by Sid Holt
BAM-bam.
He waited.
He struck again.
And again.
After ten double-knocks, he put the dowels down, picking up his MP3 player and speaker. He scrolled through his playlist, then pressed play, holding the speaker aloft as the recording of an ivory-bill, the only existing recording of an Ivory-bill, from 1935, played, underlain by heavy static. People say it sounds like a horn. Or a baby goat. Kent. Kent-kent. Lammertink turned in slow circles blasting it, and Gallagher kept his ears alert as the sound played for ninety seconds. Then he turned it off, and waited.
He put his hands on his hips. He checked his watch.
Gallagher didn’t move.
Then they started the process over, in the same spot.
BAM-bam.
A double-knock session takes about thirty minutes. With other Campephilus species, Lammertink has waited as long as twenty minutes afterward for them to respond to a call. When he thought they’d waited long enough this time, the group all sitting and standing silently there in the forest, they picked up the bags and waters and cameras they’d set down and took off again, hiking 500 meters farther into the forest to try again. The call carries at least half that far, so to maximize exposure in the limited amount of time available to any one man, Lammertink spaces them out thusly. After the second session, they hiked another 500 meters and tried again.
Those thirty minutes, knocking and waiting the third time, it was getting late in the day. It was hot, and mosquitoes landed on the motionless party. At some point, the photographer wandered off a bit. Gallagher sat down farther back on the path and rested. The writer practiced her yogic Mountain Pose. A huge bird suddenly broke through the trees and soared into view, sweeping and grand and even with some white underside. But it was only a turkey vulture, buzzing close to remind them that life is fleeting.
There have been times when Lammertink used the double-knocker in places where he knew for a fact Campephilus woodpeckers were nearby (-slash-existed), and they didn’t respond. To get one to do so on this trip in a territory this large, he conceded to the photographer, would be very lucky. To not get one proves nothing.
So: There is not a moment to waste. Not in Bahía de Taco double-knocking, and especially not after Lammertink walked to El Indio’s father’s house and interviewed him and asked him what sound the ivory-bill had made when he saw the bird with his son twenty-four years ago and the man made the wroooong, very wrong sound of a different bird, and the wrong wing description to boot. As El Indio was only seven at the time, his recollection likely colored by his father’s identification of the species, both of the accounts of these two—the only two—witnesses to the exciting possibility that the ivory-bill did or could live in non-pine forest in eastern Cuba were therefore called into question.
It was a disappointing development, one that Lammertink would henceforth refer to as “The Twist.”
So not a moment to waste getting out of Bahía de Taco—though the forest there was chockful of other species sightings: scaly-naped Pigeon and Cuban trogon and stygian owl; Cuban Amazon, Cuban pewee, West Indian woodpecker, Cuban tody, Cuban solitaire, great lizard-cuckoo, black-and-white warbler, Cuban green woodpecker. Not a moment to waste getting to Guantánamo and getting permission—no time to care or alert the authorities about the endangered parrot being kept illegally caged on the floor of the kitchen in the restaurant where they ate in town—and getting back out to push up the mountain, not a moment to wait for a new day with more light remaining and less chance of rain or a fully fixed vehicle that might not die when it gets stuck.
That night, after hours of human pushing and oxen pulling, the jeep is freed. And with more pushing and pulling, it is rolled backward, and pop-started. But it cannot make it up the now rain-slicked mountain rock, though the driver tries for a terrifying twenty minutes with all the equipment and group again loaded inside. There is a Cuban military outpost a ways back down; the group makes its way there in the downpour, in the dark, and begs a patch of concrete floor to sleep on in a dwelling containing what Gallagher will refer to for the rest of the trip and maybe the rest of his life as The Worst Toilet in the World.
