The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

  “WOULD THAT I COULD”

  Few who read Audubon’s forbidding description of Ivory-bill country made quick plans to visit. He wrote:

  I wish, kind reader, it were in my power to present to your mind’s eye the favorite resort of the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Would that I could describe the extent of those deep morasses, spreading their sturdy moss-covered branches, as if to admonish intruding man to pause and reflect on the many difficulties which he must encounter …

  Here and there, as [the adventurer] approaches an opening that proves merely a lake of black muddy water, his ear is assailed by the dismal croaking of innumerable frogs, the hissing of serpents, or the bellowing of alligators!

  Would that I could give you an idea of the sultry pestiferous atmosphere that nearly suffocates the intruder in the meridian heat of our dogdays in those gloomy and horrible swamps!

  On December 20, 1820, they gunned down an Ivory-bill in a swamp forest near the junction of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. Though its wing was broken, it tried to survive, playing dead at the base of a tree until the approaching footsteps drew too near. Then “it Jumped up and climbed a tree fast as a squirel to the very top … Joseph [Mason] came and saw it—Shot at it and brought him down.” It was the first of several Ivory-bills they would kill that winter. Audubon admired the bird’s magnificent spirit even as it was dying: “They sometimes cling to the bark with their claws so firmly, as to remain cramped to the spot for several hours after death.”

  JOSEPH MASON

  Before he took off to roam the land, Audubon taught French and painting to boys at a Cincinnati school he established. One who answered Audubon’s advertisement for students was a widower, the father of a boy who seemed to like to draw. The boy, Joseph Mason, enrolled in Audubon’s classes, and soon astonished Audubon by his ability to draw plants—exactly what Audubon needed. He made a deal with Joseph’s father. If Joseph could travel with him for a year, Audubon would give him painting lessons.

  Before long, Audubon wrote to his wife that Joseph “now draws Flowers better than any man probably in America, though Knowest I do not flatter young artists much. I never said this to him, but I think so.” Joseph Mason painted the backgrounds to fifty of the bird portraits in Audubon’s famous series The Birds of America.

  Later, Audubon withdrew three Ivory-bill specimens from his bag—an adult male, an adult female, and a juvenile male—combed their feathers, and attached thin wires to their wings and limbs. Like a puppeteer he pulled the feathers and toes into dramatic positions that would illustrate the character of these birds. This made them look much more lively and revealing than the stiff poses Alexander Wilson had painted. By manipulating the birds, Audubon could show them in flight, or feeding young, or fluffing up their feathers—whatever seemed most natural. To make sure he got the proportions right, he placed each bird against a wire grid of tiny squares and drew his first sketches on grid paper that had squares of corresponding size. Audubon made three drawings and paintings of the Ivory-bill. The one that became best known showed three woodpeckers vigorously stripping the bark from a dead cypress tree in search of food. As Audubon sketched and painted his specimens and wrote detailed descriptions of the magnificent birds, he seemed to be worrying about the species. Was it doomed? He had seen settlers clear the frontier forests of the Alleghenies and the Ohio Valley, and he must have known that southern trees couldn’t be far behind. Of more pressing concern, the Ivory-bill’s appearance and behavior made it attractive to hunters and easy to find. Audubon wrote:

  [Their calls] are heard so frequently that … the bird spends few minutes a day without uttering them; and this circumstance leads to its destruction … not because this species is a destroyer of trees but more because it is a beautiful bird, and its rich scalp attached to the upper mandible forms an ornament for the war-dress of most of our Indians, or for the shot-pouch of our squatters and hunters, by all of whom the bird is shot merely for that purpose.

  Something about the bill’s whiteness made it seem magical to whites and Indians alike. Some Native Americans thought possessing it gave them the bird’s mighty power. Mark Catesby, a British naturalist who explored the American South between 1712 and 1725, saw warriors wearing headdresses of white bills strung with “the points outward.” The heads were prized objects of trade. “Northern Indians,” Catesby wrote, “having none of these birds in their own country, purchase them of the Southern People at the price of two, and sometimes three Buck-skins a bill.” Other warriors carried crushed Ivory-bill heads inside their sacred bundles, hoping to inherit the bird’s power to drill holes through their enemies. Indians buried the bills with warriors in grave mounds as far away as Colorado—hundreds of miles from the closest Ivory-bill forest.

