The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

  1831—A decade after painting Ivory-bills, John James Audubon writes a detailed description of the species in his Birds of America.

  1863—The Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker is first reported by John Cassin, curator of birds for the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.

  1869—Michigan tries to protect rapidly declining Passenger Pigeons by forbidding guns to be fired within a mile of roosts.

  1870s—Much forested land in southern states is released from laws prohibiting sale. Northern and British timber companies begin to clear Ivory-bill habitat to sell the wood.

  1877—Florida passes a law forbidding the destruction of the eggs and young of plumed birds. It is widely ignored.

  1879—An observer writes of the Ivory-bill: “This bird is not at all abundant, and specimens may be regarded as good additions to one’s cabinet.”

  1890s—Arthur Wayne, W.E.D. Scott, George E. Beyer, and other “collectors” reduce the rapidly diminishing Ivory-bill population in order to sell or exhibit the skins of dead birds.

  1893—Johannes Gundlach publishes the first of his two-volume Ornitologia Cubana, providing the first detailed description of the Ivory-bill’s behavior, appearance, and habitat in Cuba.

  1898—After participating briefly in the Spanish-American War, which liberated Cuba from Spain, the United States takes control of much of Cuba’s land and economy. Much forested Cuban land is cleared to plant sugarcane, pushing the Ivory-bill deeper into mountainous Cuban habitat.

  1901—A course on the protection of certain game birds is required of all Nevada schoolchildren; a non-game-bird protection bill is passed in Florida, which, if it had been enforced, might have protected the Ivory-bill there.

  1907—President Theodore Roosevelt, on a hunting trip to northeastern Louisiana, sees three Ivory-bills, calling them the birds “which most interested me” among all he saw.

  1910—Responding to pressure from Audubon groups, New York State forbids the sale of wild bird feathers.

  1913—The Singer Manufacturing Company purchases nearly 80,000 acres of a swamp forest in Madison Parish, Louisiana, in order to reserve the trees for making sewing machine cabinets. The area becomes known as the Singer Refuge or the Singer Tract.

  1914—The Passenger Pigeon becomes extinct; James Tanner is born in Cortland, N.Y.

  1918—The last Carolina Parakeet dies in the Cincinnati Zoo.

  1924—Arthur and Elsa Allen, Cornell University scientists, rediscover the Ivory-bill near the Taylor River, in Florida. The bird had not been reported alive for years.

  1932—Louisiana legislator Mason D. Spencer shoots an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Singer Tract. Scientists rush to the scene, and six more Ivory-bills are soon found.

  1934—A survey shows seven pairs of adult Ivory-bills at the Singer Tract, producing four offspring.

  1935—A team of four Cornell University scientists, while on an expedition to record the voices of America’s rarest birds, conducts a detailed study of a nesting pair of Ivory-bills at the Singer Tract. They record the species’ voice and take still and motion pictures.

  1937-1939—Sponsored by the National Audubon Society, Cornell Ph.D. student James Tanner conducts a detailed study of the ecology, biology, and whereabouts of the Ivory-bill. The Singer company begins to sell and lease its forested land to two lumber companies; most goes to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, with a large sawmill in nearby Tallulah.

  1939—Tanner delivers his final report to the Audubon Society. He estimates there may be twenty-five Ivory-bills alive in the United States, but has found them only at the Singer Tract, where he is able to locate only six Ivory-bills, including just one breeding pair.

  1941—With Chicago Mill and Lumber cutting up to 800,000 board feet of lumber a day, the National Audubon Society launches a campaign to stop the cutting and preserve what remains of the Singer Tract as a refuge for Ivory-bills and as a scrap of an ancient forest.

  1943—Representatives from the Audubon Society, the U.S. government, and four state governments meet with executives from the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company and the Singer company to discuss preserving a portion of the Singer Tract as a preserve.

  1944—Last documented Ivory-bill sightings at the Singer Tract.

