Claws scritch on bark as the bird heaves itself up for a look at me. Its head pops around the warty gray trunk of the hackberry. Oh, I am too close, but I say a prayer that it will stay, if only for a moment. I’ve had my binoculars at chin level as I crept forward. They’re foggy from my breath as I ease them to my eyes. His eye meets mine through the lenses. It is palest yellow, almost white, and it stands out in his velvety black face like a topaz. The pupil is tiny, a pinpoint. His crest is standing straight up, flared in surprise. It is backlit by the dawn, afire around the edge. His bill, horn white and huge, juts from his head like the primitive chisel that it is. In my mind’s eye, I have searched for him, seen him in dreams, but even in dreams I have never seen anything like this. The white line running from his eye down his neck is immaculate, shining. And, almost casually, he hitches around the trunk and begins a long spiral up the tree, giving me a look at the lavish white rectangle of his folded wings over his back.
The motion of his legs and body is so fluid I can’t tell how it is he’s hitching upward; it just seems to happen. He thrusts back with his legs, and his body is effortlessly propelled up, his long crest flopping with the motion. His claws are like grappling hooks, slaty semicircles that seem just to prick the bark. I can see daylight under the soles of his feet as he spirals around the side of the tree. A couple of calls, brassy and explosive at this close range, a nervous toss of his head, and he launches himself, wings closed, off the trunk toward the rising sun. I gasp as they open, catching his fall—a fanfare of white, so brilliant and unexpected in the gloomy understory. He lines out just below the canopy, weaving through the great trunks of the bottomland giants, and is gone. I roll backward from the aching crouch I’d held the whole time and start to laugh as an ant picks its way through the tears streaming down into my ears. I had never given up hope that they were still here, still anywhere, not lost forever, but forever found.
Who to tell? Who, perhaps more important, not to tell? How to tell it? I don’t have a photograph; I don’t have a recording. I am an idiot. Why couldn’t I have packed my hand-held video camcorder, which lies safe in its foam-padded case in Ohio? Why didn’t I bring even a disposable camera? I could have bought one at any filling station on the way here. Well, I think, who expects to stumble on an extinct bird? I decide to stop chastising myself and get busy. I can draw, so I reach around for the sketchbook and pencils I keep in my backpack. Oh, to have him back, even for a second. I do my best, conjuring the exquisite angles of his head and bill, the long, spiky taper of his central tail feathers, even the color of his toes and the bristly white feathers covering his nostrils. These will have to do. Lord knows, these details aren’t in any field guide I’ve ever seen!
When I start thinking about ivory-billed woodpeckers, I find it hard to stop. They hitch and flap and peck around in my head; they make me think about large issues—like extinction—and small things—like the look in their eyes, the gloss of their feathers.
You will, I hope, forgive me my flight of fancy. I don’t wish to be ornithology’s Orson Welles. It’s all fiction, up to this paragraph, made out of whole cloth and a wild and deep longing to have been one of the chosen, to have seen this bird before it was gone.
With few exceptions, I write what I know about, what I have done or seen, and I draw that way, too, usually with the creature, fruit, leaf, or landscape right in front of me. That works best. I can draw, but I can’t cartoon. Put me at a table with paper and pencil, but nothing to look at, and I’m almost helpless to produce a believable drawing. I can write, but I find fiction a terrible stretch. But the ivory-bills won’t leave me alone. I think and stew and mutter about this piece, how to write about something I only wish I had known. Finally, I decide to look outward for help, to talk to those few who made the effort to know the great woodpecker.
