The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

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The Race to Save the Lord God Bird Page 19

by Phillip Hoose


  Also in Tanner’s Cornell file is his paper “The Suwannee River, 1890 and 1973,” which tells of his encounter with the men at the Suwannee River campsite (pp. 94—95).

  The aims of Tanner’s study and how he organized his time are detailed in his book The Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Here I found maps of places he visited or read about, and a good description of his research techniques. His Ivory-bill aliases (sidebar, p. 92) are found at p. 101, while comparisons between Ivory-bills and Pileated Woodpeckers (sidebar, p. 93) are at p. 2.

  Later in his life, Tanner wrote two long and valuable reminiscences of his days at the Singer Tract. One, entitled “A Forest Alive,” appears in the British magazine Birdwatch, issue 107 (May 2001), pp. 18—24. This is the basis for most of the descriptions of the Singer forest in the first pages of chapter 10, including the story of Tanner’s encounter with a wolf (p. 104), his account of rowing out onto a lake at night (pp. 104—5), of the snakes he and J. J. Kuhn encountered (p. 105), of the awesome falling of giant trees (p. 105), and of his day-end conversations with Kuhn (p. 105). A second Tanner reminiscence, entitled “A Postscript on Ivorybills,” appears in Bird Watcher’s Digest (July—August 2000). Here Tanner described his acquaintance with “Sonny Boy” (pp. 106—9).

  Tanner’s conclusions about what it would take to save the Ivory-bill are best presented in his book, but they appear first in his 1939 year-end report for the Audubon Society, entitled “Report of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Fellowship before the National Association of Audubon Societies, October, 1939,” found in Box 1 of Tanner’s Cornell file. The quote that opens chapter 10, at p. 101 (“The Ivory-bill has frequently been described …”) is taken from p. 5 of this report. The quote at p. 112 (“less dead wood …”) is from p. 8. His tribute to the Singer Tract on p. 113 (“the finest stand of virgin swamp forest”) is from p. 10. Tanner makes his first ominous reference to the cutting of trees at the Singer Tract in a report entitled “Field Work in December 1937,” at p. 4, under the heading “Recent Developments in the Singer Tract.”

  Chapter Eleven. The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

  “The Story of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company,” by John R. Shipley, is an 18-page unpublished company history. It was written in 1980 by a Chicago Mill employee and is available at the Washington County Historical Society in Greenville, Mississippi. It provided detailed information about the company’s origins and development and logging of the Singer Tract.

  Douglas Alexander’s attitudes toward flappers are discussed in Don Bissell’s The First Conglomerate (see sources for chapters 7 and 8).

  Insights about portable housing at Singer came from personal interviews with Billy Louis Fought, who lived in such a house, and Tolbert Williams. They also told me about the furious pace of Chicago Mill’s logging, as did Gene Laird, in an interview at his home. Further information on Chicago Mill’s cutting is found in a letter to Tanner from Louisiana conservation official George H. Buck, dated August 11, 1941, and found in Tanner’s Cornell file, Box I.

  Gene Laird’s quote (“Those woods were loud”) on p. 116 came from my interview with Mr. Laird. The “Swamp Date” (pp. 118—2O) was lovingly recalled by Nancy Tanner in telephone interviews and e-mail correspondence.

  The John Baker collection in the National Audubon Society archives at the New York Public Library (see sources for chapter 9) is huge. Most of this material is available on microfilm. Most valuable is a sub-file labeled “The Singer Tract,” within which I found accounts of James Tanner’s walk with Sam Alexander (pp. 120-21), Governor Sam Jones’s provision of $200,000 to buy land at Singer (p. 122), and a copy of H.R. 9720.

  The first meeting between Audubon’s Baker and Chicago Mill’s Griswold (“Mr. Griswold has just been with me here …”) on p. 122 is documented in Tanner’s Cornell file, Box I (letter, Baker to Tanner, March 25, 1942). Tanner’s recommendation that Greenlea Bend be saved (“it is the gem of it all”) on p. 121 comes from his 9-page typewritten “Report on Trip to the Singer Tract, Louisiana, December 1941,” found in Tanner’s Cornell files.

  Baker’s instructions to Richard Pough to slip down to Louisiana (p. 123) and look for Ivory-bills are found in a long “Memorandum to Mr. Pough,” in the National Audubon Society’s Singer Tract sub-file.