“This will be a great story to tell later,” he keeps saying. He’s been saying this for six days. He will continue to say it for eight more. But the writer is in no mood to agree with the principle that a good story is better than a good time, partly because she has become afflicted with diarrhea—the group has concluded that there must have been an accidental ingestion of a drop from the Bahía de Taco vat of river water—but also because people (read: men) who constantly tell stories of bad times are tedious, and she is basically certain she could write an equally compelling scene if this Cuban restricted-jungle military outpost in the mountains above Guantánamo had turned out to be home to a team of scrappy dogs attired in miniature formalwear and trained to serve cocktails to visitors—which would be a good time—rather than a toilet that in addition to being The Worst has no door to separate anyone who’s using it from her comrades.
Earlier, the photographer sidled next to the writer and asked, as they both turned their faces away from the merciless beating of the oxen, a patch of protected Cuban forest being deforested with the tearing down of ever-larger branches and trees with which to assault them, “Do you ever wonder if this is all worth it? For a bird?” The two of them snickered darkly. Just moments before, a chunk of wood had cracked off an oxen-beating club as it broke over the animal’s hide and shot past the photographer’s head, missing him by maybe an inch. “One that almost definitely doesn’t exist?”
• • •
“There is definitely a subset of people who are driven to this,” famed birder and Pulitzer finalist Scott Weidensaul will later explain to the writer. There are birders (and other field biologists), he will say, who are driven to the extent of, “Let’s save forty-five minutes of field time tomorrow by finishing this hike tonight in the dark, even though we may fall and break our necks.” He has himself made “really bad decisions,” he says, for which he could have died. Even in the absence of bad decisions, outcomes can be fatal. Ted Parker, another famed birder, did die, along with premier neotropical botanist Alwyn Gentry and leading Ecuadoran conservationist Eduardo Aspiazu Estrada, in a plane crash doing a treetop survey; so did Phoebe Snetsinger, then the most prolific birder in history, when her van rolled in Madagascar. Nathaniel Gerhart died in 2007 in a car accident in Indonesia—three years after he discovered previously unknown habitat of the Selva cacique—and so did Siarhei Abramchuk in 2010, from an encephalitis-bearing tick bite in Belarus. Subramanian Bhupathy, head of conservation biology at the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in India, died in 2014 after slipping down a hill and landing with a bamboo spike in his eye.
“I’m not saying that that’s a decision I would necessarily make,” Weidensaul will say of the hypothetical dangerous night hike. Though “part of that just becomes if you’ve gotten away with it in the past, you assume you’re gonna get away with it in the future,” he’s taking fewer risks now. But “I certainly understand what drives somebody to make that kind of a decision. Just this driving passion to push yourself to the limit because you don’t know what’s on the other side of the next hill. Because you don’t know what you’re gonna find, and if at the end of the day you haven’t done everything you possibly can, you leave yourself wondering: Well, what if I had?” Of Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt, Weidensaul says, “If there’s a reason there’s an ivory-bill anywhere, it’s there, it’s because those are the places that are most difficult to get into.”
When the group wakes up at dawn in the military outpost below Ojito de Agua, Lammertink secures four mules to carry gear. Two national park guards also arrive to accompany them. The sun comes out blazing. They climb uphill. When they make it to the manned station several miles up in the afternoon, they stop for a moment—but then continue on, five miles more to the clearing at Ojito de Agua, where Lammerti
nk wants to make camp and mount searches. The writer, who has been ingesting food but has effectively not eaten in two days because of the diarrhea, becomes too weak to stand; they put her on a mule. They put Gallagher, who is growing increasingly tired, on another one. They reach Ojito de Agua shortly before dark, and it starts to rain as they set up their tents. The Cubans fill the designated treated-water receptacle with untreated water; Lammertink, the only fluent Spanish speaker, has not explained to them that the Americans are designating such a receptacle or why because he personally is not bothering with water treatment from this mountain spring. A partial list of untreated-water tragedies that have occurred in Lammertink’s previous fieldwork includes: the death of a human man. That time even Lammertink didn’t trust the water, so sketchy were the sources they were pulling it from in the Bornean jungle, but the field assistant, a local, wouldn’t listen to anyone’s warnings. Diphtheria came on fast after he went back home and turned worse quickly; by the time his family went for medical help, there was nothing anyone could do.
