The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

IVORY-BILLS VERSUS PILEATEDS

  Tanner believed that most people who told him about Ivory-bills were really reporting the much more common Pileated Woodpecker. Both birds are very big and both have black-and-white coloring. Males of both species have red crests, adding to the confusion.

  Tanner wrote, “The position of the white on the wing is by far the most reliable field character at all times,” he wrote. “In the Ivory-bill the white is on the rear half of the wing and is visible on the back when the bird is perched and its wings folded. In the Pileated the white is on the front half of the wing and is hidden when the wings are folded.”

  Early in February, Tanner reached the Everglades. Sunburned game wardens with leathery faces squinted at him, stroked their chins, and said yes, they thought perhaps they had seen the birds among the cypress trees maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. One guide, Dewey Brown, said he had heard Ivory-bills calling recently from Big Cypress Swamp. He was happy to show Tanner the spot, but said it would take a few days to get there. By now, Tanner was learning to size up exactly how much of his time any particular rumor was worth. This one was promising, but not that promising. “I told him I would return next year with more time for a decent trip,” Tanner noted.

  Tanner’s final Florida destination was the Suwannee River, a spot famous for Ivory-bills. William Brewster and Frank Chapman had floated down this river in 1890, killing one Ivory-bill and hearing another. Two years later, Arthur Wayne and his “crackers” had shot Ivory-bills for Brewster and others. Now, more than forty years later, a few of the men who had collected for Wayne were still alive. They were wrinkled old woodsmen with long memories. As Tanner later wrote, they said that “after Wayne’s work there Ivory-bills were very unusual and that he had secured almost all of them.” Looking around at the grand trees lining the banks, Tanner hoped it wasn’t true. He thought the Suwannee still looked good enough to investigate.

  Tanner’s map showed a landing, a few miles downstream from Old Town, where the road went down to the riverbank. Maybe he could find another boat or canoe there. For the next hour, Tanner guided the Ford on a jolting, head-bumping ride along two beaten ruts that finally ended at a deserted clearing by the river’s edge.

  Tanner got out as the dust settled around him. With darkness fast approaching, he walked into the trees and loaded his arms full of twigs and limbs, then stacked them into a tidy pyramid and lit a fire. Minutes later he was contentedly crouched over his supper when he heard a truck rattling down the road. It came to a stop, and several men spilled out. Waving a hasty greeting, they hurried off to gather firewood. After a while Tanner heard bootsteps approaching his fire. Three faces appeared out of the dark, lit by the blaze. The men squatted on their heels and introduced themselves. They said they were there for some night fishing.

  Many men in Tanner’s situation would have been frightened out of their wits. He was unarmed and surrounded by strangers in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they were after his car. Maybe his money. But Jim Tanner was, as Doc Allen liked to put it, “adaptable.” He could fit in anywhere.

  “What are you doing here?” one of the men began. Stirring his fire, Tanner answered, “I am looking for peckerwoods.” The men were silent. He then launched into his well-rehearsed speech about how there were two kinds of big woodpeckers in these parts, one common and the other rare, and that he was trying to find the rare one. As he was speaking, Tanner could see their eyes narrowing with suspicion. Tanner rambled on until one of the men suddenly burst out laughing. The others soon followed.

  When he could finally speak, the first man said, “By golly, I thought for a minute you really were hunting for a peckerwood!” Catching his breath, he explained to Tanner that in those parts “peckerwood” could mean either a bird or a woodsman. Years before, another stranger had come down to the river looking for the human kind. With revenge in his eyes, he was after someone who had crossed him and had escaped on the river. The men had assumed Tanner was after the same fugitive until they realized he actually was looking for a bird.

  The strangers tromped off into the blackness to set out their fishing lines, and then banked their own fire to a roaring blaze against the cool night. They yelled over for Tanner to join their party, and he did. “We had a big meal of fried fish, baked yams, and biscuits. I ate my share even though I had already had one supper. Then they loaded their truck and near midnight disappeared up the narrow road.” It was one of many days and nights that didn’t turn out the way Tanner planned, but it showed that just about anything could, and would, happen on an expedition like this.

