ne morning I got a call from a friend inside the Nature Conservancy who asked me, first off, if I could keep an incredibly huge secret. We all know the answer to that question.ne morning I got a call from a friend inside the Nature Conservancy who asked me, first off, if I could keep an incredibly huge secret. We all know the answer to that question.
Breathlessly, he told me that his organization was sitting on one of the most amazing stories in history and would I be interested? I’m not sure I even got to answer that one. He immediately told me that a team was on the ground in a primeval cypress swamp in Arkansas and that they had found the ivory-billed woodpecker. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the critter other than that the very name, like the yellow-bellied sapsucker’s, was cartoon shorthand for bird nut.
I typically avoid daily journalism, especially announcement stories (New Asian Weasel Discovered!), because I’ve spent most of my life in weekly or monthly magazines and breaking news was always tantalizingly out of reach. But this one was different; there was time. So I asked him to let me check it out and immediately sped off to learn that, yes, this was North America’s largest woodpecker, but it also came with a backstory so bizarre, epic, covert, and overwrought that if we included birds among mythic Americans, the ivory-bill would keep company with Charles Foster Kane and Jay Gatsby.
Rumors among ornithologists and hunters that the bird still existed floated out of Southern swamps from time to time, and so the bird had become a kind of rural legend. No one had confidently seen it in more than sixty years. No doubt, it was the most sought-after bird in the world.
Native Americans long ago prized those white bills as emblems of power. John James Audubon marveled at their remote swampy habitats, the “favorite resort of the ivory billed wood pecker” with “the dismal croaking of innumerable frogs, the hissing of serpents, or the bellowing of alligators!” Early colonial hunters were stunned by the bird whose mostly black plumage at rest unfurled into a glitzy burst of white trailing feathers beneath a nearly three-foot wingspan. There was something aesthetic at work here, something unutterable, something semiotic. Its shape and style beguiled people, like the stride of a panther, the eyes of a koala, the sway back of a rhinoceros, the rolling shoulders of a gorilla.
The adult ivory-bill is a large bird and is exquisitely colored. Its yellow eyes, red crest, ivory bill, black feathers, and (when perched) the white lightning bolt marking on its neck—the mark of Zorro, the forehead of Harry Potter—give the whole bird a garish charisma. Connecticut’s state ornithologist Margaret Rubega wrote: “This is the Dennis Rodman of woodpeckers.”
In rare 1930s moving footage of the ivory-bill, it hops around the side of a tree with a cocky certainty, glancing about, seemingly aware of its ostentation. Back in the days when they were plentiful, the sight of them startling away from a tree in an explosion of white light was said to provoke blasphemous cries from the virtuous. The “Lord God Bird” is what the profane helplessly nicknamed it on their way to Hell.
I liked the idea of pursuing this story because I have a lucky streak with woodpeckers. I spent a week once with Beau Turner, Ted Turner’s son, in northern Florida as he explained to me how he was gardening an entire thousand-acre wood of longleaf pine with an eye toward its most fragile and reclusive tenant, the red-cockaded woodpecker. Standing amid the cathedral pines that afternoon, I instantly spotted one making a ruckus in the canopy. Another time, I was reporting a story in Tierra del Fuego. I wandered off in the woods trying to get as close as I could to the tiptoe of the Americas, as one is inclined to do down there. On an otherwise lonely path, an enraged Magellanic woodpecker, another Goliath of the clan, swooped in and landed for a face-to-face. This particular specimen wasn’t too pleased with me being near her nest, I guess, and she stood directly in my path, flapping her wings and making a racket. This was a really big woodpecker. But it was still a woodpecker. Maybe a foot tall, stretching it. But I’m city enough to know my Hitchcock movies, so I gave ground.