The photographer almost drinks the untreated water before the mistake is discovered.
The writer has already drunk a liter of it.
At Ojito de Agua, everyone in the small camp bathes and washes their hands and dishes in a stream that the mules are pissing and shitting in and near. The second night, one of the mules awakens the camp, moaning and thrashing and crashing around; it lies down, and then, to the great astonishment and helplessness of its Cuban masters, violently dies.
“This is not what normal birding is like,” Gallagher clarifies at some point to the writer, in case this has been lost on her.
It starts to pour again. In the morning, they break dead-mule camp for fear of infection and rotting-mule smell and hike three miles to another, smaller clearing, perched on the side of a cliff where mosquitoes are swarming in great clouds. It rains again when they arrive to set up for three nights among the trees and underbrush, which in this area are covered with sharp thorns and spikes of varying lengths. When Lammertink stayed here twenty-five years ago, he brushed up against a plant that turned his forearm into a bloated, oozing, yellow-pus-seeping rash of open blisters that didn’t close for five months and then didn’t fade from scarring for “years.” He doesn’t know which plant it was, so he can’t point it out.
But.
In between the moving, and machete-swinging through non-trails, and basic surviving:
Silence.
Between sweating and getting snagged and rained on, slipping over wet rocks in the middle or right on the side of a mountain, twenty flights of elevation before even seven-thirty a.m. one day (the writer climbing under her own power, as her stool has miraculously solidified):
They stop. They strap up the double-knocker. They turn on recorders, and write down coordinates, and call to the ivory-bill.
BAM-bam.
They wait, collectively, for hours, sitting or standing quietly, for a response. BAM-bam. Waiting. Kent-kent through the speakers; waiting. Hiking and trudging and starting over. In all that stillness and hard staring, it’s easy to understand how an anticipation broken by a bird finally bursting forth would evoke sobs, as it immediately did in the guy Gallagher saw the ivory-bill with in 2004—after they’d dodged countless close calls with poisonous water moccasins in the southeastern American swamp.
But in Cuba, one never does burst forth. Worse, there are not even any signs in this place, the last place in the country where ivory-bills lived, that they were here anytime recently. There are no foraging signs, none of the bark-scaling and bark-stripping ivory-bills do. No recent cavities. The forest is not even as ivory-bill-friendly as Lammertink would like. Though protected, it’s dense. The regrowth pines don’t have enough light and space to grow into big ivory-bill habitat. There are no reports among locals, not even crappy secondhand rumors that one has been seen or heard in decades, excepting one witness who they will go check out when they leave the woods. All of the interviews with potential witnesses they’ve tracked down so far have been hopeless: The one with El Indio’s father that contained The Twist, the one with the former logger they passed on the way to the national park station who said no one had seen the bird after the eighties, the one with the ninety-one-year-old in Farallones who said ivory-bills were everywhere when he was a kid but not since and kept trying to steer the conversation away from extinct birds (“He says, ‘We’re all made out of dust and to dust we will return,’ ” Lammertink translated. “His wife passed away three years ago, and he believes she now lives in eternity, or something”) as Lammertink mightily steered it toward extinct birds again and again (“There’s probably at this age more pressing questions than ivory-bills,” he said as he finally gave up).
Sitting down in camp on the final night, Lammertink pronounces that the worst day in the field is better than the best day in the office. He became captivated by woodpeckers in general and ivory-bills in specific when he picked up a book on the bird family by chance in a library at age eleven. When he graduated high school, he worked at a dairy factory to save money to finance his trip to come here and look for them, and this time, he is satisfied with how much ground he’s covered. He is hungry, since he ate only a handful of stale crackers for lunch on another hard-charging day of traveling and double-knocking, and thirsty, since he lost his water bottle at some point in doing so. Having observed the character of his interactions with the other members of the group for almost two weeks, the writer has circled in her notes to ask him if he likes birds better than people, but on this last night she sits down next to him and asks instead if he cares more about birds than he does about himself.
