Imperial Dreams: Now in paperback . . .

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Now in paperback . . .

I'm pleased to announce that Simon & Schuster has just released a new paperback edition of Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre, about my perilous travels in the drug lands of northern Mexico in search of the world's rarest bird. The Imperial Woodpecker is a giant—the largest woodpecker that ever lived—and the closest relative of the famed Ivory-billed Woodpecker of the American South. Many believe the Imperial Woodpecker is extinct, but I set out to see if any of them might yet exist in the remotest reaches of the high-mountain mesa pine forests of Mexico.

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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.