My friend at the Nature Conservancy called back that day to assure me that this woodpecker tale was a high-octane story. This was not merely the most sought-after animal in our mutual phylum—I was being let in on an expedition that would inevitably get headlined environmental story of the century. This was a lead with real players: the Nature Conservancy, the Department of the Interior, the state of Arkansas, and the prestigious Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Several rich tycoons had been smuggled in to see it. Private jets, my friend told me, were clandestinely dipping in and out of the Arkansas bayou on a regular basis. The bird had its own Secret Service–style moniker: “Elvis.” The president of Citibank as well as the President of the United States had been briefed. Arrangements were under way to have Laura Bush make the announcement at the ranch. Oh, man. I would do this. I was pumped.
The next day, April 29, 2005, the story leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers. EXTINCT? AFTER 60 YEARS, WOODPECKER BEGS TO DIFFER declared the Washington Post. The head of the Nature Conservancy intoned, “This bird has materialized miraculously out of the past but is also a symbol of the future.” The eminent director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said, “This is dead solid confirmed.”
I awoke that morning to a National Public Radio reporter tromping through the bayous of Arkansas. “These swamps are like flooded cathedrals with thousand-year cypress trees rising like columns out of the water,” said Christopher Joyce. I am always riveted by those radio pieces that take you to some exotic location—the crunching of the sticks, the trickling of the water—and create the place on the soundstage of your head lying on a pillow. In this case, though, I enjoyed it while simultaneously feeling like Wile E. Coyote after a misfired boulder lands on his chest.
Knowing that Christopher Joyce had probably received the same phone call I got drove me to manically consume these accounts as they broke in magazines, radio, television, and websites. I knew the punch line already and I knew that it had all been orchestrated. I knew the main characters and that they had been prepped. I knew the background. I had done the homework. Once I quickly worked through the usual Kübler-Ross stages of reporter despair—denial, anger, jealousy, I hate everybody—I watched something I had never seen before.
I observed a massive new truth stand up in American culture. Right away, the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird. The Lord God Bird signaled to America that maybe all that news of environmental destruction was overstated. The Bush administration seized upon this story—and the Department of the Interior’s Secretary Gale Norton took command of it—for precisely this reason.
It wasn’t quite as if Galileo had called a press conference to announce that the earth revolved around the sun or as if Darwin summoned the scriveners of Grub Street to explain for the first time how changes in species can occur through natural selection. But it was a small-picture version of something like that, where a brand-new understanding totally at odds with accepted opinion becomes fact in one fell swoop.
The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a case study of how professionals in our time can deploy new tools and media to proclaim a new truth. But it is also about how outsiders, many of them amateurs, can swarm this new fact with questions and contradictions to uncover an even more intriguing reality. An absolutely opposing reality. The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.
All fortresses get declared by a flag, and the ivory-bill was no different. That press conference on a bright spring day in Washington, DC, was magnificent in an Andrew Lloyd Webber way, an impressive display of contemporary institutional theater. The Department of Agriculture was there. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology was in full force. Secretary Norton headed up a full-on Capitol press event. Standing on a stage backgrounded by the snapping flags of proud departments and bureaus, Norton stepped up to the podium as giddy as an Oscar-winning supporting actress. It was as if the emperor’s legions had returned from a campaign in Africa and had brought to the seven hills the exotic spoils of the jungle—the brawny gorilla, the stealthy panther, the subdued rhinoceros. The masses were assembled and invited to gawk not so much at the bird, which wasn’t there, as at the grand power of the state and the institutions that had found this bird.
“This is a rare second chance to preserve through cooperative conservation what was once thought lost forever,” declared Norton.
Here, too, was a new and thoroughly contemporary character in the drama. America got to meet the modern environmentalist: John Fitzpatrick, that morning, was a man in full. In his early fifties, Fitzpatrick was ruggedly handsome enough that if it had been a few decades earlier, he’d have been recruited for a Marlboro ad. He sported a whitening brush of a mustache and just enough pink in his face to suggest a career in the woody outdoors, schooling himself in the nuances of Nature. He was a really friendly guy. His friends called him “Fitz.” And now it seemed impossible for a nation not to join them.