  Census data for Madison Parish are found at www.census-online.com/links/LA/Madison. A good discussion of Executive Order 8802 is found in Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), in chapter 14.

  Chapter Twelve. Visiting with Eternity

  The opening quote, on page 125, appears in Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America, at p. 253.

  In 2002 I interviewed Billy Louis Fought and his brother, Robert Fought, about what it was like to grow up on the Singer Tract as it was being logged, and about their time with the late Don Eckelberry. Likewise, Mr. Eckelberry’s widow, Virginia, shared information in a telephone interview about her husband’s temperament and work. Don Eckelberry described his days with the last female Ivory-bill in a wonderful chapter, “Search for the Rare Ivorybill,” in the book Discovery: Great Moments in the Lives of Outstanding Naturalists, ed. John K. Terres (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1961).

  Much firsthand information about German POWs in Louisiana came from two interviews with John Cherbini, who served as a prison guard in Tallulah during World War II. He went to New York City and escorted German prisoners to Louisiana, then supervised their work at a campground outside Tallulah. He was with them as they logged the Singer Tract.

  Information on Chicago Mill and Lumber Company’s wartime activities, including the manufacture of tea chests for British troops (p. 130) is found in Shipley, “The Story of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company” (see chapter II source notes).

  There is a good exhibit about the Afrika Korps soldiers in the Hermione Museum in Tallulah, including a few examples of prisoner carvings. Tolbert Williams and Gene Laird shared personal reminiscences of the POWs and took me to barns prisoners had built, with German names still carved in the doors. Good written materials include James E. Fickle and Donald W. Ellis, “POW’s in the Piney Woods,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 56, no. 4 (November 1990)—the two quotes on p. 127, “When we Germans hear the word ‘forest,’” and “Who does not know these little red stitches,” are from p. 702 of this article. I also consulted Matthew J. Schott and Rosalind Foley, Bayou Stalags: German Prisoners of War in Louisiana (Lafayette, La.: self-published, 1981), and Joe Danborn, “War Is Swell,” Gambit Weekly (January 19, 1999). I interviewed Dr. Matthew J. Schott, a former professor of history at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), and the expert on POWs in his state. His interest began as a boy of eight, when three German POWs were assigned to trim his mother’s backyard azalea bushes at a time when his three older brothers were fighting Nazis overseas. His mother gave them Cokes, explaining to Matthew that she hoped that someone would treat his brothers the same way if they were shot down or captured.

  The account of the showdown meeting at Chicago Mill and Lumber’s office on pp. 128—29 containing the “We are just money grubbers” quote comes from a report by Audubon’s John Baker entitled “For the Confidential Information of the Directors of National Audubon Society, December 15, 1943.” It is found in the Singer Tract sub-file in the Audubon archives at the New York Public Library (see sources for chapter 9). In this file I found extensive, illuminating correspondence between Baker and Richard Pough, the man assigned to keep track of the last bird, including the two Pough quotes on p. 129 (“It is sickening to see …” and “I watched them cutting …”). Gene Laird told me, during an interview, about keeping track of the last Ivory-bill after Mr. Eckelberry had departed. The story appears on pp. 132—33.

  Chapter Thirteen. Carpintero Real: Between Science and Magic

  Dr. James Van Remsen of Louisiana State University patiently explained the shift in taxonomic thinking about the Cuban and U.S. populations of the Ivory-bill.
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  Orlando H. Garrido and Arturo Kirkconnell’s superb Field Guide to the Birds of Cuba (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000) reveals much about Cuba’s natural history, as did a lecture I attended on May 29, 2002, at Harvard University by Giraldo Alayón.

  I visited Cuba three times between 2002 and 2004. Two interviews with Giraldo Alayón at his home in San Antonio de los Baños offered wonderful insights about the expeditions in Cuba and his personal involvement with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker there. One of the conversations also produced this chapter’s opening quote, on p. 135. I was also able to interview Giraldo’s wife, Aimé Posada, during the second of these two conversations. These talks were followed by several telephone conversations, a visit by Alayón to the United States, and dozens of e-mail exchanges. Quotes attributed to Alayón and Posada throughout chapter 13 came from these conversations and this correspondence. Alayón’s recollections were supplemented by interviews with Cuban biologists Carlos Peña, Arturo Kirkconnell, Orlando Garrido, and Xiomara Gálvez Aguilera.