  HARD TRAVELING

  For the next three weeks Tanner drove, hiked, galloped, and waded around Florida chasing leads, scribbling notes, leaving his pictures behind, and trying not to get frustrated. The Suwannee had a promising habitat, but no Ivory-bills. The best lead yet took him to a forest near Brooksville, Florida, where an Ivory-bill had been reported only the year before. Tanner searched the area with two local men and at last found a sign: “a dead pine from which the bark had been completely scaled, apparently the work of an Ivory-bill.” Tanner assumed the bird was only passing through, though, since the habitat didn’t seem good enough for nesting birds.

  On March 17 he took off west for Louisiana and the Singer Refuge, the one place where he knew he could actually find Ivory-bills. Two items of good news awaited him: J. J. Kuhn, the woodsman who had guided the Cornell sound team so expertly before, was available and eager to help. Just as happily, Tanner and Kuhn could use the Singer Manufacturing Company’s cabin in the woods as a base of operations. That meant they could stay in the woods all the time except when they had to go into town for supplies.

  Tanner and Kuhn concentrated their search on the east side of the Tensas River. On March 26 they finally spotted a pair of adult Ivory-bills winging swiftly through the flooded backwater called John’s Bayou, and after four days of hard searching Tanner found their nest, chiseled in the top of a sweet gum. All day long the parents took turns shuttling long white grubs to a single open-mouthed baby, who constantly yapped for food.

  The very next day, the little bird hopped up onto the lip of the nest hole, steadied itself, spread its wings, and leaped into its first flight. It never returned to the nest again, and the family’s address shifted to a tree about a quarter mile away where they slept—or “roosted”—together each night.

  J. J. Kuhn, warden of the Singer Refuge and Tanner’s indispensable companion

  “[The young bird ] flew well from the start,” Tanner wrote proudly. “The family hunted together close to the nest tree for the next two months. The youngster grew stronger and more independent every day. Within a month it could join its parents on food-finding trips two miles away from their home tree. By mid-July it was nearly as big as its mother and father, a powerful flyer and a mighty hunter of grubs.” It still called to be fed, though, as young birds often do. Tanner found himself delighted by the prowess of this young bird, but worried that the family had produced only one egg. “This pair of birds gave no indication of nesting a second time,” he wrote, “even though they nested so very early.”

  Throughout May and June, Tanner and Kuhn combed the forest for more Ivory-bills. The daily hikes installed a mental map of the forest in Tanner’s head. He came to know where the waterways called bayous emptied into the forest, where the lakes were, and how the forest trees changed when the ground got lower or higher, wetter or drier. The Ivory-bills nested and slept in sweet-gum and oak trees that sprouted from dry ridges that had long ago been banked up by the Mississippi’s floods. Tanner called them “first bottoms.”

  Kuhn and Tanner usually split up so that they could cover twice as much ground. They searched mainly in the morning, when the birds were most active. Tanner’s strategy was to stop walking and listen about every quarter mile, since the Ivory-bill’s call carried about half a mile. He always heard Ivory-bills before he saw them. When he wasn’t searching for birds, he was working on other parts of his research p
roject, doing things like counting trees, collecting and inspecting grubs, scouting new locations, and investigating the biology and ecology of the Ivory-bill in countless other ways.

  Sometimes he just sat still. As a young boy, he had practiced sitting still outdoors for long periods of time. Now this was helping him in his profession. As he sat and listened, swatting bugs, taking notes, trying not to scratch his poison ivy welts, daydreaming and dozing every now and then, he occasionally tried to imitate the Ivory-bill’s call to see if the birds would answer. They never did. Once he tooted through the mouthpiece of a saxophone. No luck. But from time to time an Ivory-bill would call on its own from somewhere way off in the forest, sending him springing to his feet and tearing off after it, through the underbrush.