“The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Fitz told us. He said they had also recorded the bird’s distinctive sounds and that seven professional ornithologists had personally spotted the bird in flight. The basic story was an adventure yarn. A kayaker named Gene Sparling had spotted the bird and blogged about it. Then, a bird journalist named Tim Gallagher read the post. With another enthusiast named Bobby Harrison, they slipped into the swamp and, in an emotional encounter, saw the bird. Gallagher returned to tell Fitz, who was convinced of the details and who launched a massive, yearlong cover operation to confirm the bird story of the century.
For the next twenty-four hours that story was inescapable. There were three hundred thousand searches for it on Google; birding sites crashed. Cornell rushed into publication (on the Science Express website operated by the scholarly journal Science) the necessary peer-reviewed article to give the story the empirical imprimatur of High Truth. The scientific paper boasted seventeen acclaimed authors. In it, Cornell detailed the seven confirmed sightings of the bird by trained Cornell ornithologists. They had the video “clearly showing an ivorybill” performing its signature move—bursting off a tree in a flare of white light and flying away. There were hidden devices recording its distinctive cry, and numerous photographs of scalings—the signature marks an ivory-bill makes when it strips bark from dead trees to get at beetle larvae.
Despite the story having leaked, Cornell managed to flood the media zone. There were 174 television programs and 43 radio shows featuring segments on the bird. Cornell launched www.ivory-bill.com, and the marketing department fired off electronic press releases to one thousand members of the media. Cornell’s press office beefed up its Washington presence. One of the authors on the scholarly article had also prepared a popular book. Tim Gallagher, the editor of Cornell’s bird periodical, had written The Grail Bird, now rushed into print. The only medium neglected in those first weeks was, paradoxically, opera.
But it didn’t stop there. Add to all this effort the stunning fact that the ivory-bill was blessed by a miraculous sense of timing and coincidence. The area of Arkansas where the sightings had occurred was known, like something out of a child’s tale, as the “Big Woods.” It was spring, too, and the announcement of the bird’s resurrection came within days of Easter. And its nicknames are the Grail Bird and the Lord God Bird?
Irresistible. Interior Secretary Norton declared that work toward habitat restoration and protection of the ivory-bill would receive $10.2 million in federal money, an astoundingly massive sum for a single species. Norton announced that the area in Arkansas where the bird was spotted would now be known as the Corridor of Hope.
When the technical paper appeared, Science’s editor in chief, Donald Kennedy, wrote an editorial that quivered with excitement, an unusual public display of affection for a sober, technical journal. His mash note ended solemnly, though, casting over the entire spectacle a patriarchal prayer. Kennedy wrote: “An appropriate salutation would be the ancient Hebrew blessing: ‘Baruch Mechayei haMetim: Blessed is the one who gives life to the dead.’ ”
Like any professional group, highly credentialed ornithologists comprise a cozy ecosystem of people all pursuing the same subject. That is the essence of any such group. They meet annually as, say, the American Ornithologists’ Union and give the most eminent member the keynote address. In this small world, they may not know one another personally, but they know of one another. So they all simply know that, say, a professor named Jerome Jackson has always been the go-to guy for the ivory-bill or that Fitz himself made his name studying the Florida scrub-jay. And in this micro-climate of specialized professionals, the Darwinian competition among species is fairly intense and arguments about scientific evidence can often get distorted, if not collapse entirely, into battles of ego and pride. Which is why Mark Robbins, an ornithologist at the University of Kansas, at first kept his stirring concerns to himself.
He had just returned from an overseas trip to discover America in the full grip of ivory-bill fever. The first person he spoke to was Tim Barksdale, who is a world-renown photographer of birds—“tenacious in getting the shot,” Robbins said.
“I said, ‘Tim, did you get this on film?’ And he goes, ‘No.’ And I asked him, ‘How much time did you spend there?’ He said, ‘I spent over two hundred days, over twenty-three hundred hours.’ And I’m thinking to myself, something is wrong here. That was my first red flag.” The next day, Robbins met with some graduate students who were very excited about the rediscovery and wanted Robbins to share in the pleasure of seeing the bird on film. To the delight of birders everywhere, Cornell Lab had posted the brief movie on their ivory-bill rediscovery website for anyone to watch.
