I'm John Bachelors with 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 scale, and now in the 21st century, there's a recognition, naturalism, ecology.

What was done in order to build America was wrong-headed and it can be corrected.

Over 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 the story is it's it's it's

miraculous but it's also tragic we do think, 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 Bills original range, who believe they are seeing Ivory Bills.

And so there are endless stories that, and some by you or swap 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 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. in particular kind of bird called the Heathan 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,

were down to fewer than a hundred birds.

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