Ever since the days of Mark Catesby (1731) this species has attracted popular attention, and even at that time, as he stated in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: “The bills of these Birds are much valued by the _Canada Indians_, who made Coronets of ’em for their Princes and great warriors, by fixing them round a Wreath, with their points outward. The Northern Indians having none of these Birds in their cold country, purchase them of the _Southern People_ at the price of two, and sometimes three, Buck-skins a Bill.” At that time the species was found throughout the Gulf States as far north as North Carolina and up the Mississippi Valley as far as southern Ohio and Illinois. Today it is almost extinct, and indeed during the past 50 years long periods have elapsed when no individuals have been reported from any part of its range. It apparently has been exterminated from all but a few isolated localities in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, where it still clings on in a precarious position. The ivorybill is primarily a bird of the great moss-hung southern swamps, where mature timber with its dying branches provides a bounteous food supply of wood-boring larvae, but its habits apparently vary in different parts of its range, for the birds I observed in Florida, although nesting in a cypress swamp, did most of their feeding along its borders on recently killed young pines that were infested with beetle larvae. They even got down on the ground like flickers to feed among palmetto roots on a recent burn. In Louisiana, on the other hand, the nesting birds observed confined their activities to a mature forest of oak, sweetgum, and hackberry, and paid little attention to the cypress trees along the lagoons.