The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

  ROGER TORY PETERSON’S FAMOUS BOOK

  By the time he was twenty-six, Roger Tory Peterson (shown here as an older man) had painted pictures of every bird species found in the eastern United States. Then he set out to collect his bird portraits into a single pocket-sized book that could help amateur bird-watchers tell the species apart.

  Five publishing companies turned him down before Houghton Mifflin published his work as A Field Guide to the Birds. The book sold out in one week. It popularized bird-watching by pointing out simple ways of identifying birds and became one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

  THE BRONX COUNTY BIRD CLUB

  In the late 1920s nine intensely competitive boys and young men—including Roger Tory Peterson—raced around the five boroughs of New York City, tracking down rare birds and learning together how to identify them. Calling themselves the Bronx County Bird Club (BCBC), they turned bird-watching into a sport. From their clubhouse near the Harlem River, they issued challenges to other teams of birders around New York City to see who could find the most birds in twenty-four hours.

  Using maps, binoculars, and coordinated strategies, they prepared for birding contests as if they were going to war. They especially loved to show up older bird-watchers from clubs around New York City. While their elders were stuck at their jobs, the boys got out of school in midafternoon and used the hours to survey the contest area in advance. One of their favorite sites was a dump in the Bronx where they once discovered four Snowy Owls feeding on rats.

  The BCBC was rarely beaten.

  He was still thinking about this the next Saturday when he and a friend went exploring. They had just crested a hill when Roger spotted a clump of brown feathers clinging to the trunk of an oak tree. The object looked dead, but somehow it was still attached to the tree. Puzzled, Roger walked up to it, extended his finger, and touched it. “It came instantly to life,” he later wrote, “looked at me with wild eyes and dashed away in a flash of golden wings.” It was a Common Flicker, a kind of woodpecker, sleeping with its face tucked into the feathers of its back. That single moment changed Roger Peterson’s whole life. “Ever since,” he later wrote, “birds have seemed to me the most vivid expression of life. They have dominated my daily thoughts, my reading and even my dreams.”

  Millions of children soaked up information about birds from the pages of Audubon’s Bird-Lore. For many students, the best part in the whole magazine was the bird biography. “I am the Golden Plover,” it would begin, and would go on to describe in the bird’s imaginary voice how it found food, attracted mates, raised its young, and navigated its way on its long migratory flights. Every issue featured a different bird.

  The stories were written by Professor Arthur Augustus Allen of Cornell University, a world expert in bird behavior. “Doc,” as his ornithology students called him, shared his home with his wife, Elsa—also an ornithologist—their five children, one Burrowing Owl, a free-roaming crow, a family of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, and dozens of wild ducks who bathed in the pond behind the house.

  And always there were special guests. One was a young Golden Eagle that a farmer had captured and delivered to Doc’s office at Cornell. Doc brought it home and put it in a pen outside. For fifteen days the great bird refused all offers of food. It turned its beak away from dead mice, scorned dead rabbits, and ignored dead chickens—it even declined fresh fish. Finally, remembering that eagles kill most of their food themselves, Doc pushed a live black hen into the pen and shut the door. The two birds looked at each other and went to sleep side by side. The eagle soon gave up its hunger strike and ate whatever Doc gave it, but it would never touch its companion, the hen. Wondering if the eagle was no longer a predator—a killer of live food—Doc shoved in another hen. The door had scarcely shut before the eagle pounced on and devoured the newcomer.

  Professor Allen was always experimenting with new equipment, too, especially cameras and recording devices. In the spring of 1924, he and Edna stuffed their cameras, lenses, film canisters, and binoculars into a Model T Ford and headed south to photograph and film some of America’s rarest birds. When they reached Florida they were introduced to a lean, leather-faced guide named Morgan Tindall, who said he could lead them to a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

  BINOCULARS

  The need to shoot specimens lessened as it became possible to fit powerful magnifying lenses into binoculars. At first, only the wealthy could afford them, but by the 1920s even the youthful members of the Bronx County Bird Club were able to afford seven dollars each to buy mail-order binoculars that could make birds look four times their actual size. Today, lightweight binoculars can magnify images forty times and more.