Any study of the ivory-billed woodpecker has to start with James Tanner’s elegant treatise, written as his Ph.D. thesis at Cornell and published by the National Audubon Society in 1942, while a few birds still hung on in the cypress and bottomland forest of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. As a college student, I painstakingly photocopied each page of this book and bound it and every article I could uncover in an old leather binder. Not long out of college, I was invited one summer afternoon to meet Dr. Tanner and his wife, Nancy, at the home of a friend in Lyme, Connecticut. He was an affable, quiet man, who willingly signed my makeshift copy of his book. I felt completely helpless to tell him how much his work meant to me, and I fretted as the conversation in our afternoon tea party turned away from ivory-bills and on to topics of greater interest to the group. What I wanted to do was touch him, this man who knew the ivory-bill better than anyone who had ever lived, to soak up some of that magic. But you don’t go touching people you barely know, nor do you drag them off to ask questions about their Ph.D. theses, forty years in the past, when they’re having a nice get-together with friends. A year and a half later, James Tanner died. Nancy Tanner’s warm voice on the telephone was a balm to my regret. Between natural history travel and lectures to universities and ornithological societies, she shared her reminiscences of ivory-bills:
“Jim had written his book based on his studies of the Singer Tract [Louisiana] population in the late ’30s. We went back down at Christmastime of 1941 because he wanted to see what was happening there. There were still five ivory-bills, and we spent two weeks down there. The bark [from their workings] peels off and falls on the ground, and that’s how you find where they are. You could hear them [calling] a mile away, it seemed. They were extremely loud. Very loud. The pounding was pretty darn loud, too. They are a very, very conspicuous bird. They impressed me as being extremely large and gorgeous—so much white is showing. We had located one roost hole, so we were relatively close, sitting quietly on a log in the dark, soaking wet in the swamp. The bird is the last of the woodpeckers to come out [in the morning]. He climbed to the top, pounded, and then called; pounded and then called, and the female flew over next to him, and with a great racket they flew off. Jim went cantering after them, leaping over logs, slashing through briar. They fly extremely fast, and when they fly high, they’re going to be gone for a while.
“The Singer Tract was being cut quite heavily when we went down. After Jim wrote his report, he and [the Audubon Society] both went to Congress and tried to get it preserved. But the war was coming on; Pearl Harbor had just come along, and Jim went off in the service in a few months. To lose such great beauty . . . there was something about that bird that’s attracted everybody.”
About a week after our conversation, a package arrived in the mail from Mrs. Tanner. With shaking hands, I removed a neat stack of photographs and two typewritten stories. They were unpublished reminiscences by James Tanner, which weave a haunting spell of the primeval forest and the flashy, regal woodpeckers that once dwelt there:
We, the woodpeckers, Kuhn [his assistant], and I, lived in the forest, and I came to know it well. It was a bottomland forest of oaks, sweet gum, wild pecan, hackberry, and several other kinds of trees covering over a hundred square miles . . . All the animals that had ever lived there in the memory of man, excepting the [Carolina] paroquet and passenger pigeon, still lived there . . .
Finding and following the ivorybills was a fascinating game, and when the chase was successful it had a fitting reward, for ivory-billed woodpeckers were not only very rare birds—they looked like rare birds. Their plumage, in bold pattern, glistened, their big bills shone white, and their piercing yellow eyes held the look of a king. I never tired of watching them.
In these words, James Tanner’s awe of and respect for ivory-bills come through, loud as a double rap. His writing is too good simply to excerpt; it deserves a forum of its own.
I fervently want to talk to more people who’ve seen an ivory-bill. My next call is to Thomas R. Murray of Owen Sound, Ontario. An avid birder since the age of twelve, Mr. Murray was nineteen years old when he accompanied three friends on a birding expedition to
South Carolina in 1936. Mr. Murray’s good friend, Richard M. Saunders, wrote of their trip in his 1951 book, Carolina Quest. They’d traveled by rail from Toronto to New York, and by ship to Charleston, South Carolina. Seeing the ivory-bill was not, initially, a goal of this group. While staying at McClellanville, South Carolina, they heard a rumor that a group of bird watchers had seen ivory-bills less than a month earlier, along a branch of the Santee River:
We didn’t know the ivorybill had been seen there at all, until we got there. There were rumors around that they had been seen. We didn’t believe it, hardly, you know, but we found the guide who had taken the people in. We weren’t there too long looking for them, actually, because the guide was able to take us to the immediate area where they had been seen. It was a long trip up the river, in a dugout canoe with an outboard motor. We split the guide’s pay four ways.