  1948—U.S. biologists Davis Compton and John Dennis find three Ivory-bills, including a nesting pair, in mountainous eastern Cuba. It is the first report in several years.

  1950 (approximately)—The Cuban Ivory-bill is renamed Campephilus principalis bairdii, reflecting the belief that the Ivory-bills found in the United States and Cuba are separated populations of the same species rather than two different species.

  1951—The Nature Conservancy is established in the United States. It will grow into the world’s biggest conservation organization, specializing in saving habitat for imperiled species such as the Ivory-bill and preserving examples of ecosystems such as the swamp forest at the Singer Tract.

  1957—U.S. biologist George Lamb discovers thirteen Ivory-bills, including six mated pairs, on Cuban property owned by U.S. corporations; makes conservation recommendations.

  1959—The Cuban Revolution freezes contact between Cuban and U.S. scientists and halts progress on Lamb’s Ivory-bill conservation plan.

  1962—Last documented sighting of Bachman’s Warbler and last well-documented sighting of the Eskimo Curlew, both birds that spent part of their life cycles in the United States.

  1968—Cuban biologist Orlando Garrido reports Ivory-bills in Cuba for the first time in a decade.

  1970—In the United States, students from more than ten thousand schools take part in the first Earth Day, focusing attention on saving species.

  1973—The U.S. Endangered Species Act becomes law.

  1986—A Cuban expedition led by Giraldo Alayón rediscovers the Ivory-bill in Cuba. One month later, an international team including worldwide woodpecker expert Dr. Lester Short produces several glimpses of a male and a female Ivory-bill.

  1987—Giraldo Alayón and Aimé Posada glimpse a female Ivory-bill from a mountainous trail. It is the last certain sighting of the bird.

  1999—A hunter delivers a credible report of having seen a male and a female Ivory-bill in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area, near New Orleans. The report touches off an intensive hunt.

  2002—A six-person international team of scientists uses high-tech equipment to search Louisiana’s Pearl River Wildlife Management Area and a neighboring swamp for Ivory-bills. They find some signs, but no birds.

  GLOSSARY

  clutch A batch of eggs. “Clutch size” means how many eggs are hatched in a single batch. Birds are said to “double clutch” if they lay two batches of eggs in a breeding season. The Ivory-bill had the smallest clutch of any North American woodpecker, two to three eggs.

  ecological niche The sum total of a given organism’s relation to its environment, such as where it lives and what it eats. Often the combined activity of different organisms accomplishes a common purpose. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker pried up the bark of dying trees to get at its food. This opened the door for still other creatures to bore into the trees. The trees continued to decompose until eventually they became too weak to stand and fell to the ground, opening holes in the canopy of treetops for sunlight to pour through and illuminate the ground so that new seeds could grow.

  ecology The study of how plants and animals relate to one another and to their physical environment.

  ecosystem A natural community of plants and animals along with the elements of their physical environment, such as soil or a river. No plant or animal can live alone in nature; all living creatures depend on the lives of others and on the environment they share. An ecosystem is a sort of biological neighborhood.

  egret One of several varieties of white heron. The name comes from long plumes called “aigrettes” grown by males during the breeding season.

  endemic A word describing a species that lives only in one place. For example, the Bee Hummingbird,
the world’s smallest bird, is endemic to Cuba, meaning that it lives only there. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was not endemic to the United States because there was also a population in Cuba.

  evolution A change in the genes within an entire population of a species by processes such as mutation and natural selection.

  extinction The state of no longer being in existence anywhere.

  extirpation Local extinction. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker probably became extirpated in Louisiana when the Singer Tract was cut, but it did not become extinct, since there was a population still alive in Cuba.

  gene The basic unit of heredity, carried on a chromosome and transmitted from parent to offspring.

  grub The larva of a beetle. The grubs that Ivory-bills loved came from three families of the huge order of beetles named Coleoptera.