  Audubon also saw “entire belts of Indian chiefs closely ornamented with the tufts and bills of this species.” But it wasn’t just Indians; everyone wanted the heads and bills. Audubon wrote that frontiersmen were always waiting at steamboat landings, dangling two or three Ivory-bill heads out to disembarking passengers and asking a quarter dollar per head. Some fastened gold chains to the head and upper bill, making watch fobs. Even in European cities, merchants sold dried Ivory-bill skins.

  Audubon was clearly concerned about the Ivory-bill’s fate, but in the early nineteenth century it was impossible to know for sure how many Ivory-bills were left, or whether the species was in danger of disappearing. During Audubon’s lifetime the country was too vast and travel too slow for anyone to keep track of how an entire species was faring. Many bird species hadn’t even been named yet, and some had not yet been discovered. There was still a great deal of territory for bird-finders to cover, especially since the area of the United States had doubled in size just a few years before, when President Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase from cash-starved France in 1803.

  SAMPLING THE BIRDS OF AMERICA

  For Audubon, knowing a bird often included knowing how it tasted. The Horned Grebe, he said, was fishy, rancid, and fat. The Red-winged Blackbird and the Hermit Thrush were “delicate.” The Common Flicker tasted like ants. Bald Eagles reminded him of veal. He didn’t describe the taste of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, though it wouldn’t be surprising if he had tried at least one.

  It was even harder to know the status of a species that lived in more than one country, especially countries separated by water. For while there were also Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Cuba at the time, hardly anyone in the United States knew it. There would be no mention of the Cuban Ivory-bill in Cuban scientific literature until decades after Audubon’s paintings.

  Audubon’s most famous portrait of the Ivory-bill shows a small family hard at work. The three woodpeckers are charged with energy, sending chips flying through the air, and you can feel the insects beneath the bark scrambling for their lives. The painting captures the spirit of the lordly bird, and shows the respect Audubon had for the Ivory-bill. He may not have been able to count them all, but as he carefully painted his specimens, transferring their colors and lines to paper, he might well have been wondering how long such striking creatures could stay aboard the ark.

  The Ivory-bill was so wildly, stunningly beautiful that everywhere Audubon went people seemed to want to give it a distinctive name. Audubon himself called it “the Van Dyke” because its brilliant coloring and bold stripes reminded him of the style of the Flemish portrait artist Anthony Van Dyck. It was “White-back” in northern Florida, “Pate” in western Florida, “Poule de bois” in French southern Louisiana, and “Kent” in northern Louisiana. Seminole Indians called it “Tit-ka.” But the most telling nickname of all came from an expression of awe, an exclamation uttered by those who suddenly caught sight of an arrow-like form ripping through the highest leaves of a deep forest, unfolding its three-foot-wide wings to the size of a flag, and then finally swooping straight up to sink its mighty claws into the thick trunk of a cypress tree. At such moments, sometimes all a dumbstruck witness could say was “Lord God, what a
bird!”

  Audubon’s painting of the Ivory-bill in The Birds of America

  Before the lumber boom of the late 1870s there were millions of acres of uncut trees in the South, such as these longleaf yellow pines

  CHAPTER THREE

  “THE ROAD TO WEALTH LEADS THROUGH THE SOUTH”

  The South is the bonanza of the future … [There are] vast forests untouched, with enormous veins of coal and iron … Go South Young Man.

  —Businessman Chauncy Depew, in a speech at Yale University, 1894

  Southeastern United States—1865-1900

  THE CIVIL WAR LEFT THE SOUTH A GRAVEYARD OF ASHES AND POVERTY. CLOUDS OF smoke clung to smoldering cities while people in rags foraged for food in the countryside, drifting down dirt roads lined with the bloated carcasses of farm animals the Yankees had shot to starve the Confederates. The war wounded so many people that in 1866 one-fifth of Mississippi’s total income was spent on artificial arms and legs. It was nearly impossible to get supplies to southerners, since railroad tracks had been wrenched up into “Sherman’s hairpins” so that munitions couldn’t move. Bridges lay splintered and rotting at the bottom of rivers.