There were two of them, a pair. We had a good look at them. There was absolutely no question; we were familiar with pileated woodpeckers. I don’t recall how close we were, but it was fairly close to them. Flaming red crest, and all that white on them. But it was for less than a minute, I would say. They both flew off, of course, as soon as they realized we were there. There was a tremendous amount of white in the wing. Once they started flying they disappeared almost immediately; it was in heavy bush. I’ve done a lot of birding: Argentina, Kenya, Costa Rica, Australia and New Zealand twice, New Guinea, Java . . . My world list is around 2,800. But that’s most certainly the crown jewel.
I try to imagine stumbling on a rumor of ivory-bills, being lucky enough to follow it up, and seeing them on the first try. That was a neat trick, even in 1936, but I can’t quite imagine it happening today. I want to hear from someone who went after the ivory-bill, on a quest to see the bird, so I call Don Eckelberry, ornithologist and peerless painter of birds, at his home on Long Island.
“I may be the last ornithologist to have seen them in the States. As far as I know, it is the last absolutely authenticated sighting. It was in April 1944. This is northeast Louisiana, the Tensas River bottom. Dick Pough had gone down there, and he’d seen it. He was the ornithologist for [the National] Audubon [Society], and I was in New York, working for the magazine. When he came back and said he’d seen it, I was in a lather to go see it, and I convinced John Baker, the president, to let me go down and see it.
“I never saw a male; this was a female. I went back and would follow her through the woods when I’d hear the double rap. And I saw it several times after that. We knew then it was on its way out. There were several in that area, and that was the last one seen. Pough had been down there for quite a while searching all over, and that’s all he came up with, this one female.
“It isn’t really a woodpecker; it’s a bark peeler. When she was peeling bark, her head was turned back to the side and went under the bark. Down at the base of the tree you’d find big strips of bark, not little chips. She’d start and hitch down and keep peeling it down and eating the grubs in the cambium layer, between the bark and the wood.
“The voice is like a loud HENK, like a red-breasted nuthatch, only louder. But it was not nearly as loud as the double rap. It had a double rap like ba-BOOM ba-BOOM, and that was very loud and would carry a long way. And once you’d heard that double rap, you could locate the bird. When it flew, it flew like a pintail duck, not like a woodpecker that goes down and up, down and up—it went straight. And it wasn’t easy to locate; it went straight away.
“The German prisoners of war [World War II] were helping lumber the Singer Tract. Not too far away you could hear the little donkey engine, and the cutting. I don’t know how much is left today. I never went back. I went in on the train, the donkey engine, and there were all these German prisoners who would rather be out in the fresh air than sitting in a camp. It was an interesting experience.”
Don Eckelberry has brought the meaning of extinction home to me as no one else could. Extinction, to me, is powerlessness, inexorability, rage, and despair. Extinction is the buzzing saw that drowns out even the double rap of a powerful woodpecker. Suddenly, I have to get some air, and I turn out the lights, put on my boots and coat, and walk deep into our woods. On this late January afternoon, the sky is oyster gray, and not a breath of air stirs the bare branches. I climb partway up a steep hill and sit to catch my breath and retie my shoes. I lean back on my arms and listen. A brown creeper calls, three, four times, then falls silent. Overhead, a jet roars and thunders, but soon it fades from hearing. A shot sounds from the east, a chain saw from the north. Over it all, I can hear traffic on the interstate highway, eight miles to the west.
There are pileated woodpeckers in our woods. I’ve found four nests over the years. The woods are being cut on three sides of our eighty-acre property, and the two pair we have been watching since 1992 are seen ever more frequently on our land. I can’t take a walk without hearing their high, wild yelps, or seeing the sweep of pied wings. I think about a world without pileated woodpeckers, as James Tanner and Don Eckelberry, I’m sure, thought about a world without ivory-bills. I listen again. Not a note from any bird. But I, too, can hear the saws.