  habitat A place where a bird or other animal lives, or where we go to find it. It is the place that contains all that a certain animal needs to eat and reproduce.

  heron A tall, long-legged wading bird with a long neck and a long, tapering bill that is used to catch fish and other food. Herons’ closest relatives are storks, ibises, and flamingos.

  migration The regular movement of birds between their breeding and nonbreeding areas. This movement is usually seasonal and repeated each year. Some birds, such as the Lesser Golden Plover, fly many thousands of miles in migration each year. Birds migrate for many reasons, including to encounter less competition, to avoid predators, to find more food, to find increased sunlight for feeding and reproduction, and to avoid harsh weather. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker flew long distances to find food, but did not migrate.

  natural selection The process through which forms of life survive and reproduce better than others of their kind by developing traits that allow them to adapt to environmental pressures. For example, over time, each of Darwin’s fourteen finch species on the Galápagos Islands evolved from a single founding species through the development of traits—such as different bill shapes—that let them find new sources of food and produce more offspring.

  predator An animal that seizes and eats other animals. The birds most frequently thought of as predators are hawks, eagles, and owls.

  preening Taking care of feathers by fluffing them out and then combing them with the bill. Birds spend a lot of time preening. They preen to make sure that all their feathers are in place, correctly interlocked, and well oiled. Most birds squeeze oil from a gland at the base of their tails onto their bills, which they then use to spread the oil over their feathers. This keeps the feathers from drying out in the sun and keeps birds that live in water warm.

  roost A place where birds sleep, and also the act of sleeping in that place. Some birds, such as blackbirds and starlings, roost together in giant flocks, covering trees or bushes at night. Ivory-bills and other woodpeckers sleep inside cavities, or holes, chiseled into trees.

  species The most basic category into which living things are divided. A species of bird is a kind of bird—such as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, or a Blue Jay, or an American Robin. But what makes a species a species? One well-respected theory says that a group of birds is a species if the group is reproductively isolated from other groups of birds. This means that members of the group can reproduce only with each other. By this definition, if they tried to reproduce with birds that were not of their species, any young bird that was born could not produce young birds of its own. The question “What makes a species a species?” is still hotly debated among biologists. In other words, it is evolving.

  SOURCES

  A Note on Sources

  This book was a journey for me in two ways. First, it let me write on things I’ve been thinking about for more than thirty years as an environmentalist and conservationist. I’ve long been fascinated by the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I went looking for it myself in the Big Thicket Swamp in Texas in 1980—it was so hot that day I had to carry my dog out. Alas, there were no Ivory-bills, or if there were, they kept out of sight. Second, it was an actual journey in that I hit the road. In a year’s time, this book took me to Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Massachusetts, New York, and Cuba. Often, my most important sources were the people I met and interviewed during this journey.

  Research in Cuba was especially exciting. Scouring the island, I found most of the people who had most recently seen the Ivory-bill. I met artists, biologists, stamp collectors, foresters, museum curators, and guides who knew the Ivory-bill in their own ways. Several Cuban educators told me that their students are hungry to learn more about birds, but that poverty forces them to study without binoculars, field guides, drawing paper, even pens and pencils. So, along with several colleagues, I helped start a fund to buy and deliver the supplies they need. For more information on how you can help the Birders’ Exchange Cuba Initiative program, see www.americanbirding.org/bex.

  General Sources: Books and Magazines

  Several books and magazines were more important to my research than all the others:

  James T. Tanner, The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Audubon Society Research Report No. 1

  (New York: Dover Press, 1942). It’s the bible for the Ivory-bill. I first read this book in the 1970s, when I was just beginning my own career as a conservationist. It remains the best study of a single species I’ve ever read.

  Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America (New York: Viking, 1959). This book gives a detailed snapshot of endangered species in the United States nearly a half century ago.

