The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

  Eastern Cuba, 1985—1987

  THE CLOSEST RELATIVE TO THE IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER OF THE UNITED STATES IS the Cuban Ivory-bill (Campephilus principalis bairdii). Most experts believe these birds are simply two populations of the same species that became separated long ago. Museum specimens of Ivory-bills from the two countries look the same, except that the Cuban birds tend to be a little smaller and the white line that runs down each side of the body starts a bit closer to the ear on the Cuban Ivory-bill. During the years when Jim Tanner was exploring the Singer Tract, scientists thought that the Cuban and U.S. birds were two separate species, but opinion changed around 1950, when biologists concluded that the slight differences in appearance wouldn’t keep birds from the two populations from interbreeding if they ever came in contact.

  Cuba was home to its own population of Ivory-bills, known only to a few ornithologists. Clearing of lowland forests reduced the Cuban Ivory-bill’s habitat to the eastern mountains

  Ivory-bills have been rapidly disappearing in Cuba, too, but because they have been seen there much more recently than in the United States, there’s a ghost of a chance that a few birds still inhabit the rugged, rust-colored mountains of the east. Every year, teams of searchers thread their way through those jagged peaks, hauling camping gear and scientific equipment up over the powdery trails to look for them. When they stop from time to time to gasp for breath, they send recordings of the old Cornell tape out into the mountain air, hoping an Ivory-bill will answer. So far, none has.

  The Ivory-bill was featured on this now-rare Cuban stamp, issued in 1962

  Since 1985, guides and scientists have spent more than forty thousand hours looking for the bird Cubans call Carpintero real—the Royal Carpenter. And in all that time there have been only nine glimpses of an Ivory-bill, adding up to maybe two minutes of time. The longest sighting lasted only about twenty seconds. There are no photos.

  The most determined of the searchers has seen the Ivory-bill four times and has organized the expeditions that have been most successful at tracking it down. Giraldo Alayón has studied the great bird for more than thirty years, collecting scientific information and folklore in a series of files and journals. He has become as important to the Ivory-bill in Cuba as James Tanner was in the United States. He is also Cuba’s national spider expert.

  The son of a lensmaker, Alayón grew up in the town of San Antonio de los Baños during the years of the Cuban Revolution. Just about everything changed in San Antonio in those days except for one thing—the movies. Even as the United States was being cursed as Cuba’s enemy, even as governments were bracing for possible conflict, the Casino theater downtown kept right on showing American films.

  Giraldo’s future snapped into focus one Saturday night in December 1960, when he went to the movies with his sister and two friends to see a film based on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. For two hours, eleven-year-old Giraldo sat wide-eyed as four American actors and a duck named Gertrude probed the core of the earth itself. He stared as Alex—played by Pat Boone—lowered himself into the chimney of a volcano. He held his breath as the giant reptile Dimetrodon nearly carried off Arlene Dahl. And when the great geologist Professor Oliver Lindenbrook, played by James Mason, informed his students that “the spirit of man cannot be stopped,” Giraldo Alayón knew for sure that he wanted to be a scientist.

  NATURAL CUBA

  Cuba is a big island, about the size of Pennsylvania, accounting for about half the land mass of all the islands in the West Indies. Cuba’s landscape is extremely varied. There is a desert, a huge swamp much like the Everglades, and three mountain ranges with peaks almost as high as any in the eastern United States.

  Because Cuba is an island, many species evolved there. Twenty-one bird species are found only in Cuba, including the world’s smallest bird—the Bee Hummingbird. Half of Cuba’s 580 spider species are endemic—found only there. Cuba has twenty-five different species of scorpions, its own crocodile, and twenty-five endemic butterfly species.

  Many birds that migrate to the United States to breed in the warm, buggy months spend most of their year in Cuba.