Almost every birder has seen a pileated woodpecker, which shares many of the ivory-bill’s traits—white panels of feathers on a different part of the wings—but its beak is nearly black and it’s somewhat smaller and it’s very, very common. “I wanted to see the film,” Robbins said, “so one guy downloads it onto his computer. I look at it and now I’m feeling sick. I’m almost at the point where I’m going to vomit on the floor because I realized that it’s a pileated woodpecker.”
The video itself is now legendary, possibly the most studied four seconds of moving images since Abraham Zapruder filmed his home movie in Dealey Plaza. The cameraman was a computer programming professor and ivory-bill enthusiast named David Luneau. He kept a camera mounted on a central post in his canoe. And when he visited the swamp, he kept it running all the time, just in case. As it happened, his brother-in-law Robert was in the front of the canoe on this day, and the automatic focus gives us a very clear image of him. Off to one side of him, in the blurry distance, a bird startles and flies away. A non-birder would not be able to tell you if it was a woodpecker or an eagle. It’s a tiny blur of white and black, and after being blown up, it’s an even blurrier blur.
But to a professional, the bird’s white panels permit an interpretation. To Robbins, good science requires that you make the most likely interpretation: “The proportion of white to black on this bird can’t be the dorsal of the ivory-bill,” Robbins told his grad students that day. “We pulled our specimen,” he said, “and sure enough it didn’t fit and everybody is going, ‘Holy shit.’ ”
Robbins kept this skepticism to himself but only for a day, at which point his old officemate Rick Prum called. Prum had since moved on to Yale (and he’s a neighbor of mine now), but he and Robbins maintained their old water-cooler chats by phone. And without so much as a howdy-do about Robbins’s overseas trip, “Rick was right off the bat with ‘What do you think about this ivory-billed proof?’ ”
Turns out Prum had seen what Robbins saw—a pileated. Still, it seemed crazy to question it since there was so much other proof—the numerous sightings by professionals, the telltale bark scalings, and other evidence. Yet by the end of the conversation, Robbins and Prum felt compelled to make the scientific case, especially about the ambiguity of the video. They would prepare a paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal, in this case, Public Library of Science Biology.
This was how we are all taught science is supposed to work. Data and conclusions get set down, then presented to other people in the field to review (or duplicate), and then those peer reviewers give the paper a thumbs-up or -down to publication. This idea of peer review is what makes science different from other forms of truth construction. Originally, the scientific method might have been an effort to keep the language of miracles and faith and Scriptural Authority out of observations and conclusions. But now we understand that it’s also meant to scrub secular flaws as well—logical holes, rhetorical leaps, insistence based on seniority or ego.
As he and Robbins wrote the paper and finished it, I got a call from Prum. He was asking me for advice about how to get the word out about his paper. I immediately told him of my own failed involvement in the story so far and, frankly, was excited to hear that there was a controversy. Again, my magazine deadlines would not be fast enough, and it hardly mattered. Just before they were set to publish, Prum and Robbins received a call from an acquaintance inside the Cornell lab who had heard about their upcoming article. She warned them that Cornell had put audio machines throughout the woods and were still analyzing the numerous calls and knocks picked up on the tapes, but that the sound prints looked like the rock-solid evidence everyone wanted. And yet, in the paper, Cornell refused to say anything about the sounds other than that they were “suggestive but not proof.” Prum and Robbins were permitted to hear the audio and compare it to the soundtrack of the only film of ivory-bills made in 1935, shot by a legendary ornithologist named Arthur Allen, then also the director of the Cornell lab.
The recordings convinced Prum and Robbins that while they might be right about the video specifically, perhaps they were being too impetuous about the general claim. So they did what scientists are supposed to do. Faced by better evidence, they held their article. Given the fame of the bird by now, Prum and Robbins’s retraction itself became national news.
