The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

  THE RED WOLF

  A Red Wolf can be any color from tan to black. Smaller than its cousin the Gray Wolf, it once hunted deer and smaller mammals in forests, marshes, and swamps from Pennsylvania to Texas and in southeastern states. Many were shot and trapped early in the twentieth century as suspected killers of cows and sheep. At the same time, their habitat was cleared and drained.

  By the late 1930s, only two populations remained in the United States, including some at the Singer Tract. In 1967, the Red Wolf was declared endangered. Six years later, with the species nearing extinction, biologists captured 14 wolves so they could breed in safe, zoo-like situations. Now there are 270 to 300 Red Wolves, of which 50 to 80 live in the wild.

  Brown Thrashers led off the dawn chorus with a hoarse, once-repeated churr that welled up from the brambles. White-throated Sparrows chimed in next, with a high melody whose first four notes sounded like “Here comes the bride.” Then the amazing Winter Wrens burst onto center stage, stub-tailed midgets who threw back their heads and belted out the longest song of any bird, rattling their entire frames with the effort. By the time the late-sleeping Ivory-bills finally appeared at their hole to preen their feathers, the forest was bathed in light. By then, Tanner noted, seven other woodpecker species had already called.

  Sometimes surprise guests appeared during his silent vigils. One December morning Tanner was seated on the ground, listening for Ivory-bills, when the vines in front of him rustled and the stiff palmetto fronds gave way to something big and

  solid. At first the glossy black back that passed slowly before his eyes seemed to belong to a small horse. Then, suddenly, he realized it was a wolf walking along a log. When it plopped silently to the ground and vanished into a thicket, Tanner raised himself to a half crouch so he could see better. The wolf came out of the brush and passed slowly across a clearing maybe thirty steps away. “He was handsome, powerful … with a deep chest and a lean belly, self confident, alert … black from tip to tail,” Tanner wrote. Cupping his hands, Tanner tried to squeak like a wounded bird to catch the wolf’s attention, but it trotted off.

  The forest became silent and still at midday, when creatures active in daylight hours seem to take a break. The forest pulse quickened again at dusk and stayed brisk until sundown, which ushered in a whole new cast of characters. One night Tanner rowed a small wooden boat out into the middle of a lake, put his oars at rest, and remained silent as he scanned the moonlit water. “The forest stretched away for miles from the black wall of trees surrounding the lake,” he later wrote. “The air shook with noise … The chorus of frogs came from all sides … loudest by weight of numbers were the tiny cricket frogs on the floating duckweed … sitting and beating out their rasping notes.” He flicked on a flashlight. The beam swept across the surface of the water until it caught “a glowing coal that burnt for a moment and then went out—the eye of an alligator that sank beneath the surface.”

  Day or night, poisonous snakes were a huge worry, especially around Greenlea Bend. Timber Rattlesnakes slithered out from their winter dens just as spring covered up the foot trails with vines, leaves, and brambles. The “thick-bodied water moccasins” and Copperheads that Theodore Roosevelt had seen on his hunting trip were still there, too, and plenty of them. Since Tanner and Kuhn couldn’t look up for birds and down for snakes at the same time, there were many unscheduled meetings. Once, as Kuhn went charging through a thicket of vines after a bird, his boot came down on a rattler. The unmistakable sound sent him leaping in the only direction he could—straight up. Then, penned in by brambles on all sides, he landed on the only place he could—straight down. The snake was still there, rattling away. Heart pounding, Kuhn jumped again, with the same result, and kept on jumping until the snake darted away.

  In spring and summer, the two men wore long-sleeved shirts with all the buttons closed tight to the neck and the collars turned up, and sometimes they wore their hats jammed down over their ears. But still the insects bit and stung them. Annoying as it was, it gave them something in common with all the other warm-blooded creatures of the forest, and they had no choice but to accept it.

