The Red Hills region is an idyllic setting filled with longleaf pines that stretches from Tallahassee, Florida, to Thomasville, Georgia. At its heart lies Tall Timbers, a former hunting plantation. In 1919, sportsman Henry L. Beadel purchased the Red Hills plantation to be used for quail hunting. As was the tradition, he conducted prescribed burnings after every hunting season in order to clear out the thick brush to make it more appealing to the nesting birds. After the U.S. Forest Service outlawed the practice in the 1920s, condemning it as harmful for the forest and its wildlife, the quail population diminished dramatically. Astonished by this loss and encouraged by his naturalist friend Herbert L. Stoddard, Beadel set his sights on conserving the land in order to study the effects of prescribed burnings on wildlife. Upon his death in 1958, Beadel donated the entire Tall Timbers estate to be used as an ecological research station. The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation traces Beadel’s evolution from sportsman and naturalist to conservationist. Complemented by a wealth of previously unpublished, rare vintage photographs, it follows the transformation of the plantation into what its founders envisioned--a long-term plot study station, independent of government or academic funding and control.

The first biography of the distinguished ornithologist

George M. Sutton (1898-1982), an esteemed ornithologist, was also one of the preeminent bird artists of the Twentieth Century. He was asked by his friend Thomas D. Burleigh, who worked on his manuscript for Georgia Birds during the 1940s and '50s, to provide the illustrations. Sutton painted a series of individual portraits of a select group of Georgia birds shown in their natural habitats. Sutton arranged to spend the spring and summer of 1952 with his friend Herbert L. Stoddard at Stoddard's Sherwood Plantation in southern Grady County. They made a field trip to the Georgia coast near Savannah and Brunswick to study shore birds. Otherwise Sutton sought, studied, and painted birds in Stoddard's backyard. Sutton described his experiences with Stoddard and his Meridian Road neighbors in an affectionate essay in the front matter of Georgia Birds, and in charming one-paragraph vignettes for each painting. Sutton gave the original Georgia Birds' watercolors to Stoddard, whose son later donated them to Tall Timbers; they are part of the Stoddard Collection.