I remember Prum called me the day this happened. I was on my cell and stood in my driveway. Prum talks fast to begin with, but he was a flywheel that afternoon. The words zipped by. He said he was pulling his paper because that is what good scientific method mandated. But he was also saying that he still didn’t believe the video. It was an important distinction but one I felt helpless telling him would never survive the blunt instrument that is our national media. Indeed, within hours, the whole story became a parable about a failed attempt to bring down Cornell. But it was much weirder than that. For the time being, the bird existed in the most bizarre way. Prum and Robbins believed the video showed nothing, while Cornell said it showed an ivory-bill. And Cornell pooh-poohed its own sound recordings as “suggestive,” while the other ornithologists considered them compelling.
When John Fitzpatrick ascended to the podium at the annual meeting to the American Ornithologists’ Union, it was as if Perry had returned from the North Pole or Armstrong from the moon. All honor and glory would be showered upon Fitz.
In his career, he was known as the scrub-jay guy, but he’d also become famous as a packager of birds. At various organizations in his career, he had shown that he could unite conservation mascots—photogenic birds, for instance—with money from mega-donors and the sweat equity of well-intentioned environmental groups to create massive partnerships. The work on the ground was carried out by the do-gooders, while the backers were welcome to proclaim their public virtue and the two “synergized” to get the hard work done. His most famous achievement—a bird program called Partners in Flight—says it all in the title.
The stage for the annual meeting was massive, with a huge dropdown screen, and was set perfectly for the arrival of the great man. Sure, there had been a peep of controversy with Prum and Robbins, but that was over now. Fitz was prepping himself for the history books. You know that scientists are thinking about history books when they dare to use religious metaphors—as Stephen Hawking did in the last line of his A Brief History of Time, about how science will “know the mind of God.”
Fitz’s own words were solemnly quoted as if he’d already ascended to the great canopy and sitteth on the right hand of John James Audubon: “These woods are my church,” he prayed.
From the beginning of his presentation, he spoke rapturously of nature. The first few minutes were about big old trees and haunting romantic landscapes and the loss, long ago, of virgin forests. He spoke achingly of earlier folks like Allen who got to walk in woods we can only imagine or see in mournful photographs.
It’s in this context that the discovery of the bird became the birth of another cute-animal mascot. Koala bears, baby-faced marsupials, charming fuzzy critters? This is how Fitz presented the ivory-bill, as the new animal that would launch a decade of fund-raisers. The larger mission was, in fact, so huge—reviving entire deltas and massive swaths of land, the Big Woods—that it made accepting the rediscovery of the bird seem minor. Fitz was in Hawking mode, sure, but it was not history he was reaching for really. It was a new partnership.
By the time he got to the evidence, he cheerfully encouraged the audience not to be troubled by the flicker of a speck of an image. In the video, the bird is no bigger than the brother-in-law’s thumb, and as it flies off it only gets smaller. Fitz says it’s crucial to get “the whole gestalt” of the bird coming off the tree. Yet it’s not as if the nuanced differences between ivory-bill and pileated perch-departing gestalts were then common knowledge. If anything, that very odd word permitted the audience to fill in the gaps of what was not seen. If you’re looking for a gestalt—instead of clear identifiable proof—then you’ll see the gestalt and be convinced. Fitz’s audience in Santa Barbara that day saw it and cooed.
The various complaints from Prum and the others who had questioned his evidence—what did he make of those? They were useful, he said, because the brief controversy lent an air of scientific struggle and, by extension, legitimacy. Barely an air, though. At the end, he posted a slide in his PowerPoint presentation that read “Scientific Spice” and then listed Prum, Robbins, and three other minor skeptics. His body language and vocal tone formed its own communication, suggesting that while he should obviously feel nothing less than contempt for these pathetic apostates, he had conquered the world and so it was easier to be generous in a chuckling, belittling sort of way.
“I particularly want to especially thank these guys for adding scientific spice to the discussion all summer long,” said a bemused Fitz.
Science was less than an appetizer. It was a pinch of herb sprinkled over the main dish. Even the bird was not the entree. Throughout the talk, Fitz invited his peers to journey with him past the shaky evidence to the larger marketing campaign for big-scale land conservation. In his very last line, before he accepted the grateful applause of a thousand ornithologists, he intoned: “We can save these forests, and we can do it with a great badge of a bird at the top of the treetops if things work out right.”