  During the winter and spring of 1937, Tanner and Kuhn found evidence of adult Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in seven different parts of the Singer Tract. Since adult Ivory-bills mated for life and stayed together all year round, Tanner assumed there were seven different nesting pairs, even though he saw only one young bird the whole time. Another parent was seen winging across a lake with a grub dangling from its bill, which almost certainly meant there was a young bird to be fed, but they couldn’t find the nest and never saw a nestling.

  Tanner kept wondering why all those adults produced so few young birds. Was Doc right about inbreeding? Were they tormented by mites? Or was it something else they hadn’t even thought of? After the small Ivory-bill family Kuhn and Tanner found on March 26 had abandoned its nest tree, Tanner shinnied high up the sweet gum and inspected the nest. Once again there was no evidence of parasites or mites, nor were there signs of struggle. The disappearing Ivory-bills were still a mystery.

  When summer came, broad leaves made treetops almost impossible to see and the air filled with swarming mosquitoes. Tanner rolled up his bedroll, packed his boots, and got ready to hike out to Tallulah and head home. But just before he left, he and Kuhn heard news that hit them both hard: the Singer company had sold six thousand acres of its land to a lumber company, and logging had already started. The land was on the west side of the Tensas—not the best Ivory-bill habitat in the forest, but now the lumbermen had their feet in the door. Even worse, Singer had sold the rest of the west side to the much bigger Chicago Mill and Lumber Company—which had a major sawmill in Tallulah. Singer was even allowing an oil company to drill test wells in prime Ivory-bill habitat.

  Tanner said goodbye to Kuhn on June 29 and spent another month tracking leads in Louisiana and South Carolina before he turned north toward home. Back at Cornell, he sorted through the hundreds of pages of notes he had compiled, and began to reflect on what he had learned so far.

  In his first season of sleuthing, he had been able to find Ivory-bills only at the Singer Tract. There was still promising habitat at Big Cypress Swamp and the lower Suwannee River, both in Florida. These sites merited follow-up visits. Four other places looked good, too, but less so. The birds at Singer were not reproducing well, and he still didn’t know why. But he now knew more about the kinds of trees the birds liked, what they ate, and how much space a nesting family seemed to need.

  Casting a shadow over everything was the sale of Ivory-bill habitat at Singer. Tanner didn’t let his emotions show easily, but there was desperation in his year-end report to John Baker of the Audubon Society. Time was running out. “Those woods should be preserved,” he wrote. “That area should be a national monument, and I strongly recommend that a movement be started towards that goal, even though the lumbering interests and possibility of oil present difficulties.”

  Looking back at that winter and spring, Tanner knew there were still many more questions than answers, but one thing was certain: he had done some hard traveling. He wrote a tribute to his indestructible Ford that might well have reminded him of himself. “It has been the first car to break a way over many a muddy road,” he said. “It has had several springs broken, mufflers knocked off and running-boards knocked loose, bumpers broken on trees, and the front axle bent. But it still runs.”

  The Singer Tract was the last significant scrap of a vast riverbottom forest that once covered millions of acres

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE LAST IVORY-BILL FOREST

  The Ivory-bill has frequently been described as a dweller in dark and gloomy swamps, has been associated with muck and murk, has been called a melancholy bird, but it is not that at all … The Ivory-bill is a dweller of the tree tops and sunshine; it lives in the sun … in surroundings as bright as its own plumage. It is true that the man trying to watch and follow these birds is probably in the shade and mud, among the fallen trees and running vines, but that does not affect the Ivory-bill in the least. He stays above all that, and is a handsome, vigorous, graceful bird.

  —James Tanner

  Singer Tract, Louisiana—December 1937-October 1938

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, TANNER WAS BACK IN THE SOUTH. HIS RESEARCH OF THE PREVIOUS spring had narrowed down the number of likely habitats for Ivory-bills, and there was no time to waste. The place he wanted to explore most was a swamp around the Santee River in South Carolina. Museum specimens and local reports left no doubt that many Ivory-bills had once lived there. Local experts confidently predicted that eight to twelve nesting pairs still remained.