  The Ivory-bill’s territory has shrunk. Large areas in the Carolinas and Texas that had once been home to the Ivory-bill are no longer included

  But the trees that blanketed much of the South remained in place like stoic sentinels, sheltering a great variety of plants, snakes, insects, mammals, fishes, and birds, including the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Even before the Civil War, few southerners had the money or machinery to log the forests and there were few major roads or railroads to haul trees to market. When Yankee soldiers came, many plantation families fled for their lives, hastily carving “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas,” on their walls. Trees began to sprout in the cotton fields they left behind.

  After the Civil War a Reconstruction government took over the South, enforced by occupying northern soldiers. The new government sought to guarantee freedom for former slaves, but many southern whites felt it was also out to punish the South for starting and waging the war. Congress passed laws that prohibited southern landowners from selling land at a profit. One such law kept the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida from selling any of their public or unclaimed land, about a third of all the land in those states. As a result, the trees kept growing and dying and regenerating, as they had for thousands of years. If Audubon and Wilson had still been alive to visit the South, they might not have recognized Charleston or Atlanta—much of which lay in ruins—but they would have been right at home in those virgin forests.

  Once, the northeastern portion of the United States had also been covered with timber. But after Europeans arrived, pioneer settlers mowed down the trees like an army of termites as they surged west across the country. Most settlers hated the wilderness and feared the creatures who lived within it. The famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather said, “What is not useful is vicious.” In other words, if you couldn’t use something, it was evil. The first white settlers believed that a cleared patch, neatly fenced off, was a sign of civilization, while a forest left standing was a job undone. And everyone wanted as much land as possible. Trees that weren’t used for building were burned as fuel to heat homes and factories, or to run steamboats and railroad engines.

  ENEMY SQUIRRELS

  In pioneer days, it was said that there were so many trees in Ohio that a squirrel could travel from the Ohio River to Lake Erie without ever touching the ground. Then settlers made up their minds to rid the land not only of fierce beasts like bears and wolves, but of any other animal that might eat their crops.

  In 1807 Ohio passed a law requiring each taxpayer to turn in between ten and one hundred squirrel scalps each year along with his taxes. But in 1822, when even that didn’t dent the squirrel population, settlers organized a massive squirrel hunt, killing 19,666 squirrels.

  In this fever, many forest creatures of the North began to vanish. Deer, turkeys, and beavers became scarce in many places. Passenger pigeons declined by the millions, and wolves ran out of habitat. By 1800 almost all the original forest east of the Appalachian Mountains had been cleared and settlers were streaming west through the Cumberland Gap or down the Ohio River. Daniel Boone, the famous hunter and Indian fighter, left his home in Kentucky in the 1780s to escape the hot breath of Civilization at his back. Again and again he moved, trying to stay ahead of the forest-clearing blades and torches that always caught up. Schoolchildren sang a song about him:

  Daniel Boone was ill at ease

  When he saw the smoke in the forest trees

  There’ll be no game in the country soon

  “Elbow room!” cried Daniel Boone!

  But when Boone revisited Kentucky in 1810, what he found didn’t just make him ill at ease. It made him depressed. If ever a place was out of elbow room, it was Kentucky. In despair, he remarked to his friend John James Audubon, “Sir, what a … difference thirty years makes in the country! [when I left] you would not have walked out in any direction for more than a mile without shooting a buck or a bear. [But when I returned] a few signs only of deer were to be seen, and as to a deer itself, I saw none.

  THE LUMBER BOOM

  On October 8, 1871, one of Mrs. Kate O’Leary’s five cows kicked over a lantern and set her barn on fire. The flames quickly raced out of control and burned down much of Chicago. So many pine trees around the Great Lakes were cut to rebuild Chicago’s houses that by 1880 the Chicago Tribune reported that there was only ten years’ worth of lumber left in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota combined. The nation, it warned, was headed for a “timber famine” unless it could change its ways.

