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

which were then studied further.
    Cornell professor George Sutton wrote: “In the roughing-out room, the fumes of ammonia are so strong as to be all but overpowering. Had Edgar Allan Poe spent two minutes in this chamber of horrors, he might have written a mystery thriller the likes of which are not on the world’s bookshelves today.”

    Bird students investigated and experimented all day and all night. Many projects involved getting to know more about what birds ate. Live bullfrogs splashed in McGraw’s sinks, and field mice scraped their claws against the slick sides of big tubs kept in the lab rooms. There were refrigerators containing
dead cats, and gunnysacks stuffed with dead hawks and owls whose stomachs awaited examination. One student even had his own collection of snakes, at least until the day they all got loose. For months afterward, bloodcurdling screams rang out through the building. After a while, students didn’t even notice. Screams only meant that someone had encountered a Blue Racer coiled behind a specimen flask, or maybe that a blacksnake had dropped onto a student’s open textbook from a library shelf above.
    Doc Allen oversees a Cornell ornithology class at McGraw Hall. Note the bird skeletons on the windowsill
    In 1931, the Great Depression created widespread poverty and made it hard for many families to send their children to college. Doc Allen did everything he could to keep his bird students in school, including letting a few of them live at McGraw. One young man from Florida, having no money to rent a room, unrolled his mattress each night on top of a long classroom laboratory table and fell asleep. The students who opened the door for early-morning lectures sometimes startled him awake, causing him to scramble into his trousers and dive behind a cabinet to shave. He cooked his dinner—usually a stew of carrots, beans, and bread crusts—in a big pot, adding the
bodies of whatever Red Squirrels and chipmunks he was able to trap on campus that day.
    Jim Tanner, with financial help from his family, moved his belongings into an all-male rooming house which provided a bed and dinner for five dollars a week. It was all he needed. For Tanner and his fellow ornithology students it was birds, birds, birds, almost twenty-four hours a day. He took classes in entomology (the study of insects), zoology, and German, a language in which many articles about birds were written. He also studied drawing, bacteriology, botany, and genetics. He especially liked Professor Allen’s new course, “Conservation of Wildlife,” which explored how to preserve wild species in their natural habitats. It was the first such course in the United States.
    Every Monday night, Tanner stomped into McGraw with his classmates, his professors, and invited guests for the week’s discussion on birds. The seminar sessions began with each person telling the entire group about the birds he or she had seen on campus in the past week. It was a chance to shine before the others, or to make an embarrassing mistake out loud. Doc, who led the group, never reacted to errors in bird identification with laughter or harsh words, but instead with gentle questioning and thoughtful remarks, which could be even worse. A student named Sally Hoyt Spofford remembers reporting a Swamp Sparrow in March, far too early for the bird to be in Ithaca. The others looked down at their boots and tried to conceal smiles as Sally’s face reddened. “How interesting,” Dr. Allen mused, his voice light. “That is an early one.”
    Tanner pushed himself hard, learned rapidly, and won high marks. He flew through a four-year course in just three years. In the spring of 1934, when he was finishing his undergraduate studies and wondering what to do next, McGraw was buzzing with rumors and wagers about how Doc was going to spend his sabbatical leave. Doc had taught at Cornell for more than twenty years without a