The Western Section of The Wildlife Society
"Lost and Found," by J. Drew Lanham
In Lost and Found, J. Drew Lanham looks back on the formative years that shaped his inevitable career as a birder, a path especially rocky for a young African American growing up in South Carolina in the 1970’s.
“From my earliest nurturing in my backwoods upbringing in Edgefield, SC – a place where wild turkeys always seemed abundant and white-tailed deer never read the early 1970’s news of their demise, I’ve been more interested in being outside than in… The hardening for that rural nature-nurture destiny then came with my first field guide and constant (but unsuccessful) attempts to fly without the aid of machines already proven in the task. By the time I was ten I’d launched myself from ladders, rooftops, haystacks and trees with cardboard wings, plastic garbage bag parachutes and umbrellas in attempts to be one of the birds I watched. Somehow gravity always won.”