Free The Race to Save the Lord God Bird by Phillip Hoose Page A

but he never took it with him. He even refused to collect butterflies with his friends because he couldn’t make himself stick pins in their wings. He wanted to meet wild things on their own terms, not his.
    All nature was interesting to Jim, but nothing was as fascinating as birds. He especially loved to listen to them. He practiced imitating their songs and could sometimes get them to answer him. He taught himself which birds sang from the ground, which sounded from the middle of trees, and which called from the highest branches. He got so that he could even tell them apart by their one-note chips—sharp little warning notes which had no melody. He learned to identify nests and eggs. He picked up owl pellets—regurgitated wads of matter that owls couldn’t digest—from under pine trees and used a twig to tease tiny mouse bones from the fur balls. Sometimes he hiked with a heavy camera, snapping pictures that he developed when he got home, turning the family bathroom into a darkroom.
    Jim learned a lot from school, but his most valuable lessons came on those long hikes. He kept a journal, starting with the date and time of day and noting the weather and the direction of the wind. He made himself go a long time between meals. He learned to sit still against a tree even if the bark was digging into his shoulder
blades and itching like mad. Most important, he learned that while you can’t meet Wildlife by appointment. if you study wild creatures carefully enough, you can predict where they will be.
    By the time Jim was a teenager, he had sailed through his scout badge on ornithology and was known as a town expert on birds. When someone picked up a wounded Golden Eagle far out of its range, he naturally took it to Jim. Jim kept it in a cage in his home and fed it rodents until it regained its strength. Then, like a falconer, he taught it how to hunt from his arm.
    Jim Tanner with the Golden Eagle he rescued
    As Jim Tanner entered his senior year of high school, he had many possibilities to choose from, but he had plans of his own. By the greatest stroke of luck, he lived only twenty-two miles from Cornell University, one of the world’s premier centers of bird knowledge, where Professor Arthur Augustus Allen offered America’s sole course of study in ornithology. That meant that Jim was only an hour’s bus ride away from a chance to make his living learning about, teaching about, and helping birds. Ranked third in his class, he applied to Cornell and was quickly accepted.
    By the time he said goodbye to his family in the late summer of 1931, Jim Tanner was almost as much a creature of the forest as any songbird, and as hungry for knowledge as an owl for a mouse. At last he was headed to Ithaca, New York, to study with the world-famous Dr. Allen at Cornell. No more “be home by dinner” for him. From now on, dinner would be whenever he could find time to eat.
    OLD MCGRAW
    The center of every Cornell ornithology student’s universe was McGraw Hall. When people stepped into the creaky building from the often snow-covered campus, their eyes had to suddenly adjust to the dim light even as their nostrils filled with the sharp odor of formaldehyde. Jammed into McGraw’s three noisy floors were dozens of small classrooms, offices, closets, and even a museum. Bird skeletons raised their wing bones from dusty windowsills. Stuffed hawks and owls and shorebirds stared silently from every nook and cranny. Pickled bird parts floated lazily in briny jars that rested on shelves in laboratory rooms.

    THE ROUGHING-OUT ROOM AT MCGRAW
    If you want to learn about birds, you have to get to know bugs, since birds of almost every family eat insects and spiders. At McGraw, the “Roughing-Out Room” high in a drafty tower of the old building was the place where students took notes as hordes of beetles attacked the crudely skinned corpses of birds and animals, breaking them down into skeletons