  The Allens leaped at the chance. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker hadn’t been reported for years, and many ornithologists assumed it was extinct. But suppose it wasn’t—what a find that would be! With Tindall shouting directions over the engine’s rumble, the Aliens gunned the car through flooded swamps. Sheets of gray moss hung from giant, widely spaced cypress trees. For seventeen long miles the Ford’s wheels were completely underwater. One evening the engine sputtered to a stop and refused to restart. Miles from help, the Ford became an island in an alligator-infested swamp. To the Aliens’ great relief, it roared to life again the next morning.

  Tindall was right about the Ivory-bills. Just after dawn on April 12, Doc Allen peeked out from a crouched position behind a blind made of palmetto leaves, and saw two huge black-and-white woodpeckers winging through the cypress trees. Clearly showing a broad saddle of white on the lower wings, they swooped up and came to rest high on a dead pine snag. When Allen could steady his fingers, he pointed, not a shotgun, but a camera at the birds, and snapped history’s first photographs of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

  The birds called a few times and then flew off together back into the swamp. Allen sloshed frantically after them, then gave up to catch his breath and empty his boots. But that evening the birds returned, and they came again the next day, finally leading the explorers to a dead cypress tree with a twisted snag of a top. Thirty feet above the ground was a large, freshly chiseled oval cavity. It was a nest—that meant the Ivory-bills were still reproducing. Allen got more clear photographs and was able to describe the Ivory-bills’ courtship, though he had to leave before young birds were hatched.

  The sensational discovery made headlines throughout the country. Reporters turned the scholarly Allens into safari heroes. One newspaper called their trip “an expedition fraught with peril and adventure, penetrating far into the disease-infested glades of Florida in search of rare forms of bird life.” Headlines trumpeted, “CORNELL EXPERTS FIND BIRDS WITH BILLS OF IVORY” and “RARE FEATHERED FREAKS REVEALED IN UNEXPLORED FLORIDA SWAMPS.”

  More important, Doc Allen came back to Cornell with nearly seven thousand photographs and 1,600 feet of motion-picture film of birds that few Americans had seen. He had added to America’s knowledge of birds without ever firing a shot. And, of course, he had rediscovered the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. But just before he and Edna left Florida, a message from Tindall cast the whole expedition into a cloud of gloom. Two local collectors had been following the Allens and Tindall on their Florida quest. They knew the Ivory-bills were valuable and had asked the county sheriff for a permit to hunt them. Amazingly, the sheriff had obliged. Now, according to Morgan Tindall, the birds were gone.

  So it was that the normally unflappable Arthur Allen wore a grim expression when he gave reporters a terse statement: “As long as the state of Florida allows [Ivory-bills] to he taken legally,” he said, “ … the species is doomed to certain extinction.” He didn’t share his personal feelings, but he must have worried that their extinction might have already occurred. Worst of all must have been the thought that he, Arthur Allen, America’s only full-time professor of ornithology and a man who had dedicated his life to understanding birds in the wild, had unwittingly helped to seal the fate of America’s rarest bird.

  The first photogr
aph ever taken—by Doc Allen—of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

  CHAPTER SIX

  LEARNING TO THINK LIKE A BIRD

  My best Acquaintances are those

  With Whom I spoke no Word.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Central New York State—1914–1934

  THERE IS A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH OF JIMMY TANNER, EIGHT OR NINE YEARS OLD, SEATED on a park bench, looking out at the world through a pair of binoculars. Beside him, his tall older brother, Edward, is bent in intense concentration over a book while his mother also reads. Jimmy is in a world of his own, totally absorbed in whatever he is looking at. Odds are it was a bird.