Words betray us. To Fitz, the ivory-bill was not a bird. It was a logo.
By the following winter, the aimless discontent of some professional ornithologists exploded in a small magazine called the Auk. It’s not a scholarly journal, but it is respected. The author was Jerome Jackson, the man whom the cozy club of ornithologists had long known as the go-to guy for ivory-bills. Just why Fitz had not brought Jackson in from the beginning is still one of the great mysteries. Jackson was to have been an author with Prum and Robbins on that suppressed paper, and now he let fly with a cri de coeur all by himself.
He charged that Fitz’s proof was “molded more by sound bites than by science.” He said that the massive federal funding was a ruse. Jackson charged that the big money Secretary Norton had pulled together from the Interior budgets “was not a new appropriation, but a re-allocation of funds from other budgeted projects, including ongoing efforts on behalf of other endangered species, resulting in cutbacks to those projects.”
Jackson slammed what is known as “story creep.” Tim Gallagher’s popular book on the rediscovery, published in May 2005, had described his sighting of the bird when he was in the swamp with Bobby Harrison. He estimated his distance from the bird at “less than eighty feet.” That July, though, his wife wrote in Audubon magazine that it was “less than 70 feet.” In an interview on 60 Minutes in October, Gallagher said the bird was “about sixty-five feet away.” At one news conference, Fitzpatrick observed that if Gallagher and Harrison had not shouted, the bird “might even have landed on the canoe.” Jackson wrote: “Observations can become more and more ‘real’ with the passing of time, as we forget the minor details and focus inwardly on the ‘important’ memory.”
He noted that Prum and Robbins never did retract their assertion that the video showed nothing other than a pileated. He said that when you examined the evidence carefully, Fitz’s stuff wasn’t science or even scientific spice, but rather “faith-based ornithology.” Jackson closed by alluding to the paranormal TV show The X-Files: “Whether truth is in the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers or in the perception of the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, we now have hope. But hope is not truth. It is only the fire that incites us to seek the truth. The truth is still out there.”
Fitz fired back immediately, charging that it was Jackson dressing up dubious evidence as science: “Despite being neither peer-reviewed nor fact-checked by the Editor, that article was treated as a scientific contribution by the public media, a perception actively fostered by its author in public appearances and interviews.” Fitz rebutted each point and—being standard media advice in the age of the marketing rollout—he accused Jackson of precisely the failings Jackson had alleged: “We agree with Jackson’s statement that ‘sound bites must not pass as science.’ This is why we were flabbergasted by Jackson’s own use of the phrase ‘faith-based ornithology’ in referring to our work. Who, exactly, is compromising science with sound bites here?”
So it sat for a while—another gnarly scientific quarrel—until I heard from another bird person, David Allen Sibley. Like Audubon or Roger Tory Peterson before him, Sibley is a careful field birder who studies birds in the wild and paints them.
I met Sibley years ago through a mutual friend, and one day he was telling me that he was going to come out with a paper in Science. He was joining the ranks of the video skeptics. Up until now, the complaints about the video had been broad—“I think it could be a pileated.” Sibley and three other authors got right into the details, questioning the video frame by frame.
For example, when the blurry image was blown up and “de-interlaced,” according to Cornell, a portion of the perched bird could be seen as a droplet of white that is peeking out from the tree’s edge. The Cornell team saw this image as the tucked-in feathers of a perched ivory-bill. Sibley provided a drawing in which he argued that it was just as likely a pileated in the first explosion of flight behind the tree. The white-feathered droplet was a pileated twisting its wings frantically in those first big beats of taking off, scooping huge pockets of air to skedaddle.
It’s one thing to say that the image is just “too blurry.” It’s quite another to show, frame by frame, how much more easily one can look at each frame and see a super-common bird. It was like one of the optical illusions where you think you’ve been looking at the soft-focus image of a beautiful young woman in the nude until someone points out that tilted this way it even more perfectly forms the face of an old hag wearing a babushka. Afterward, it just becomes impossible to look at the image and see the nude anymore.