  The most awesome event in the woods occurred when one of the giant trees fell. This usually happened after a hard rain, when a grand old monarch’s soaked crown became so heavy that the trunk could not hold it up any longer. Then, as Tanner wrote, “the quiet of the woods would suddenly be broken by a resounding crack … then a series of loud snaps merging into a roaring crescendo as the tree crashes downwards to hit the earth with a dull, echoing boom. The echoes quickly die away, but the forest still seems to hold its breath until gradually the birds resume their song, the normal quiet sounds return, and the listener collects his scattered thoughts.”

  In the evenings, Kuhn and Tanner ate their supper together by a kerosene lamp on the cabin’s screened-in porch. Since they often split up during the day, they used the night to catch up. “We talked … just as Mark Twain’s river pilots endlessly discussed the details of the river’s course,” wrote Tanner. “Although learning of the Ivory-bill and its life history was our goal, the forest was our working place and we had to know it—[how] to find our way, to travel quickly and to know where to hunt.”

  The two men’s deepening friendship was rooted in a respect for the forest. Jim Tanner and J. J. Kuhn were after something different from the game pursued by the hunters who had passed through the forest before them. Unarmed, and with their minds and hearts wide open, they were hunting for knowledge.

  SONNY BOY

  As Christmas of 1937 approached, Tanner and Kuhn set out to count all the Ivorybills in the Singer Tract. It was too early in the season for nests, but the birds were easy to see and hear in the leafless forest.

  Quickly they found three pairs and another female who had no mate. That made seven birds—a good start. But for some reason they couldn’t find the young bird they had seen the spring before. Then, on December 22, rain began to fall, drumming steadily on their cabin roof for more than a week. The water collected in puddles in front of the cabin; then the puddles gathered into ponds. When the ponds merged into a sheet of water that made hiking impossible, Tanner drove back to New York for the holidays.

  It was mid-February before he could return, and now there was no time to lose. Nesting season lasted from January to May, so there might already be young birds in the forest. Early on February 17 Tanner discovered a pair of Ivory-bills nesting in a live red maple tree at John’s Bayou, not far from where he had observed the small family the year before. He built a blind and settled in to observe. More than anything, he wanted to know how many baby birds there were, but it might take weeks before nestlings were strong enough to appear at the hole. With the whole forest to cover, he didn’t have that much time. He took a chance. On the morning of February 24, when both parents had flown away, Tanner hastily drove a ladder of spikes up toward the nest hole. He was about halfway to the nest when the adults flew back and caught him red-handed.

  They dug their claws into a nearby tree and glared back over their shoulders at the huge invader. Then the male flew to the nest tree and hitched down the trunk toward Tanner, backing him down the spikes until he hopped onto the ground and stepped away. The male flew off but soon returned with a grub in its bill, disappearing into the nest. Tanner let out a sigh of relief, for early writers such as Audubon had reported that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers were easily spooked and would desert their nests for even the slightest of reasons.

  Later the parents flew off again and Tanner scurried back up his ladder, completing it as he climbed. When he got to the hole, he reached his hand inside and felt around. It was surprisingly warm. Something made “a long, scraping buzz.” Probing gingerly around the entire nest, Tanner’s fingers came to rest upon the soft feathers of a single little bird. There was nothing else inside at all, not even pieces of eggshells. As he scrambled down the ladder in time to beat the parents, Tanner’s mind blazed with the same question that had plagued him ever since
the Cornell sound expedition three years before. Once again, only one nestling—why?

  Ten days later, the baby bird appeared at the opening, poking its head out curiously for the first time. It was clearly a male. Soon he would be strong enough to fly and leave home. Tanner decided to try to “band” him with a lightweight collar around one foot so that researchers would be able to identify him anywhere he went and track his movements.

  On March 6, banding day, Tanner and Kuhn waited at the nest tree for the adults to take their usual morning break. When they did, Tanner raced up the spike ladder. But as he drew near, the young bird poked his head out of the opening, spread his wings, and flung himself into the air. Tanner reached out instinctively and caught him. The bird struggled and squawked, but Tanner managed to fasten the band around one leg and gently place the young bird back in the cavity. However, their acquaintance was far from over. As Tanner lingered by the hole to whittle away a small branch that had blocked his view of the entrance, the young bird appeared again and took a second leap, this time plunging down past Tanner’s grasp.