  After high school, Giraldo enrolled in Havana University, first studying physics and then switching to biology. Spiders were his passion. Their diversity of color and form and behavior fascinated him. No two seemed alike. He was never happier than when he was crawling through a cave or inspecting rocks, logs, bushes, or crevices for spiders. One night in the winter of 1970, after a spider-collecting field trip to the eastern mountains, Alayón relaxed contentedly on a log before a crackling campfire, listening to neighboring peasants tell stories of a big white-billed woodpecker of the deep forest. The way they spoke made it hard to know whether it was real or legendary. They swore it had mystical qualities, calling it the guardian spirit of the forest. Alayón’s professor, Fernando Ciyas, declared that he, too, had once seen the skin of this sacred bird nailed to the back of a peasant’s door, its wings stretched into the shape of a cross.

  Alayón was fascinated. A huge, white-billed spiritual woodpecker? Later he returned to the area to collect more stories—accounts that deepened his interest. Woodsmen told him that this woodpecker’s bones could be ground into a powder to keep evil spirits away. Others repeated that the bird’s spirit guarded the forest. The only problem was that hardly anyone he interviewed had actually seen this creature they called Carpintero real. Did it really exist?

  Alayón went to museums and libraries, just as Jim Tanner had in the United States, to pore through books and specimen cabinets for any scraps of information at all about the Ivory-bill. There was precious little. The Spaniards who had ruled Cuba for four hundred years had seemingly overlooked it. No scientist mentioned it at all until the 1860s, and in the century that followed there were only two detailed reports.

  After 1900, most of Cuba’s forests were cleared for growing sugarcane. The few scientists who knew about the Ivory-bill worried that it had become extinct in Cuba. But in the 1940s and 1950s, two U.S.-led expeditions rediscovered the species. The second quest, led by scientists George and Barbara Lamb, found six mated pairs in a hidden mountain forest known as Bandilero. This land was owned by two U.S. companies. The Lambs believed that if a preserve could be established, enough breeding birds might remain to rebuild the population and save the species.

  THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

  All during the 1950s a storm had been gathering in Cuba. A growing number of Cubans were tired of having their country ruled by Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt dictator who allowed wealth to become concentrated in the hands of a few. Some thought the United States had too much control over Cuba’s economy, culture, and land. During that decade a young lawyer, Fidel Castro, the son of a wealthy sugar planter, led rebel forces against the government from Ivory-bill country—remote mountain outposts in the eastern part of the island. The rebels took over in 1959, and Castro became the head of the government.

  Relations between the United States and Cuba froze solid when Castro declared himself a Communist and accepted support from the United States’ global enemy—the Soviet Union. In 1960 Cuba took over all U.S. property on the island, and most U.S. workers scrambled for home. President John F. Kennedy quickly outlawed U.S. trade with Cuba, and most contact between U.S. and Cuban scientists—including research on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker—all but stopped for more than three decades.

  But the Cuban Revolution changed everything. In 1959, after the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista had collapsed and rebels took control, most Americans left in haste and the Cuban government took over the land at Bandilero. Once again the phantom woodpecker seemed to slip away into the twilight of legend. There were no more Ivory-bill reports at all until one day in 1968 when a biologist named Orlando Garrido happened upon a lone female while collecting reptiles at a mountain forest known as Cupeyal. From its safe vantage point high in a pine tree, the great glossy bird had hitched its way around from behind the trunk to get a clear look at the star
tled Garrido. It cocked its head and inspected him for a while, uttered a sharp yelp, and shot off across a valley. Garrido had no idea that the Ivory-bill was on the brink of extinction, but he did recall that he had a book about it back in his Havana office. He remembered photos of a baby bird on a man’s arm and head. These, of course, were the famous photos in Jim Tanner’s book. Garrido then wrote about his discovery.

  Almost a decade later, in the late 1970s, Giraldo Alayón read Garrido’s report and questioned him about the Ivory-bill he had seen. The two scientists began to converse excitedly at the University of Havana about organizing a new expedition to search for it. Since the older and better-known Garrido was often pulled away to lead field trips throughout Cuba, Alayón took the lead. Again and again, he traveled to the mountains, interviewing country people, listening to more stories, and mapping the places they told him about. Finding this lost bird became an obsession. Like so many researchers before him, dark-eyed, mustachioed Giraldo Alayón felt himself drawn toward this elusive creature that seemed to exist in a dimension all its own.

  SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE

  While many Americans who lived in Cuba fled the island after the revolution, one man was trying to get in. Dr. Lester Short, Curator of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History, was a stocky man whose broad face was fringed with a whitening beard. He probably knew more about woodpeckers than anyone else in the world. His book Woodpeckers of the World was a bible for ornithologists. There were few woodpeckers on earth that Lester Short hadn’t seen. One was the Ivory-bill.

  For twelve years Short tried in vain to get permission from the U.S. and Cuban governments to search for the Ivory-bill in Cuba. He filled out endless forms and wrote countless letters. But always there was another form to fill out, always another official to consult, always someone else who had to grant the final permission.

  But then, in August 1984, Short received an unexpected call from a man who introduced himself as Comandante Universo Sanchez Alvarez, director of Cuba’s Bureau of Flora, Fauna, and Protected Areas. Sánchez Alvarez wished to invite Dr. Short to Cuba to help search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Sánchez Alvarez hoped that if the bird could be found again, Short’s worldwide reputation might help Cuban scientists make a case for creating a large nature preserve in the forest to protect it.

  ORLANDO GARRIDO

  Dr. Orlando Garrido, the Cuban biologist who saw the Ivory-bill in 1968, was at one time a world-class tennis player. But even in a big match, biology was never far from his mind. In 1959, while representing Cuba in the Davis Cup tennis competition, Garrido was about to serve the ball to his Australian opponent when he noticed a huge beetle crawling slowly across the court in front of him. It was a magnificent specimen. Raising his hand, Garrido signaled the referee to stop play, and as the crowd watched in amazement, he walked to the sidelines, found an empty tennis ball can, went back to the court, and carefully scooped up the insect and placed it inside. Only when the lid was tightly secured did he walk back to resume play.

  Short arrived in February 1985, along with Cornell sound technician George Reynard. Their guide was Giraldo Alayón. Alayón led the Americans to Cupeyal, where Orlando Garrido had last seen the bird seventeen years earlier. The explorers pushed themselves to cover twelve miles a day, often leaning into a hard, driving rain. They saw no birds, but now and again they came upon trees whose bark had been scaled back, suggesting that maybe a lone Ivory-bill had passed through.

  On the morning of the fifth day an old man rode into their camp on horseback. Dismounting, he introduced himself as Felipe Montero Rodriguez, a logger who had been cutting trees in those mountains for thirty years. He said he had information for the men seeking the Carpintero real. Explaining that he had kept track of the bird because he loved it, Señor Rodriguez reported that Ivory-bills had declined steadily throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s until they seemed to be completely gone in 1977—or so he thought. But just a few weeks before, while he was working, he was startled to hear the sound of a familiar crack of bone against wood. Dropping his blade at his feet, he crashed through the forest at a full sprint until he saw it—a bird bigger than the Cuban Crow, black-and-white, with a black crest pointing forward—a female Ivory-bill! He said the tree was only about five miles away from where they were now.

  That was good enough for Alayón and Short. They folded their tents, struck camp, and followed the old man’s hand-drawn map. They searched for another three days without success, but they had no doubt that his detailed story had the ring of truth. Lester Short returned to New York convinced that there were still Ivory-bills in Cuba. Finding them would be like finding a needle in a haystack—and one that moved at that. But they were out there. The team had simply not yet found the right place to search.

  MARCH 16

  The old peasant squinted at the picture of the bird Giraldo Alayón had handed him, and then smiled. His smile split into a grin when Alayón clicked on his tape recorder and the rapid succession of toots and yaps came pouring out. These were sounds he clearly recognized. Without hesitation he led Alayón directly to a tree whose upper limbs were stripped of bark.

  Alayón looked around. Here was a wild and primitive forest, with pine-carpeted mountains plunging steeply down to meet clear green streams lined with thick brush. Locals called the place Ojito de Agua. Ever since Lester Short had left, Alayón had been interviewing mountain people, looking for the best place to begin a new expedition when breeding season began. Ojito de Agua looked like the spot.