In a single scientific article that is what happened to a lot of birders. The most famous ivory-billed woodpecker of the twenty-first century became, overnight, one more startled pileated, flying away.
The Cornell team published their rebuttal simultaneously. For some, there was another way to dismiss Sibley as a disgruntled competitor: Sibley is a Cornell dropout, a man whose dreamy obsession with birds kept him wandering in the woods, never able to get his degree. There are stories of him going out into the woods for days on end to look at birds and never getting around to the homework. And it’s true: He is not a professional ornithologist, in the technical sense. Sibley is a working stiff, a mere painter, to a professional ornithologist, and outsiders like him live beyond the daily concerns of their esoteric and expert sphere of knowledge.
But that distinction is also what made this paper devastating. The earlier questioning of Cornell’s proof could be easily bracketed as “part of the scientific debate.” Professional rivalry. Scientific spice. But Sibley’s paper exposed a rift between folks in the field and those in academia, between outsiders and the fortress-dwellers.
“One of the dirty secrets of ornithology,” said Chris Elphick, the fourth author on the paper and a professor at the University of Connecticut, “is that the ornithologists in the university are not experts in identification anymore. They were a hundred years ago, but for the most part university researchers study one species or a small set of species. They spend most of their time in front of a computer rather than in the field.”
Bird professionalism is like every other specialty. It emerged from a more hands-on world of gritty, hairy grunts in the field, but as it developed more tools for exploration and more theories, it tended to move indoors. To the academy. Sometimes to industry. But, most typically, to a desk.
And it left behind the generalists, the mechanics, and the amateurs doing basic research. In this case, those people were the lovers of birds happy to organize group tours or whatever it took to keep them out in the field, the dreamy open field where the occasional sighting is a profound pleasure.
“The whole expertise of bird identification is not in the realm of the university anymore and hasn’t been for some time,” Elphick said. “All that expertise is out among the amateurs and the bird-watchers.”
If you look at the history of professionalization of any kind, you’ll see that it tends to follow this route. In America and Europe, a great deal of professionalization occurred in the nineteenth century, when most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossils and wrote about botany and invented household tools and studied animals. He was an amateur anthropologist and even an amateur theologian who famously cut all the miracles out of the New Testament because he thought Jesus made a whole lot more sense without the supernatural material mucking up the good moral philosophy.
Throughout the nineteenth century, however, different professions began to emerge. The invention of the telegraph and the railroad—a bricks-and-mortar version of our Internet—sped communication and interaction, permitting groups to form more easily, hold meetings, trade notes, and determine what was good for the field or bad. One of the earliest examples was the formation of the American Medical Association in 1847. Previously medicine had been a private guild. It was held together by little other than the Hippocratic Oath, which didn’t pledge members to “do no harm” so much as to “spill no secrets.”
The professionalization of medicine, as with any discipline, established standards and practices. It set rules and created a cohort of insiders. In the case of doctors, it would go on to establish medical schools and then credentialed medical schools, then board tests and board examiners. For most disciplines, the grand credentialer became the academy.
And that was the case with birding as well. It came out of a long history of amateur pursuit. Birding developed from the gentlemanly world of collecting, which was part of the hunter tradition. John J. Audubon painted his birds after shooting them. But in the course of time, that method fell into disfavor and bird-watching trended to the less intrusive, less brutal way of making distinctions. The modern birder in the field had to become good at sighting on the fly or in a matter of seconds as the bird perched. This change in identification is what led to the shift from the grand paintings of Audubon to the guidebook work of Roger Tory Peterson and David Sibley.
Audubon was painting his work to show people the flora and fauna of the New World. His work was expeditionary and meant to enlighten the world generally about the vastness of America’s varying environments. Audubon’s paintings have a nearly British feeling when you look at them—magnificently staged birds in some fantastic tableau. They might be captured on paper in the middle of feasting, like the red-tailed hawk dining on a half-eaten bloodied rabbit. Audubon’s long-billed curlew stands in a patch of muddy marsh probing the muck with its improbable bill. I own an old engraving of this image in part because if you look at the distant horizon, you’ll see the skyline of my hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, with Fort Sumter in the harbor. But all of that is tiny imagery in the background. For Audubon, he is showing the fauna’s POV. He’s found and identified these creatures, and his paintings invite us to see the world from the bird’s and the New World’s perspective.