  BANDING BIRDS

  John James Audubon was the first person to “band” a bird. In 1803 he tied silver threads to the feet of Eastern Phoebes in Pennsylvania—birds that migrate south in the winter. The next year, some of them returned to the same place to nest.

  German scientists banded gulls and other birds that flew over the Baltic Sea in 1903. People who found these birds in France had no idea what the bands meant. They thought maybe the bands had been attached by sailors aboard a sinking ship.

  Today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issues people permits to fasten lightweight bands to the legs of birds. Each band is colored and has a specific number. The data tell us about the birds’ migration routes and traveling speed, and how old they are. Jim Tanner is the only person ever known to have banded an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

  The bird fluttered into a tangle of vines, where he lay yelping and squawking. Tanner scrambled down the ladder and pulled him out of the thicket. He was, Tanner wrote, “yelling loud enough to be heard in Tallulah.” Gently handing the bird to Kuhn, Tanner fumbled for his camera and started snapping pictures before the parents got back. He had already wasted six shots before he realized he hadn’t focused the camera. He jammed more film in the camera and was firing away again when he realized he hadn’t even opened the lens. He had rarely been this flustered in his life. He took a deep breath and made himself slowly go over how to operate a camera.

  Sonny Boy meets J. J. Kuhn

  By this time, the young Ivory-bill had taken over the situation. No longer wailing, he climbed out of Kuhn’s cupped hands and hopped sideways onto his wrist, perching on it as if it were a limb. Then he hitched his way up along Kuhn’s arm and perched on his shoulder as Tanner snapped photos. Seeking the safety of a high perch, the bird continued up Kuhn’s collar, scaled his head, and hopped atop his cap, puffing up his feathers to make himself look bigger. When Kuhn reached for the bird with his hand, the bird pecked at it, puncturing the skin. Tanner later wrote, “Though only a nestling, it had the imposing and elegant appearance of the Ivorybill and the quick and confident actions.”

  When Tanner ran out of film, he wrapped the bird loosely in two soft handkerchiefs, buttoned him inside his shirt, and climbed back up the tree, placing him gently in the nest. This time the young bird stayed inside. As Kuhn and Tanner watched in hiding, the mother returned. To their relief, she fed her son without hesitation. The father flew in a bit later with his own billful of grubs. “Sonny Boy,” as Tanner and Kuhn called the little bird, became history’s only known banded Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and the only young Ivory-bill ever captured close-up on film.

  THE FATAL FLAW

  Seventeen months later, in October of 1939, Jim Tanner straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and faced the members and staff of the National Association of Audubon Societies in New York City. It was the third and final year he would deliver a report about his Audubon Research Fellowship on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and this time he illustrated his presentation with a slide show. The first slide showed his beloved car—as trusty a companion as any cowboy’s horse.

  Tanner showed slides of Kuhn, of “Sonny Boy,” of adult Ivory-bills, of towering trees and moonlit lakes, and then he got down to his conclusions. He estimated that there might still be about twenty-five Ivory-billed Woodpeckers left on earth, scattered throughout four or five large areas in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—though he had seen the birds only in the Singer Tract in Louisiana.

  He reported fewer and fewer Ivory-bills every year at the Singer forest. The numbers were as follows:

  1934—seven pairs that gave birth to four birds

  1935—no data

  1936—six pairs and six young birds

  1937—five pairs and one unmated adult, producing two young birds

  1938—two pairs and three unmated adults; three young birds

  1939—one pair and three unmated adults; one young bird

  He didn’t think there was enough evidence to blame the decline on inbreeding. In fact, it seemed encouraging that he had been able to find at least one successful nest in each of the three years of his study—that meant the species was still able to reproduce.

  No, there was a much more serious problem, getting bigger each day. The birds were starving to death. The Chicago Mill and Lumber Company’s giant band saw in Tallulah was devouring the last nesting, roosting, and food trees of the Lord God bird as fast as logs could be fed in. Time was running out fast for the Ivory-bill.

