The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  It’s clearer to me now that the chances of these big-tree peelers hanging on in the face of full-scale forest exploitation are slim. While ivory-bills could use their great chisels to advantage in digging nest cavities, they were not, by nature, true excavators, as are pileated woodpeckers. The smaller birds do peel bark, but they also dig deeply into wood, from living to decades-dead, finding a great variety of insect food along the way. Pileated woodpeckers inhabit a wider niche; they’re closer to being generalists in their food requirements and foraging strategies. Even in the Singer Tract, Tanner estimated a density of thirty-six pileateds inhabiting the foraging territory of a single ivory-bill!

  What of the “unsubstantiated” records since Eckelberry’s sighting in 1944? I want to hear from someone who’s seen an ivory-bill more recently. The ornithologist John V. Dennis of Princess Anne, Maryland, has had three more recent encounters with this will-o’-the-wisp. In April 1948, he and Davis Crompton found an active nest site, three adult birds, and a skull in Oriente, the easternmost province of Cuba. On April 5, 1951, he heard an ivory-bill call five times in the Chipola River swamp of northwestern Florida. Not until December 3, 1966, did Dennis hear the call again—but this time, he was following up, by request of the World Wildlife Fund, on an excellent description of a female ivory-bill given by Mrs. Olga Hooks Lloyd, in the Neches River Valley of East Texas. On December 10, he finally saw the bird:

  “It flew up from the ground and lit in a big cypress tree. It had a large amount of white on the rear of the wing. It flew off in a straight line. I’d read in Tanner that once the bird flies it goes in the same direction for quite a while. I was so excited. It was a pretty cold day in December, but I took my clothes off and waded into this bayou. The water came up almost to my chin. I was holding my clothes over my head. I climbed out on the other side and I didn’t have an opportunity to dry myself, and I was pretty cold. I got my clothes back on as best I could, and headed in the same direction. The woods opened up a little bit. In front of me was a stump, and the ivory-bill was on the stump, wings outspread. A pileated woodpecker pair was in the neighborhood. I got the impression that the ivory-bill was directing a threat display at the pileateds. The ivory-bill flew off again. It disappeared over the Neches River.

  “I spent a lot of time in the Big Thicket. Across the river there was a big area owned by the Army Corps of Engineers that hadn’t been lumbered for a long time. It was pretty good habitat, so I spent a lot of time searching over there as well as on the same side where I saw the bird. I found places where the bark of trees had been knocked off and scaled. I couldn’t always be sure whether it was ivory-bill or pileated work. My wife and I later practically moved to the Big Thicket. There were some generous people who loaned us their cabin, and a couple of people joined us and we made that our headquarters. We got quite a bit of publicity, and people would call in, but 90 percent of the time they hadn’t really seen the bird. We went out every day looking and listening. We got the Cornell recording and played it out in the woods, and hoped that it would attract the live ivory-bill. We never heard any response. When I went searching for it in South Carolina’s Congaree Swamp, we never got any response, either.

  “My feeling is that the ivory-bill is extinct. There just haven’t been any reports coming in. I don’t want to be the last one to see it. I’m hoping and have been hoping all along that the birds are still around.”

  Given the aura of secrecy that surrounds later ivory-bill sightings, I wonder if the lack of reports might be because of unwillingness on the part of observers to reveal the birds’ exact location. After all, if ever there were a Holy Grail of North American bird watching, the ivory-bill is it. I try to imagine the stampede that would ensue if an authenticated sighting were to hit a rare bird alert hotline. I picture helicopters and satellite television trucks as the media and throngs of camera-toting birders swarm whatever quiet backwater might still shelter the reclusive log gods. I wonder what I would do if the stars aligned and an ivory-bill appeared before me. What was the most recent sighting out there? An Internet contact leads me to Dr. Dennis G. Garratt, a Canadian chemist who’s made an amateur study of ornithology for many years. In 1985, he made a month-long trip to study birds in Florida. His story:

  “I wasn’t looking for them at the time. It [the bird] was on a dead palm tree, and it was pecking away. The hammering sounded like an ordinary pileated. It was a large woodpecker, with a great deal of white on its back. I did get good views of its back and underwings. The pattern is very different from a pileated’s. The pileated will tuck its wings and look like a torpedo, and I don’t recall [this bird] doing that.

  “It certainly did not care to be watched. I froze, and it froze. It was tapping when I first saw it. It gave a call totally unlike a pileated, a single note. It was considerably larger than the Florida subspecies of the pileated. It had a red crest, which would make it a male. I had a camera, and I didn’t think to pick it up and aim at it—I was so stunned, I just stood there looking at it. It took off through the swamp, and I took off through the swamp. It was perhaps fifteen minutes from my first sighting to the last; I saw it one more time after the initial sighting. I lost it in some mangroves and then it flew across a river—I didn’t cross the river myself because there were a number of alligators in it.

  “When I came out of the swampy area I had been in, I tried finding some forestry workers, but they had all closed up shop for the day. I sat in my car trying to cool off for a while—it had been a very warm day. When I got back I typed all of this up. I sent the report directly to a person with the American Ornithologists’ Union. I sent notes out to all the state authorities. I wrote to American Birds, and that’s when we got into the question of should we publish it at all, and we decided no.