He pauses for a long, long time, and stutters. He allows when pressed that the botflies are a gross and painful annoyance but a small one and maybe he should put more DEET on his clothes. But when you’re getting up close on a bird and you feel a mosquito land, you can’t just be swatting around like a maniac. No. You can barely dare to breathe. He doesn’t think he would kill himself over a bird. Not deliberately. Yes he’s had dengue fever and malaria, and he died once. Well didn’t quite die, but came close to dying, when he and a field assistant were swarmed by thousands of bees in Borneo. They were in and out of consciousness after, ferocious puking and diarrhea while some villagers tried to pluck thousands of stingers from their faces and backs and arms, and others stood around saying they wouldn’t make it for sure. It was an oriental honey-buzzard, which rips open bees’ nests, that had whipped them up and caused the whole event; Lammertink had never seen one of the birds, and he was pretty excited until the bees attacked. He and the field assistant are married now and have two children. “I’ve been doing this now for, let’s see, twenty-five years, fieldwork in tropical areas, and you know, I’m still alive,” he says. He laughs. “So, why not do it for another twenty-five years?” He is not a thrill seeker. Not even a risk seeker, he says. He acknowledges that some of the work he does is risky, “but it’s always for some kind of conservation project, and if something goes terribly wrong, at least in my last moments, I know it was for some greater cause.”
In the morning, Lammertink, who can endure almost anything but cannot abide an unshaven face, shaves by feel beside the cold creek. The group packs up camp. They march eight miles over a mountain ridge and out of the forest, stopping for a last double-knock session, finally coming out the side opposite the one they entered—north, back up in Farallones. Both birders say, as they emerge filthy from the trees, that it does seem like the ivory-bill is dead in Cuba. Lammertink’s earlier conclusions, he reconcludes, are confirmed. The little bit of hope he was holding is squashed.
But.
Wait.
The ivory-bill is not given up so easily.
After a night of sleep back at the first jungle shack, the birders decide, while the photographer and writer are out of earshot, that they will go back into the woods. Today. There is still that last witness, who someone said saw one in 2008 and heard one in 2011. They haven’t interv
iewed him yet. They are on their way to interview him this morning. If he seems credible, they will ditch the writer and photographer and round up some mules and hike right back into the mountains for another double-knock session tonight, and another at dawn, and then try to race back out and to a driver and to the airport hours away over barely-roads to make their flight tomorrow.
There’s hope! Gallagher thinks, perking up out of his dire exhaustion, in which he barely staggered out of the woods just yesterday. We can still do this!
• • •
The witness says he saw ivory-bills, all right.
He saw them in 1971.
Gallagher is crushed. His throat is thick with grief and near-crying when he comes into the writer’s hotel room the next day to confess the plan to jettison her and continue the expedition, foiled only by the confirmation of a faulty report. “I just suddenly …” he says. “I thought: These birds are really gone.” His swallows are heavy. “I mean, I’m the most optimistic person in the world, and it was just … inescapable to me. And I almost felt guilty, as though, like, me giving up made it so. It was really like having a loved one on a ventilator or something, and they’re already gone, and you just have to make that decision to give up.”
He thinks other people should keep looking here. Even though he feels sure the birds aren’t here. He doesn’t know why. He says it’s hard to say. He himself won’t come back, though, unless there’s a solid sighting. This is it for him.
Here in Cuba, anyway! He’s talking about the Cuban ivory-bill. He will continue to float the rivers and bayous of the American Southeast looking—Oh yes! he says. Because that’s who he is. He will never give up the dream of finding one in America, though he’s been mired in controversy since the first time he proclaimed that he had—the catalyst of the highest-profile birder fight in modern history. Weidensaul, when saying on the record that he considers Gallagher’s sighting “persuasive,” equates that admission to “driving nails into the coffin of my professional reputation.”
