Gallagher was part of a search in the mid-2000s to determine if the ivory-billed woodpecker still existed in a remote tract of swampy forest in Arkansas. They supposedly spotted some and later there was even a video taken, though that evidence is apparently disputed by many authorities and the broader consensus is seemingly the species is extinct.
This book, however, is about several trips Gallagher and a variety of other interested parties made to Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains in the early-2010s, searching for signs the imperial woodpecker, the ivory-billed's bigger relative, still existed. While there are scattered reports of sightings from the 1940s up to a few years before Gallagher's trips started, what real information we have on their habits, in terms of breeding, diet, social structure, habitat preferences, came mostly from a Norwegian named Carl Lumholz, who spent a couple of years in the 1890s riding a mule the length of the Sierra Madres, writing mostly about the people he encountered, but also the wildlife. So if we want to learn anything further about imperial woodpeckers, including whether there's a species to preserve, time was getting short.
SPOILER ALERT, Gallagher doesn't find any imperial woodpeckers. I imagine the book would have been somewhat different if he had. Probably more like what I was expecting. But if you can't find it, you can't find it, so the book focuses on the people and the place they inhabit. It's in some ways a history, as those mountains have long been isolated enough to be used as refuges for a variety of people. Pancho Villa hid out there from the American military for a time, some of the last holdouts of the Apaches in Mexico lived there. Gallagher travels through several villages he presents as not having changed in their ways of living in centuries. No electricity, no phones or anything like that. That isolation likely worked in the woodpeckers' favor, as basically all the evidence we have says they preferred old-growth pine forests at altitude.
Unfortunately, time marches on, and where there's old timber, there will be people trying to get to it and cut it down to sell. Which is what Gallagher thinks may have done the imperials in; the logging industry destroying a lot of their habitat. He speaks to a lot of people along the way, looking for any hints of places that might hold imperial woodpeckers. Which gives the reader a good sense of what a longshot this is, when the people he speaks with are in their 70s or older, talking about how they remember those birds vividly, but they haven't seen one since the 1960s or even further back.
The other thing that apparently moved into the region is drug cartels growing opium. Their looming threat hangs over the entire book. Gallagher often mentions people who advise him against going on this trip, or tell him he absolutely can't search beyond a particular mountain range, because that's Zetas cartel turf. There are more than a few encounters with men in SUVs or trucks, often with AK-47s, demanding to know what they're doing, or wanting to see identification. There are people he planned to speak with who are too grief-stricken because one of their relatives was abducted and murdered days earlier. To an extent, the book is Gallagher slowly coming to realize that risking his life to try and find this woodpecker might be a little crazy and/or stupid.
'It's hard to say what motivated him to embark on such grueling and dangerous journeys. He had an excellent income from his dental practice, a nice home, and no children, so he and his wife could afford to indulge themselves. Instead, he chose to drive south with a few buddies and spend up to two months at a time roughing it in the outback of Durango, living on beans, booze, and tortillas.'
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