  The slender, sandy-haired boy behind the binoculars would grow up to become forever linked to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. He would know it best, spend the most time with it, record its voice, take the best pictures of it, and devote years of his life to trying to save it from extinction. Had he been born a few decades earlier, he might well have grown up, like Arthur Wayne, trying to study the Ivory-bill by collecting specimens. But he was a product of the Audubon movement, part of the first generation of ornithologists that learned mainly by studying how birds behaved in their natural habitats.

  Jim Tanner was born in the small town of Cortland, New York, in 1914, the same year that Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. The Tanners gave their two sons a well-rounded education that included a strenuous outdoor life, a church upbringing, and exposure to mechanical skills as well as book learning. Jim could fix almost anything and invent what he couldn’t. He could take complicated things apart, remember where he had laid all the pieces, and then put them back together. People told him that if he could ever think of anything useful to invent, he might get rich someday. To make themselves hardier, like President Theodore Roosevelt, Jim and Edward slept outside on a screened-in porch even on the frostiest New York winter nights. They shivered plenty, but rarely got sick.

  More than anything Jim loved the outdoors. He explored the territory near his home after school, seldom making it home “by dinner,” the family rule. On weekends he set off on long hikes, stuffing a slab of beef wrapped in waxed paper into his knapsack to cook over a fire when he got hungry. Sometimes alone, sometimes with his friend Carl McAllister, he traced the flat, low ridges around the lake country of central New York, exploring the gorges and blue glacial ponds, hauling himself up granite boulders, probing through marshes, learning to be quieter.

  Like most small-town boys, Jim owned a rifle and liked to shoot it, but he never took it with him. He even refused to collect butterflies with his friends because he couldn’t make himself stick pins in their wings. He wanted to meet wild things on their own terms, not his.

  All nature was interesting to Jim, but nothing was as fascinating as birds. He especially loved to listen to them. He practiced imitating their songs and could sometimes get them to answer him. He taught himself which birds sang from the ground, which sounded from the middle of trees, and which called from the highest branches. He got so that he could even tell them apart by their one-note chips—sharp little warning notes which had no melody. He learned to identify nests and eggs. He picked up owl pellets—regurgitated wads of matter that owls couldn’t digest—from under pine trees and used a twig to tease tiny mouse bones from the fur balls. Sometimes he hiked with a heavy camera, snapping pictures that he developed when he got home, turning the family bathroom into a darkroom.

  Jim learned a lot from school, but his most valuable lessons came on those long hikes. He kept a journal, starting with the date and time of day and noting the weather and the direction of the wind. He made himself go a long time between meals. He learned to sit still against a tree even if the bark was digging into his shoulder blades and itching like mad. Most important, he learned that while you can’t meet Wildlife by appointment. if you study wild creatures carefully enough, you can predict where they will be.

  By the time Jim was a teenager, he had sailed through his scout badge on ornithology and was known as a town expert on birds. When someone picked up a wounded Golden Eagle far out of its range, he naturally took it to Jim. Jim kept it in a cage in his home and fed it rodents until it regained its strength. Then, like a falconer, he taught it how to hunt from his arm.

  Jim Tanner with the Golden Eagle he rescued

  As Jim Tanner entered his senior year of high school, he had many possibilities to choose from, but he had plans of his own. By the greatest stroke of luck, he lived only twenty-two miles from Cornell University, one of the world’s premier centers of bird knowledge, where Professor Arthur Augustus Allen offered America’s sole course of study in ornithology. That meant that Jim was only an hour’s bus ride away from a chance to make his living learning about, teaching about, and helping birds. Ranked third in his class, he applied to Cornell and was quickly accepted.

  By the time he said goodbye to his family in the late summer of 1931, Jim Tanner was almost as much a creature of the forest as any songbird, and as hungry for knowledge as an owl for a mouse. At last he was headed to Ithaca, New York, to study with the world-famous Dr. Allen at Cornell. No more “be home by dinner” for him. From now on, dinner would be whenever he could find time to eat.