  The account on page 141 of Alberto Estrada’s glimpse of a big bird that he believed to be an Ivory-bill comes from the article “Of Woodpeckers and Frogs,” by Alberto R. Estrada. It appears on pp. 75—87 of Islands and the Sea: Essays on Herpetological Exploration in the West Indies, ed. Robert W. Henderson and Robert Powell, Contributions to Herpetology 20 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles).

  By telephone from his home in Kenya, Lester Short shared his memories of tracking the Cuban Ivory-bill. His observation that the Ivory-bills he saw in Cuba seemed “very wary” (p. 143) came from a telephone interview. Dr. Short also wrote two articles in Natural History magazine whose titles reflect the mood of the searches. The first is called “Last Chance for the Ivory-bill” (vol. 94, 1985). A year later, Short and his wife, Jennifer Horne, co-authored “The Ivory-bill Still Lives” (vol. 95, 1986).

  Any discussion of the Cuban Revolution is controversial, but I admire Christopher P. Baker’s even-handed discussion in Moon Handbooks: Cuba (Emeryville, Calif.: Avalon Travel Publishing, 1999).

  The story in the sidebar on p. 139 about Orlando Garrido’s stopping an international tennis match to collect an insect is legendary in Cuba. I heard it from several sources and was finally able to hear Garrido tell it himself in a telephone interview in Havana in March of 2003.

  Information in the sidebar “Learning About Birds in Cuba” on p. 141 comes from my discussions with Cuban biologists and from an article, “Getting Things Done in Cuba,” by Steve Hendrix in International Wildlife magazine (January/February 2000). In this article I found the discussion of Orestes Martinez and his “Three Endemics” club presented in the same sidebar.

  George R. Lamb reports his successful 1957 expedition in quest of the Cuban Ivory-bills in The Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Cuba (New York: Pan-American Section, International Committee for Bird Preservation, Research Report 1, 1957). John Dennis reports his 1948 quest in “A Last Remnant of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Cuba,” The Auk, vol. 65, no. 4 (October 1948).

  Chapter Fourteen. Return of the Ghost Bird?

  Jane Goodall’s quote at the chapter opening (p. 147) comes from her essay “My Three Reasons for Hope”; the full essay appears on the Web site of the Jane Goodall Institute (www.janegoodall.org/jane/essay.html).

  The story of Jim Tanner’s return to the Singer Tract (pp. 149—50) came from interviews and correspondence provided by Nancy Tanner. Most helpful was a newspaper article of March 25, 1986, entitled “Tanner Returns to the Tensas,” by staff writer Amy Ouchley of the Madison Journal, Tallulah, Louisiana. Tanner’s list of Ivory-bill sightings is found in his file at Cornell (see sources for chapter 9).

  David Kulivan’s purported sighting of the Ivory-bill, reported on pp. 150—51, and the subsequent dragnet for the birds in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area have been described in hundreds of articles, magazine stories, and even books. Two of the best are Jonathan Rosen’s “The Ghost Bird,” which appeared in the May 14, 2001, New Yorker magazine, and in Scott Weidensaul’s book The Ghost with Trembling Wings (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

  Dr. James Van Remsen, the man who organized the six-person search for the Ivory-bill, allowed me to interview him several times during the height of the media frenzy, including once in his office in Baton Rouge (see quotes, p. 151, “He passed with flying colors,” and p. 155, “What about the mites … ?”). Cornell University Lab of Ornithology maintained updated information throughout the search on its superb Web site, www.birds.cornell.edu. The search team’s conclusions were reported in “The 30-day Zeiss search for the ivory-billed woodpecker ends,” Carl Zeiss Sports Optics news release, February 20, 2002.

  Epilogue. Hope, Hard Work, and a Crow Named Betty

  Everyone should read or reread Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Ballantine Books, 1962). It’s beautifully written and as timely now as it ever was.

  A great source of information about the Piping Plover and the Peregrine Falcon is the Web site of NatureServe, the organization that keeps track of species in trouble better than any I know. The Web site is easy to use. Just dial it up at www.natureserve.org and name your species. It offers good, detailed accounts of how a given species slipped into danger, where it continues to live, a history of efforts to help it, and what’s being done for it now.