  By now the Ivorybill was to be found only in one place: the Singer Tract in northeastern Louisiana

  Early in December, Tanner and a guide pulled on their boots and set out to comb every part of the Santee swamp for Ivory-bills. Eleven days later they came back disappointed. While they had seen a few stripped trees, Tanner wasn’t sure Ivory-bills had done the work. And they hadn’t heard a single call.

  The Santee search made Tanner rethink how much habitat Ivory-bills really needed. “I believe [the local experts] have underestimated the range of the birds, and so overestimated the numbers,” he wrote. In short, he feared that there wasn’t nearly enough food for eight to twelve pairs in a forest the size of the Santee’s. He thought back to the Ivory-bill family he had studied in the spring at the Singer Tract. They were nomads. Within a month, even the little bird had been able to fly two miles from its home tree in search of food. He realized that it must take a lot of territory to contain enough food for a family of Ivory-bills. The Santee was less than half the size of the Singer Tract. Tanner figured it was big enough for only two, maybe three, pairs at most.

  THE CAROLINA PARAKEET

  Southern U.S. forests once teemed with emeraldgreen parakeets sporting a bold yellow streak where the wing met the body and a bloodred patch around the eye. Audubon said they were so abundant that they covered orchards “like a brilliant coloured carpet.” Now the species is extinct. Why? Farmers killed them because they ate fruit. Market hunters shot, stuffed, and sold them to collectors. Hatmakers loved the green plumes, and hunters found the birds easy targets. When one bird lay dead on the ground, others in a flock often joined it, making themselves targets, too. The last Carolina Parakeet, Inca, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918.

  With this ominous new theory, Tanner gunned the engine of his Ford and swung toward Louisiana, racing through the Georgia hills and across the Mississippi to Tallulah in a single day. By dusk Tanner and J. J. Kuhn were walking single file long the slippery trail to their cabin, balancing sacks of groceries on their shoulders as they picked their way around mud-holes and stepped over logs.

  Beginning at dawn the next day, Tanner explored the Singer Tract day and night. Step by step he learned where the bayous ran and how the forest changed from its flat soggy bottom, laced with vines, to its drier ridges. He came to sense the subtle changes of the seasons—the lengthening of shadows, the fragrance of blossoming vines, the smell of wet leaves, and the steady electric hum of insects. Finally these patterns converged into a picture of the whole magnificent forest.

  Tanner’s visits to other swamps in the South had usually been disappointing because loggers had sliced the forests up into small patches. Less than halfway through his study, he
began to suspect that the Singer Tract was the last big uncut swamp forest left in the entire Mississippi delta—maybe in the whole South. The Singer Tract was the one forest that looked and felt and smelled and sounded as it must have thousands of years before. There was a good chance that every single species that had ever lived in this forest was still there except for the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon—both extinct. Everything else—from Ivory-bills, panthers, and wolves to grubs, mites, and frogs—was still there.

  Feather-topped cypress trees fringed the lakes inside the Singer Tract

  Tanner was beginning to realize that in order to understand the Ivory-bill’s life history, and to save it at the Singer Tract, he had to know the forest completely, to understand it as a single colossal organism throbbing with life. So the whole forest became Tanner’s lab, and it fascinated him as much as any species within it, even the Ivory-bill. Often he began hiking before the sun rose and was still out after dark.

  Winter was by far Tanner’s favorite season. Ivory-bill calls carried a long distance through the leafless forest, and he could spot the birds more easily when they flew through the bare limbs. Plus, there were no mosquitoes or snakes. One winter morning he made his way to an Ivory-bill roost tree while it was still dark, hours before the woodpeckers would be active. Plumping up a cushion of palmetto fronds, he settled himself against a tree to hear the forest wake up. It was great entertainment, he thought, and he didn’t even need a ticket.

  Just as the first pink stripe appeared behind the black-silhouetted trees, Barred Owls signed off the night shift with their final “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-call” hoots. The spreading sunlight brought the day crew to life, singer by singer and song by song.