In the mail, a week later, a package arrives from Don Eckelberry, the same day I received Nancy Tanner’s. I hope none of my neighbors sees me and wonders why I am suddenly down on my knees by the mailbox. He’s made a tracing paper overlay on one of my color studies of an ivory-bill, moving its leg to a more believable position. Thank you, Don. He’s included a reproduction of his painting of a pair of ivory-bills, muscular, bold, impeccably constructed, as are all his birds. My eyes bug out as a little sheaf of original field notes and sketches from his 1944 expedition falls out. The life sketches he’d described to me as “nothing, really,” leap off the page: living, preening, flying ivory-bills. There’s an essay, too, that had appeared in John Terres’s Discovery: Great Moments in the Lives of Outstanding Naturalists. In it, the artist paints his encounter with what was perhaps the Singer Tract’s last ivory-bill, but this time with words:
She came trumpeting in to the roost, her big wings cleaving the air in strong, direct flight, and she alighted with one magnificent upward swoop. Looking about wildly with her hysterical pale eyes, tossing her head from side to side, her black crest erect to the point of leaning forward, she hitched up the tree at a gallop, trumpeting all the way. Near the top she became suddenly quiet and began preening herself. With a few disordered feathers properly and vigorously rearranged, she gave her distinctive double rap, the second blow following so closely on the first that it was almost like an echo—an astonishingly loud, hollow, drumlike Bam-am! Then she hitched down the tree and sidled around to the roost hole, looked in, looked around, hitched down beneath the entrance, double-rapped, and went in.
At 7:20, after I had finished all my notes and we were about to leave, she popped out and raced up the trunk to its broken top where, bathed in rich orange light of the setting sun, she alternately preened and jerked her head about in a peculiar, angular way, quite unlike the motions of any other woodpecker I knew. I was tremendously impressed by the majestic and wild personality of this bird, its vigor, its almost frantic aliveness.
. . . One day on my way in I investigated some desultory hammering expecting to find a pileated woodpecker, but it was the ivorybill working on a broken stub not fifteen feet above the ground. I watched her for a good ten minutes. I hope I am not dispelling belief in what I have said about the regal qualities of the bird to add that there was something comical about it too. That big pale bill sometimes looked almost like an ice-cream cone jammed into her black mouth, and then the expression of her eyes seemed the natural one at such an occurrence. Call that anthropomorphism if you like, but it is just such impressions which give the bird painter the key to that “rightness” of expression, for which he is always striving.
The ivory-bill, in life, so vividly described by Tanner and Eckelberry: how can it be gone from the earth? Could the birds somehow still survive in the southern United States? Could eno
ugh bottomland forest have been left for a small breeding population to hang on? Pileated woodpeckers have undergone a resurgence, as once-cleared land has been allowed to grow over to forest. Why couldn’t the ivory-bill, too?
Extinction is, as a rule, unkind to specialists, creatures that make their living in unique and rather narrow niches. Think of the snail kite, which depends almost entirely on apple snails for food. Drain the apple snail’s marsh, lose the kite. While the ivory-bill was more flexible, taking a variety of wild fruits and poison ivy berries, for example, it relied most heavily on the great, thumb-size larvae of cerambycid (long-horned) beetles, which tunnel just beneath the bark of dead trees.
These larvae inhabit not just any dead trees but very large dead trees that have been dead only two years. A stand of mature trees killed by fire, wind damage, or flooding was a bonanza to the birds, which were, by some accounts, seminomadic, traveling widely to exploit such stands. Tanner referred to them as “deadenings,” and he watched ivory-bills peel loosened bark from the trees to reach the grubs. Enter modern forestry practices. Clifford Shackelford, a biologist with Texas Partners in Flight/Texas Parks and Wildlife, explained:
“[Mankind] removed fire and flooding by creating dikes and channels. Those kinds of things have shut down the disturbance [that the ivory-bill depended on]. You can see how quick we are to respond to beetle outbreaks and fire—we go in and fell the trees so it doesn’t spread. Pine plantations and the lack of flooding in the bottomlands: I don’t know which is worse. Loblolly is the pine of the bottoms in the coastal plain. They were always sparse, but now we’ve mass-produced them in rows. The management of trees is to make sure they are harvested before they die of natural causes. To somebody who’s looking at a tree as a dollar, a snag is a sign of mismanagement! You didn’t make your dollar off that tree. And you can’t blame them when there’s a tremendous demand for paper products. That’s why all this is going on. If an ivory-bill were worth one hundred dollars a sighting, we’d have a lot more ivory-bills.”
The Bluebird Effect Page 19