  “I did a lot of research back in the libraries, and the first chance I had to get to a museum where they might have a specimen, I went to look at it. That just reinforced my feeling that I had indeed seen it, and not some aberrant pileated with partial albinism.

  “I did look for a number of years thereafter in the same spot without any success. The last time I looked was in 1991. The area was protected, but there hadn’t been any reports in many decades. As far as I know, that area is still protected, but I don’t know if any of the surrounding area has been gobbled up since I was last there. It was a cypress swamp with a lot of mangroves along the river.

  “I was awestruck at the time, and I still feel that way today. I could still find the tree it was on, if it hasn’t fallen down.”

  His mention of the year 1985 has an immediacy that stops me cold. Although no one knows what the life expectancy of the ivory-bill might be, Ken Parkes, curator emeritus of ornithology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, estimated that it might be around twenty years. And yet, parrots of similar body size have made it into their seventies. How sad, to think of a handful of survivors somehow hanging on, with no others to answer their high, strange calls. Better, I suppose, than to think of the earth without ivory-bills at all.

  It has been an absorbing and strangely sad exercise, this phoning and interviewing the last people to see ivory-billed woodpeckers. I want someone to assure me that the great birds are still out there, but no one does. Some dismiss the idea outright, almost as if wanting to be the last to have seen it. Others seem wistful, yet dubious that new sightings are yet to be made. Clifford Shackelford has compiled recent published sightings of the species in Texas. To this day, hundreds of purported ivory-bill sightings come in to his office each year. He tells me, “There are a lot of people who claim to see it. I think people are just getting out more, and probably none of them who call in are competent bird watchers. The majority of the people are interested, but really don’t realize there are two by-gods [colloquial name for pileated woodpeckers]. Everybody wants to see a ghost. I throw it in there with UFOs and Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster. I think people can convince themselves that they see it. I wish I could convince myself.”

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bsp; I think about how modern endangered species management practices might handle the discovery of a relict population. The birds captured, one by one, with giant mist nets strung near their roost holes. Taken into huge enclosures. Artificially inseminated. Their eggs placed in incubators in some humming laboratory; their chicks fed by lifelike puppets until they are ready to join their parents in the enclosures. Would the populations be built up until a precious few were deemed ready for release? Would there be any place to release them? Given a choice between such intervention and certain extinction, and the intellect to consider it, what would an ivory-bill choose? I imagine it flying away in a long, straight line, wingbeats steady, putting miles of swamp between it and the further workings of humanity.

  Almost as elusive as the bird itself is Jerome Jackson, a Mississippi State University biology professor [now at Florida Gulf State University] widely considered the foremost living authority on the ivory-billed woodpecker. He keeps a punishing schedule that includes teaching, writing a book on the species for Smithsonian Books, and searching for ivory-bills both in Cuba and in the last tracts of bottomland forest in the southern United States. We communicate via e-mail for a long time before I actually pin him down by telephone. Jackson was appointed in 1986 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to an ivory-billed woodpecker advisory committee that also included his fellow woodpecker experts Lester Short and James Tanner.

  Jackson tells me, “We had a meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the purpose of the meeting, we found out after we got there, was to put the stamp of approval on declaring the species extinct. I said I wasn’t willing to go along with it. I said, ‘How can you declare a species extinct when you haven’t even looked for it?’ The habitat has improved dramatically since [the 1940s], because there were still fifty thousand acres of the Singer Tract that were still relatively virgin forest. As a result of my complaints and refusal to go along, they decided to give me a grant in 1987 for one year to look for it. I had to be on sabbatical to do it. There was no money for help, or a boat. I did spend that time searching the swamps of the Southeast. I bought a boat and canoes on my own money, and I took student volunteers. When you’re in the Atchafalaya Basin, and it’s over one hundred square miles, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  “In ’87, Malcolm Hodges, a student of mine, and I were in an area north of Vicksburg, Mississippi. We’d play a forty-five-minute segment of tape, walk for fifteen minutes, and take transects. We got to a point where I said, ‘Malcolm, this is the best habitat I’ve seen anywhere!’ He said, ‘There it is, there it is! Listen!’ I couldn’t hear anything. ‘It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming!’ he said. It was repeating exactly the call on the tape. It got to within a hundred yards of us and then stopped, wouldn’t come any closer, and it called for eighteen minutes. Finally I said, ‘Malcolm, we’ve got to see it; we’ve got to get a picture or at least a sight record.’ On the count of three, we rushed toward it. Nothing, no more sound, no more bird. We never saw it. This is within forty miles of the Singer Tract. If they left the Singer Tract, they could have easily ended up there. We went back in, and the next day we met a forester in the area, cruising timber, and he informed us that they were going to take a million dollars’ worth of timber out of there. And the next year they did.

