe continued to gain momentum. Beginning on the night of November 9, an anti-Semitic rampage exploded throughout Germany and Austria. In what many consider the beginning of the Holocaust , Nazis destroyed or damaged thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and more than two hundred synagogues. Countless storefront windows were broken, and the shards of glass scattered on the sidewalks gave rise to the name Kristallnacht —the “Crystal Night,” or “Night of Broken Glass.” By the end of the bloody riots, some ninety people had been killed at random, almost all of them Jews. That same month in the United States, which was still struggling through the Great Depression, President Roosevelt saw a number of his Democratic Party allies in Congress go down to defeat in the midterm elections. This setback was but one of several obstacles that were thwarting FDR’s efforts to implement his New Deal agenda during his second term. Meanwhile, on the foreign-policy front, Roosevelt was engaged in secret talks with the French to sell them military aircraft in the face of the growing Nazi threat. Back in western New York, Jim Tanner knew that winter was working its way to the South. The forests would be dropping their leaves, making it easier to find woodpeckers. Having one year left in his Audubon fellowship, he was anxious to get back on the road. On November 16, he drove east to New York City and met with his benefactor, John Baker, at the Audubon headquarters. After almost two years of searching, the big question on their minds must have been this: were there any ivory-bills left in the South outside of the Singer Tract? At that moment, the most promising place was the Santee bottomlands in South Carolina. Alexander Sprunt Jr. and Lester Walsh, Baker’s personal assistant, had confirmed a sighting. The men had found an ivory-bill and possibly heard two more. Yet, Jim had visited the Santee region twice in 1937 but found nothing of note. Clearly, a third visit was in order. 176 From the Santee to the Sunshine State That evening Jim stayed in the YMCA and took in a popular play on Broadway, Tobacco Road. Jack Kirkland’s drama was based on Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel about a family of poor white sharecroppers in Georgia—a family desperate to hang on to their small homestead while all around them other farms are being gobbled up and mechanized. The story about the Lester family probably resonated with Tanner more than with anyone else in attendance that evening. He had spent almost two years driving across the southern states, passing hundreds of tenant farms. Jim knew the “croppers” to be hardworking people, struggling to raise enough cotton and garden produce—potatoes, beans, onions, winter turnips—to keep their land and feed their families. Tanner had spoken to them, eaten with them. On more than one occasion, they had helped him find his way, loaned him a mule or a horse, talked to him about “kents,” and assisted him by pulling his car out of the mud. They were good folks, not like the buffoons in the play. After leaving the Big Apple, Tanner spent three days driving to Columbia, South Carolina, with overnight stays in Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, North Carolina. The route along U.S. Highway 1 mirrored the drive he had made with Allen and Kellogg almost four years before. In the state capital, Jim met the head of South Carolina’s forestry commission as well as a state forester who gave him information about Hell Hole Swamp and the new Francis Marion National Forest established in July 1936. The Santee River formed the northern border for that woodland. On Tuesday, November 22, Tanner traveled to the town of St. Stephens. Located just south of the Santee River and west of the new national forest, it had a population almost too small to count. He spent two days exploring the bottomland , interviewing outdoorsmen who might be familiar with ivory-bills. Several described them as being very rare; none could report a recent sighting. One afternoon , Tanner ate lunch on the porch of an abandoned plantation with a line of...

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