  A fine book about animals that became extinct is Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten, A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001).

  Betty the Crow’s breakthrough was a media sensation. The story “Crow Makes Wire Hook to Get Food,” dated August 8, 2002, can be found on the National Geographic Web site. It even has, at this writing, moving pictures of Betty. The address is www.Nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0808_020808_crow.html. For a magazine article, read “Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows,” in Science, vol. 297, no. 5583, p. 981.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If ever a book were like an ecosystem, this is it. I depended on the help of an interconnected web of scientists, conservationists, librarians, editors, guides, curators, translators, readers, and ordinary folks who often lived through extraordinary events.

  For helping me comb through a mountain of material at Cornell University, I thank Susan Szasz Palmer and Elaine Engst of the Rare and Manuscript Collections Division. Likewise, Greg Budney and Marie Eckert at Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology, Library of Natural Sounds, gave me much help and advice, and David G. Allen generously shared insights about his father, Arthur A. Allen.

  For help in Madison Parish, Louisiana, I thank the Nature Conservancy’s Keith Ouchley and Ronnie Ulmer—who gave up two days of his valuable time to guide me. Thanks also to Geneva Williams, Jerome Ford, Ava Kahn, and Tolbert Williams and the Madison Parish courthouse staff. Mary Tebo shared her valuable insights on the clearing of the southern forests. Tony Howe taught me about railroads.

  For material and insights about German prisoners of war in Louisiana, I thank John Cherbini, Mary Sims, and Matthew Schott.

  For sharing childhood memories of their lives in and around the Singer Tract, I thank Robert Fought, Gene and Lynelle Laird, and especially Billy Louis Fought, who helped me constantly and repeatedly.

  I thank my Nature Conservancy colleagues Tony Grundhauser, Dean Harrison, John Humke, Becky Abel, Mike Andrews, and Will Stolzenberg, and especially Pat Patterson.

  I visited Cuba to research this book. There I covered much ground, conducted many interviews, and made lifelong friends. I’m deeply grateful to Arturo Kirkconnell, Carlos Peña, Xiomara Gálvez Aguilera, Nils Navarro, Michael Sánchez, Ernesto Reyes, and Eduardo Fidalgo Franco. I thank Elizabeth Garca Guerra for helping me find the stamp of the Cuban Ivory-bill. I thank Dr. Lester Short for sharing memories of his visits to Cuba and insights about woodpeckers. I must also express my appreciation to Maine Congressman Tom Allen and his indomitable staffer Mark Oulette for helping me obtain a license to travel to Cuba. I tha
nk Giraldo Alayón, Aimé Posada, and Mariela Machado González for friendship, insight, and inspiration.

  I thank Longfellow Books, the world’s greatest independent bookstore, especially Chris Bowe and Kirsten Cappy, for constant encouragement and uncritical love. The same goes for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. For library research help, I thank Paul D’Alessandro of the Portland, Maine, Public Library, and Cassandra Fitzherbert and her fine staff at the University of Southern Maine’s Interlibrary Loan Department.

  I’m very grateful to Gavin Bauer and Tessa Hartley, both middle school students, who read this manuscript from front to back and gave me precise, constructive criticism. Thanks to Shoshana Hoose for reading and commenting on early drafts.

  I can’t thank my amigo y compañero Charles Duncan enough for going with me to Cuba, for translating, for taking photos, for helping me in so many ways. Likewise I thank the original Bromista, Ben Gregg, whose friendship means the world to me.

  Many scientists, including Dr. Davis Finch and Dr. David Wilcove, helped me evaluate facts and ideas and led me to materials concerning everything from grubs to extinction. Dr. Larry Master, Chief Zoologist for NatureServe, read much of the scientific material critically and saved me from embarrassing errors. Dr. James Van Remsen, Curator of Birds at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, actually encouraged me to bombard him with a year’s worth of questions. I thank him so much. Dr. Daniel Simberloff of the University of Tennessee’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology read, admonished, encouraged, guided and mentored me through a great deal of this project, even when the Lady Vols experienced shaky times. I admire and thank him more than I can ever tell him. I thank Dr. Robert E. Jenkins for inspiring this book by expressing faith in me long ago and putting me to work in service of biodiversity. He is a genius and a kind man.

 

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