  OLD MCGRAW

  The center of every Cornell ornithology student’s universe was McGraw Hall. When people stepped into the creaky building from the often snow-covered campus, their eyes had to suddenly adjust to the dim light even as their nostrils filled with the sharp odor of formaldehyde. Jammed into McGraw’s three noisy floors were dozens of small classrooms, offices, closets, and even a museum. Bird skeletons raised their wing bones from dusty windowsills. Stuffed hawks and owls and shorebirds stared silently from every nook and cranny. Pickled bird parts floated lazily in briny jars that rested on shelves in laboratory rooms.

  THE ROUGHING-OUT ROOM AT MCGRAW

  If you want to learn about birds, you have to get to know bugs, since birds of almost every family eat insects and spiders. At McGraw, the “Roughing-Out Room” high in a drafty tower of the old building was the place where students took notes as hordes of beetles attacked the crudely skinned corpses of birds and animals, breaking them down into skeletons which were then studied further.

  Cornell professor George Sutton wrote: “In the roughing-out room, the fumes of ammonia are so strong as to be all but overpowering. Had Edgar Allan Poe spent two minutes in this chamber of horrors, he might have written a mystery thriller the likes of which are not on the world’s bookshelves today.”

  Bird students investigated and experimented all day and all night. Many projects involved getting to know more about what birds ate. Live bullfrogs splashed in McGraw’s sinks, and field mice scraped their claws against the slick sides of big tubs kept in the lab rooms. There were refrigerators containing dead cats, and gunnysacks stuffed with dead hawks and owls whose stomachs awaited examination. One student even had his own collection of snakes, at least until the day they all got loose. For months afterward, bloodcurdling screams rang out through the building. After a while, students didn’t even notice. Screams only meant that someone had encountered a Blue Racer coiled behind a specimen flask, or maybe that a blacksnake had dropped onto a student’s open textbook from a library shelf above.

  Doc Allen oversees a Cornell ornithology class at McGraw Hall. Note the bird skeletons on the windowsill

  In 1931, the Great Depression created widespread poverty and made it hard for many families to send their children to college. Doc Allen did everything he could to keep his bird students in school, including letting a few of them live at McGraw. One young man from Florida, having no money to rent a room, unrolled his mattress each night on top of a long classroom laboratory table and fell asleep. The students who opened the door for early-morning lectures sometimes startled him awake, causing him to scramble into his trousers and dive behind a cabinet to shave. He cooked his dinner—usually a stew of carrots, beans, and bread crusts—in a big pot, adding the bodies of whatever R
ed Squirrels and chipmunks he was able to trap on campus that day.

  Jim Tanner, with financial help from his family, moved his belongings into an all-male rooming house which provided a bed and dinner for five dollars a week. It was all he needed. For Tanner and his fellow ornithology students it was birds, birds, birds, almost twenty-four hours a day. He took classes in entomology (the study of insects), zoology, and German, a language in which many articles about birds were written. He also studied drawing, bacteriology, botany, and genetics. He especially liked Professor Allen’s new course, “Conservation of Wildlife,” which explored how to preserve wild species in their natural habitats. It was the first such course in the United States.

  Every Monday night, Tanner stomped into McGraw with his classmates, his professors, and invited guests for the week’s discussion on birds. The seminar sessions began with each person telling the entire group about the birds he or she had seen on campus in the past week. It was a chance to shine before the others, or to make an embarrassing mistake out loud. Doc, who led the group, never reacted to errors in bird identification with laughter or harsh words, but instead with gentle questioning and thoughtful remarks, which could be even worse. A student named Sally Hoyt Spofford remembers reporting a Swamp Sparrow in March, far too early for the bird to be in Ithaca. The others looked down at their boots and tried to conceal smiles as Sally’s face reddened. “How interesting,” Dr. Allen mused, his voice light. “That is an early one.”