  “They [the ivory-bills] had to have old-growth forest with lots of dead and dying trees, no question. They were feeding on large cerambycid beetles. You had to have big trees for big insects, and big roost cavities. The humidity of the forest was important because it provided the fungi that would rot the wood that would allow the beetles to exist. It had to be humid, as in the tropics. They wouldn’t have occurred farther north, except right along river bottoms. The beetles are still out there, but some of them are quite rare. The ivory-bill is the tip of the iceberg. What else have we lost along with it that wasn’t so glamorous?

  “I saw an ivory-bill, and we heard them on eight different days, in Cuba in March of 1988. No one was able to find them after that. I continue to follow up on leads, and the F and WS continues to send me leads. I followed up on a lead in Florida, where a woman had one in her backyard. She described it perfectly; she described the call perfectly. But everyone reads the books. The habitat around her house was not at all appropriate, but there was appropriate habitat within five miles.”

  If all the stars aligned and a population of ivory-bills were ever discovered, what would be the best course of action? I put the question to Jackson. “The best thing that would happen would be to secure the property, not one thousand acres, but thirty thousand acres, and keep it from the public. The fortunate thing for the ivory-bill is that any population that could be found would be in the most inaccessible of places.”

  Jerry Jackson, by virtue of his unique combination of ornithological expertise, woodsman’s smarts, and unalloyed faith, refuses to close the book on the ivory-billed woodpecker. Alone among all those I’ve spoken with, he continues to search. He truly believes that, somewhere on the planet, ivory-bills still hitch and rap and toss their fluffy topknots, pound their great white bills into bark, fly in long, straight lines over a sea of treetops. As much as I would like to see an ivory-billed woodpecker, I wish more that Jerry would see one.

  As I read over my writing, I can’t decide whether to use past or present tense when referring to ivory-bills. I go back and forth between the two, tense in either camp. Ambivalence permeates my every thought about the great woodpeckers. I can’t look at the old photographs of ivory-bills and believe they’re gone; it’s like holding a still-warm bird in the hand, one that’s just struck a window. Its eyes are wide, its feet soft and pliable; its wings snap back when they’re extended. Surely it will regain its senses and spring into the air. It’s too beautiful to be dead.

  The ivory-bill was an extravagant creature by all accounts, a vision in ebony and white. It had a big bill and a big appetite for oversize beetle larvae. It needed a lot of timber, with many old, dying trees, and it was willing to travel to make its specialized living. We cut its habitat right out from under it, and we continue to cut it. We’ve sent it countless messages with our saws and our columns of smoke. Leave or die out. Find somewhere else to live. This land is our land now. And it just doesn’t listen to us; it goes on, somewhere, I have to believe it; not dead but missing in action; alive, defiantly, desperately, joyously, alive. No one can tell me I’m wrong, and, it seems, no one can tell me I’m right. There are those of us who cannot let it go.

  WINTER MUSINGS

  Birds We Feed, Birds that Feed Us

  Love and Death Among the Cranes

  NOVEMBER, FOR ME, will always be associated with sandhill cranes, with their purling rattle and the easy beat of slate wings overhead. Two recent Novembers have found Bill and me at New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Reserve, working the Festival of the Cranes. We take Phoebe and Liam along, and, at fourteen and eleven years, respectively, they settle well into the rhythm of predawn wake-ups and evening banquets, just glad to be included. Thoroughly plugged in at home, when they’re in the wild they revert to a primal state, playing with rocks, sticks, and water as their parents line up the next interesting animal or bird to be viewed in the spotting scope. They’re lucky to be in New Mexican sunshine in November, and they know it, beg for it as the Ohio skies go leaden and start their winter weeping.

  It’s hard to find a written piece about sandhill cranes that does not invoke the word ancient. Their sonorous voices and gangly form in flight are unarguably primeval. You can imagine them gliding over a group of mastodons, imagine a giant ground sloth craning its thick neck to see them land. In fact, the fragmentary fossil record suggests that Grus canadensis has survived virtually unchanged for at least 2.5 million years, and, if a single Nebraska fossil is factored in, perhaps almost 10 million years. The sandhill crane is a Pliocene relic, the oldest known surviving North American bird species. No wonder it inspires such reverence in those of us who came late to the party.
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br />   Sandhill cranes come to Bosque del Apache to spend the winter, flooding in from the northern plains and Canada. The cranes walk along the roads atop the dikes at Bosque, heads high, and they stare over their stone gray shoulders and stand down vehicles, in no hurry to clear the way. It’s good to see them at ease, and I will them to stay here on the refuge. Only a few hundred yards outside its boundary, hunters in blinds wait to shoot them.

  I remember where I was standing when I found out that midcontinental sandhill cranes are considered game birds and could be shot in every state where they occur except Nebraska. It was here, at Bosque del Apache, on hearing shots near one of the reserve’s borders, that I asked around among refuge personnel. Yes, they’re hunted in New Mexico, right outside the refuge boundary. Wait a minute. We’re here celebrating the Festival of the Cranes while they’re being killed just over the refuge border? Knowing that the millions of snow geese were being hunted was one thing, but learning that cranes are on the list of hunted species was another. Seeing men with blinds and decoys waiting for the cranes as they skeined over, trying to reach the refuge, took the realization to yet another level. It has taken years for me to think about this in any but the most primal of ways.