I'm John Batchel 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 large scale, and now in the 21st century, there's a recognition naturalism, ecology, that what was done in order to build America was wrongheaded and it can be corrected.

However, I want to go to a couple of small successes here that are a joy to celebrate.

The ivory-billed 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 bayou or swamp 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 kind of bird called

the Heathen, 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 waterbird in America,

were down to fewer than a hundred birds. Whooping cranes were down to only 16 left. Even bald

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