Displaying items by tag: arthur allen
Tuesday, 26 January 2021 16:55
Still no glimpses of the ghost bird
The red-cockaded woodpecker is vanishingly rare, but its true status in the wild is not known. Courtesy Stephen Lyn Bales
‘Lord God Bird’ of lore, a sad reminder of what we have lost
We stood agape. Before us, on a white countertop as big as a ping pong table, lay 17 dead ivory-billed woodpeckers. They were museum specimens neatly arranged in two groups: nine males and eight females, all lined up like ears of corn in separate wooden trays. Each had a paper label attached to a leg with handwritten notation of when and where it had been collected; most seemed to date from the late 1800s. Being in the presence of so many rendered us reverently speechless.
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Creature Features
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