  Tanner had finally identified the Ivory-bill’s fatal flaw, at least at the Singer Tract. These birds needed a forest home big enough so that somewhere a few old trees were always dying natural deaths at any given time. These could be trees that were injured by lightning or wind or weakened by disease or old age, but they had to be still standing as they died. Only in such trees did the beetle larvae called grubs bore into still-tight bark to lay their eggs. Those grubs were almost the only thing that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers ate.

  Why didn’t these birds just change their diet and eat other things? What possible advantage was there to being such finicky eaters? Some birds, like Mourning Doves, draw nourishment from hundreds of plant species, and others eat many kinds of insects, as well as other prey. Tanner’s theory was this: there were so many big, fat grubs under the bark of a tree just after it died that the Ivory-bills had formed a habit of looking for those trees and very little else. Large birds like Ivory-bills need a lot of food, especially when they are raising a young family, and the banquet under the bark could feed the Ivory-bills’ families for a long time. Of all the woodpeckers, only the Ivory-bill was strong enough to pry off bark while it was still bound tightly to the tree. Others had to wait until the tree became weaker and the bark looser. In other words, the Ivory-bill had its own private stash of grubs that no other woodpecker could reach.

  But once logging started at the Singer Tract and the food began to run out, the birds couldn’t change their habits fast enough to look for other kinds of food. The problem was that there were only so many newly dying trees in a forest at any one time. The forest had to be very big to contain enough Ivory-bill food. The Ivory-bills could cover great distances to find the trees—and mates traveled together—but the trees had to exist somewhere.

  GRUBS

  With nearly 300,000 species, beetles are the most common insects on earth. They live everywhere except the oceans. Beetles pass through four life stages to adulthood—egg, larva, pupa, and adult. The second, or larval, stage is called a grub. Ivory-billed Woodpeckers gobbled grubs from three beetle families, Cerymbycidae, Scolytidae, and Buprestidae, all of which developed from eggs laid under the bark of dying trees. There was a lot of nutrition in these white, flat-headed grubs, some of which grew to three inches long and an inch thick. But the Ivory-bills had to get them fast, for they molted into pupa within just a few weeks.

  According to Tanner’s calc
ulations, a mated pair of Ivorybills needed to live in an uncut or nearly uncut forest of six square miles in size to furnish enough grubs to feed a small family. That was 36 times more room than Pileated Woodpeckers needed, and 126 times more than Red-headed Woodpeckers did. No wonder the Ivory-bill was in desperate straits: the Singer Tract was the last scrap left of the huge carpet of trees that had once covered the entire Mississippi delta, and now it was disappearing by the minute. Tanner told his audience, now raptly attentive, that day by day there was “less dead wood, fewer insect borers, and less food for woodpeckers.” “This decrease in food supply,” he said, “has been the only thing I have found which could seriously affect the numbers of Ivory-bills.”

  Tanner presented a plan to meet the needs of both woodpeckers and loggers. His map divided the Singer Tract into three types of areas:

  1. “Reserve” areas—the best Ivory-bill places, like John’s Bayou, not to be cut at all;

  2. “Partial cutting” areas—not the best part of the forest for Ivory-bills, but places they still sometimes used; and

  3. Logging areas—places not used much by Ivory-bills, where logging could take place.

  Unfortunately, the Ivory-bill’s favorite food trees—sweet gum and Nuttall’s oak—were also the species that made Chicago Mill the most money. Tanner recommended that loggers spare all such trees whose tops were already dead or dying, since the wood was inferior and birds could use them for roosting, nesting, and perching. For the same reason, he urged that dead trees of all species be left standing. He even came up with an idea for increasing woodpecker food in the forest—by “girdling,” or choking, some trees so they could die standing up, instead of cutting them down. That way the grubs would infest them and the woodpeckers would have food. He recommended that no more railroad tracks be laid in the forest, that hunting be banned, and that few people be allowed to visit until the Ivory-bill could recover. He urged that most logging be done in summer and fall rather than winter and spring, when Ivorybills nested.