I'm John Bashworth, Professor Dan Flores. His new book is Wild New World. The epic story

of animals and people in America, we've established that the philosophy used by the hunters

and the profiteers of the 18th to 19th century is still in place and yet in the 20th century

there are first small demonstrated efforts to preserve this or that creature. And then large

scale and now in the 21st century there's a recognition, naturalism, ecology that what was done

in order to build America was wrong headed and they can be corrected. However, I want to go to

a couple of small successes here that are a joy to celebrate. The ivory bill woodpecker,

Professor, this is such a surprise because I wrote down in my notes, disappeared last one,

1940s. Well, the story is it's miraculous but it's also tragic. We do think now, according to

the Fish and Wildlife Service about a year ago that the ivory bill is extinct. There are always

people in the south which was the ivory bill's original range who believe they are seeing ivory

bills. And so there are endless stories that in some by you or some somewhere in the Carolinas

or in Louisiana, there are still some around. But this was of course America's contribution to our

candidate for the largest most charismatic woodpecker in the world. It was one of our iconic

animals from the colonial period into the 20th century. But it's along with a whole host of other

birds became threatened and acknowledged as threatened by the 1930s. For example,

the Northeast, New England in particular, had a particular kind of bird called the Heat Man,

which was an Eastern Prairie chicken, which became extinct as people actually stood and watched it

happen in the late 1920s into about 1931 when the last bird disappeared. During that same period,

trumpeter swans, our largest water bird in America, worked down to fewer than 100 birds.

Woothing cranes were down to only 16 left, even bald eagles were being threatened because they

were regarded by the livestock industry as a possible threat to raising sheep and goats.

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