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Chapter 1 Q Sabbatical The idea grew, and soon we had a hunting expedition well in mind—an expedition which would leave guns at home and would “shoot” the birds with cameras, microphones, and binoculars. —Arthur A. Allen Bluster. The man had bluster. As with any good Southern lawyer in the 1930s, it was as much a part of his persona as his penchant for white linen suits and straw hats. But on this one point, Mason Spencer knew what he was talking about: ivory-billed woodpeckers were not ghost birds. No sir! Although the last documented sighting of the species in Louisiana had been in 1899, they were still alive in the state and he could prove it. Damn right! And armed with a gun and a hunting permit he obtained from the State Conservation Department, Spencer ventured into the misty bayous along the Tensas River near Tallulah, and when the smoke cleared, he had his proof: a fresh, bloodied specimen he had just shot himself. Until his gunshot brought it down, this one ghost bird had been very much alive. It’s a strange thing—slaughtering a bird to prove it wasn’t extinct—but that’s what he did. Spencer was well educated, an attorney, and a state representative . He was a big man, both in physique and influence, reportedly fond of bars and gambling. It was said at the time that he was the only man capable of beating Huey Long at his own game—populist politics—but he didn’t seem to have the inclination. Among naturalists of his day, Spencer was no villain or pariah for having shot an ivory-bill. Many tenured professors of zoology at the time would have done the same thing just to get a special specimen for their collections—though today this does represent an antiquated, shoot-first-askquestions -later attitude toward the sanctity of a species. Spencer’s ivory-bill shooting did cause a stir. It happened on April 15, 1932, and the killing set into motion a chain of events that would resonate all the way to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology over thirteen hundred miles away. Almost three years later, three men of science busied themselves on the Cornell campus for a journey. Their plans had been made, itinerary set, maps 6 Sabbatical secured, equipment bought and checked, rechecked, and packed into two recently purchased trucks. Spirits were high. Wednesday, February 13, 1935, was a cold, overcast day in Ithaca, New York. The temperatures the day before had barely inched into the low thirties. The weather forecast was for warmer conditions with rain or snow developing, but that mattered little. The men were headed to sunny Florida and points beyond, a long way beyond. Across the nation, all eyes and ears were tuned to news from the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey. The prosecution’s case against Bruno Richard Hauptmann, accused kidnapper and killer of Charles Lindbergh’s young son, was going to the jury. The group of eight men and four women spent only eleven hours and six minutes before finding the German-born carpenter guilty. “He’s a low animal,” declared Attorney General David Wilentz in a scathing closing statement. Labeled the “Crime of the Century,” the darkness of the deed had cast a malaise over the entire country, which only eight years before had celebrated Lindbergh’s history-making solo flight across the Atlantic. But at Cornell University, in the Finger Lakes region of western New York, the three men were focused on the task at hand. Theirs was an exciting undertaking ; some would even call it the adventure of a lifetime, in its own humble way as unique as Lindbergh’s flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, to Paris in 1927. In the history of ornithological science, no one had ever attempted an endeavor such as the Cornell men envisioned. Their plan: to travel across the country and make sound recordings of birds in their natural habitat. Sound recording was still a relatively primitive technology; and to take the bulky, cumbersome equipment into marshes, mountains, swamps, and prairies in unknown weather conditions seemed extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible . The group’s goal was to seek out species rumored to be vanishing and to find, photograph, and record them before they were lost to the world. Ornithology, as a specialized, named field of study, had only been around since the mid-1800s. The first half-century of the...

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