Imperial Dreams: Cuban Ivory-bill Search Featured in Audubon

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Cuban Ivory-bill Search Featured in Audubon

Journalist Mac McClelland, who accompanied us in Cuba, wrote an in-depth article on the search, which is featured in the May/June 2016 issue of Audubon and can be viewed online. Mac's article and Greg Kahn's excellent photographs vividly capture the intensity and hardship of our time in the mountains of Cuba.

Photo by Greg Kahn/Audubon

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About Me

I'm the author of six books, including my latest, Born to Fish (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; May 2018) about world-class angler Greg Myerson and his conservation efforts on behalf of the striped bass.

My other recent book is Imperial Dreams, about my search for the Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico, the largest woodpecker that ever lived. Two feet in length, with the deepest black plumage and brilliant, snow-white flight feathers that showed as a white shield on its lower back, the Imperial Woodpecker lived only in the high country of northwestern Mexico. The last documented sighting of the species took place in 1956, and many scientists have already written the bird's epitaph. But stories persist of lone Imperial Woodpeckers flying yet over the most remote pine forests of the Sierra Madre.

I began searching for these birds about ten years ago and interviewing people who remembered seeing them. It was tough. The mountains have become a major center of drug growing where you often encounter AK-47-toting drug traffickers and other dangerous people.