  Christopher Cokinos, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (New York: Warner Books, 2000). Having read Tanner’s book about the Ivory-bill, I thought I knew the story of its decline. But Christopher Cokinos broke new ground. His wonderful book—about the disappearance of six American bird species—taught me more and made me want to know much more about the Ivory-bill in the United States and in Cuba. And he left a trail of sources behind that I could research.

  David Allen Sibley, ill., The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (New York: Knopf, 2001). What a treasure! I constantly turned to this beautiful book when I wanted to know something about why birds act as they do.

  The Auk. For more than one hundred years, The Auk, a quarterly journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, has published original reports on the biology of birds. Tanner, Wayne, Allen, Brewster, Chapman, and other figures in this book published articles in The Auk, and, with the help of librarians at Bowdoin College in Maine, I turned to it again and again.

  Frank Graham, Jr., The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society (New York: Knopf, 1990). By far the best single source of information I found on the history of the Audubon Society and the Plume War.

  Barbara and Richard Mearns, The Bird Collectors (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998). Here is a gold mine of information on collectors and collecting, covering everything from Ward’s Natural Science Establishment to a ranked list of the greatest collections of bird specimens in the world.

  Fortunately, the Ivory-bill was so striking in appearance that many of the people who saw it wrote something about it. Here are the more important sources by chapter.

  Prologue. The Hostage

  Alexander Wilson’s famous account of trying to keep an Ivory-bill in his hotel room appears in his American Ornithology as part of a long description of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I used the Brewer edition (Boston, 1840), pp. 272—79. All quotes attributed to Wilson in “The Hostage” are from this book, including the opening quote on p. 7. For more information about Wilson’s life and times, I turned especially to Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson: Naturalist and Pioneer, a Biography (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961). The quote from Charles Leslie in the sidebar on p. 9 is from Cantwell, p. 144.

  Chapter One. Specimen 60803

  I visited the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science in January 2002. Dr. James Van Remsen showed me Ivory-bill specimens and patiently answered questions about the species’ life history. Much in this chapter is based on this interview.

  “Wei
ght-Saving Features” (sidebar, p. 14): I especially used Sibley and Dr. Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), in order to understand more about how birds evolved and why they are formed as they are and behave as they do.

  A good discussion of Darwin’s finches (sidebar, p. 15) is found in Roger F. Pasquier, Watching Birds: An Introduction to Ornithology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 24—27.

  To learn about the structure and behavior of woodpeckers, I consulted Dr. Lester L. Short, Woodpeckers of the World (Greenville, Del.: Weidner & Sons/Delaware Museum of Natural History, 1982), and T. Gilbert Pearson, “Woodpeckers, Friends of Our Forests,” National Geographic, vol. 63, no. 4 (April 1933).

  Almost all material on George E. Beyer, including the quote on p. 18 from Beyer to W. D. Rogers, came from materials in a file under Beyer’s name in the Special Collections Division of the Tulane University Library. The newspaper article about Beyer’s experiment with rattlesnake venom is from The Daily Picayune (New Orleans) of September 2, 1905. Quotes on p. 18 in which Beyer describes collecting Ivory-bills are from his article “The Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana,” in The Auk, vol. 17, no. 2 (April 1900).

  Chapter Two. Audubon on the Ivory-billed Frontier

  The introductory quote (“He neglects his material interests”) appeared in an article by Michael Harwood and Mary Durant, “In Search of the Real Mr. Audubon,” in Audubon Magazine, vol. 87, no. 3 (May 1985), p. 63. John James Audubon’s descriptions of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, its voice, its habitat and behavior, and the quotes about the killing of Ivory-bills by Indians and settlers appear in Audubon’s The Birds of America (New York: J. J. Audubon; Philadelphia: J. B. Chevalier, 1840—44). Besides Audubon’s great paintings, one can find nearly five hundred fascinating descriptions of the birds Audubon encountered. For biographical information about Audubon, I turned to several books, especially Shirley Streshinsky, Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness (New York: Villard Books, 1993), Alice Ford, John James Audubon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), and Alexander B. Adams, John James Audubon: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966).