  But just as the North was running out of wood, a vast new source opened up. Southern politicians regained control of their region in 1877, and the Yankee troops were sent home. Congress cleared the way for southern states to sell their land once again. All at once cash-starved southerners with something to sell—their forested heritage—met wealthy northerners who needed timber. The lumber boom was on.

  The fever for southern trees sizzled with the same heat as the Gold Rush of 1849. First, potential investors sent “cruisers” south to find out how big the trees really were and how hard it would be to get them to market. The witnesses came back wide-eyed, thick-tongued, and stammering. There were millions of acres of trees, they said, with crowns that blotted out the sky and trunks thicker around than the combined armspans of two men. Thousands of freed slaves and poor white men were eager to work in the woods for a mere fifty cents a day. The terrain was mostly level and the land dirt cheap. The only catch was that rail lines and roads would have to he built to get men and machines in and logs out.

  And so, almost overnight, northern and British investors formed lumber companies. The Illinois Central Railroad arranged for special trains to take land buyers from Chicago to Mississippi. It hired ex–Confederate officers to entertain the lumber brokers with war stories as the miles drifted by. When the stories got old, passengers buried their noses in new books such as The Road to Wealth Leads Through the South.

  Vast forests changed hands for next to nothing. One northern congressman bought 111,188 acres of Louisiana land in 1876 for less than a dollar an acre. The state of Florida sold 4 million acres to a Philadelphia company in 1881 for only 25 cents an acre. Then a British company bought nearly a million acres in Louisiana for 12 1/2 cents an acre.

  Loggers attacked the woods with new machines such as the Barnhart loader pictured here, which allowed logs to be loaded directly onto cars waiting on rails. This is a scene from the 1890s in Laurel, Mississippi

  Railroad builders followed the land buyers, clanging out a web of steel. At first the tracks had to be built on nearly level ground, but in 1881 a Michigan lumberman named Ephraim Shay invented a small, powerful locomotive that could chug up and down hills, following the shape of the land. In the 1880s alone, 180 new railroad companies started up east of the Mississippi River. Engines with piercing
whistles belched clouds of blue-white steam as they pulled blades and loggers, mules and carts, over the mountains into the pine forests, and later into the swamps.

  New tools made it possible to level trees at a furious pace. Woodsmen were given double-bit axes that chewed deeper into bark. The crosscut saw enabled two men to push and pull a long toothed blade back and forth through immense trunks, destroying in an hour what it had taken nature a century to grow. The once silent forest roared with machinery. The fragrance of wet leaves and rain-soaked soil gave way to the scent of tobacco and sawdust, and later of gasoline.

  The few men and women who dared to object to the complete destruction of the forests were shouted down as fools. One who spoke up was labeled “immeasurably stupid” by a Chattanooga, Tennessee, newspaper in 1886. “Such stuff, if taken seriously,” the paper editorialized, “would leave all nature undisturbed. We welcome the skilled lumberman with his noisy mill.”

  More and more species of plants, birds, bats, snakes, and mammals ran out of habitat as the wilderness collapsed around them. Ivory-billed Woodpeckers vanished forest by forest and swamp by swamp as the trees were toppled. By 1885 no one could find them at all in North Carolina or northern South Carolina. In 1896 ornithologist Thomas Nuttall warned, “This species is now restricted to the Gulf States and Lower Mississippi Valley.” By 1900, the same year a government forestry expert called the leveling of the southern pines “the most rapid and reckless destruction of forests known in history,” Ivory-bills became part of Mississippi’s history. Fifteen years later, their toy-trumpet call and double-note whacks were gone from Texas, Arkansas, and Alabama, and from most of Florida and Georgia. Retreating deeper into shrinking patches of swamp forest, the few surviving birds became easier to find. They were big, bright, and noisy. And it was their bad luck that, like so many other big, bright, and beautiful things, once they became rare, they also became extremely valuable.