  Alayón organized an all-Cuban Ivory-bill search team, the first ever. With him were herpetologist Alberto Estrada, two other scientists, a mule driver, four guides—all hunters and miners who knew the mountains like the backs of their weathered hands—and a young photographer named Carlos Peña who had become famous in Cuba as a champion boxer. Their cook was an old woman who kept them strong with rice, beans, and canned meat.

  LEARNING ABOUT BIRDS IN CUBA

  At this writing, Cuba has about forty professional ornithologists and a much larger number of ornithology students. Classes in the island’s natural history begin for all students in fourth grade. Cubans have learned about their birds with very little equipment. The island has little money, and scientists are often restricted by their government from traveling to conferences outside of Cuba.

  So Cuban scientists work without batteries, pens, binoculars, paper, thermometers, or gasoline—usually for free. They do it for the love of learning. At Zapata Swamp—a vast ocean of grass like the Everglades—Orestes Martinez, known as “El Chino,” has become the world expert on three birds found only there—the Zapata Wren, the Zapata Sparrow, and the Zapata Rail. He started a bird club called “The Three Endemics” to help local children learn about these special birds. “Their fathers and uncles hunted them,” he says. “The children want to protect them. That means the birds have hope.”

  They set out in February 1986, rumbling in a truck to a flat clearing in the lower mountains where they unloaded a huge canvas tent and set up a base camp. Then they divvied up the rest of the gear and food into their mochilas, or backpacks. They were fit, well prepared, and optimistic.

  The trail to Ojito de Agua seemed to have been made for goats. One part, which they marked as “Three-Rest Mountain,” was too steep and rocky for even the agile guides to accomplish in a single climb. For several days the team collected insects and reptiles and searched for Ivory-bills. On the morning of March 13, Estrada caught a brief glimpse of a huge black bird flashing across the path. It might have been a crow, but it struck Estrada as far too big, and he thought he saw white on the wing. Minutes later, several explorers thought they heard an Ivory-bill call far to the south. For the next two days they explored the hills in a state of keen expectation, but found no sign of the great woodpecker. Then, just after breakfast on the morning of March 16, they set out on an old lumber trail that zigzagged along a mountainside. Footing was difficult, and the men frequently stumbled. By nine o
’clock a light fog had reduced visibility and made the rhythmic crunching of their boots seem even louder. Soon a thin mist glistened on the green crowns of the huge old pine trees.

  Giraldo Alayón surveys habitat during one of the expeditions when the Ivory-bill was rediscovered in Cuba in the mid-1980s

  Alayón was alone in the middle of the pack, trudging with his head down, when he heard a crow call. He lifted his head to the right and, as he remembers, “I saw two big crows chase a female Ivory-bill. They were moving fast, from one side of the valley to the other. It was like a flash. Two big black birds, with another big bird ahead of them. But the one in front had a flash of white on the wings. I was frozen—completely paralyzed. And then it was over so fast. I screamed for the others to come back, but it was gone by the time they got there. I stomped my foot and punched my fist in the air and screamed ‘Lo ví! Si! Si!’ [‘I saw it!’] It was one of the biggest moments of my life.”

  A week later he returned to Havana and immediately called Lester Short in New York. “I saw the Ivory-bill!” he said. “Come back!” Short was there in a matter of days, this time with his wife, ornithologist Jennifer Horne, as well as sound technician George Reynard. A well-equipped international team explored the forest for ten days straight, with spectacular success. One male Ivory-bill and at least one female were seen seven different times by six different people. The birds streaked across valleys and through trees like black-and-white comets, electrifying anyone who caught a glimpse.

  Word of the rediscovery crackled around the island. On their way down the mountain, the searchers were met by a Cuban television crew coming up by mule to interview them. By the time they got back to Havana, even their hotel maids knew. Meetings were arranged with important officials who took notes as Alayón and Short made recommendations much like those of Tanner earlier: no cutting of trees within three and a half miles of the Ivory-bill site; no one allowed in the area except for scientists and wildlife managers; girdling of trees to provide more food. This time Cuban authorities took their advice and closed the area within a week.