Sibley’s work has a different purpose. The naming and grandeur of New World birds is a done deed. His paintings are not trying to show us the bird’s perspective but Sibley’s. He wants his readers and viewers to come away knowing how to distinguish an ivory-bill from a pileated and a red-cockaded from the hairy variety.
If you’ve ever been in the field with a really great birder, then you know that this skill requires years of practice. Birds are identified not merely by their color and plumage but by the mastery of thousands of pieces of learned information about size, age, feet, beak formation, eye, crest, wing shape, flight path, the way they land, the company they keep, where they perch in a tree, or how they stand on the ground. After you’ve learned the boomerang curve of a swallow’s wing, then you learn the nuance differences among the nearly one hundred swallow species. Once, when I was in the Florida woods with Beau Turner, he quickly pointed out to me a tree swallow that was in the northernmost sweep of its range—a rare sighting in winter. Nothing quite convinces one of another’s bona fides than an easy intimacy with the unusual and outermost details of a field of knowledge.
To spot such nuances and to know in your gut that you have that nailed is a deep physical pleasure. Any birder will tell you so. When people obsess about collecting their “life list” and seeing all these birds and checking them off, in a sense they are re-creating the long journeys of John J. Audubon, the first birder obsessed with his life list, only he painted his.
When I first met Sibley, it was through a mutual friend. There were a bunch of kids with us, and Sibley offered to take us around the woods of Shelter Island at the end of Long Island to look at birds. It was a marvelous afternoon, but at one point the kids had fled. Sibley was left with just me, standing in a meadow with a distant view of water. He has a charming obsessive quality when you’re with him. Sibley is laconic, even shy. But in time, he opens up and reveals a wonderfully funny and ironic personality.
That day, I did most of the talking (not unusual). I found out, for instance, that there were only a half dozen species of birds in this hemisphere that he had never personally seen—birds which nested on the ocean and required super-expensive boat trips in harsh environments to see. But when, during the course of this (or any) casual conversation, Sibley’s peripheral vision senses a slight speck scoring a thin black line in the sky, he immediately cuts off everyone and tunes out the rest of the world. When I was with him, he turned mechanically, instantly, and precisely in the direction of the bird. His high-powered binoculars were on his eyes and the bird was centered in his field of focus in half a second.
“Yellow-shafted flicker,” he might say. Meanwhile I’m squinting at a distant circumflex and then struggling with my binoculars until finally I get a glimpse of a departing speck. Throughout all this, I might try to keep the conversation going, but Sibley’s body language has a way of communicating that he’s no longer there for you. He is inside the binoculars for those few seconds. It’s as if he’s gone, left his body, literally ecstatic.
On several occasions, I didn’t even bother to look at the bird, so riveting was it to watch a man in the grip of an irresistible thing. It always seemed sacrilegious to continue talking. This was hallowed time, bird identification time, concentration time.
On this very afternoon, Sibley was looking in one direction and I in another. And I spotted a bird first and raised my binoculars. I got it quickly in focus and could see right away what it was.
“It’s just a seagull,” I said and lowered my binoculars. I saw that Sibley nevertheless had his gaze fixed intently on the bird. Sibley’s body language and radiant silence was telling me that, even if I didn’t think so, the bell jar of avian solemnity had descended over this entire meadow. Sibley was in the bird zone, his face tense with study. I slammed the binoculars back to my eyes and fixed my field of focus on the bird. Had I missed something? Was it a wayward albatross? But I grew up on the ocean. I know my gulls, and unquestionably that was nothing more than an everyday seagull.
“It is just a seagull, isn’t it?” I said, again lowering my binoculars and looking at him. And then he said this simple, little thing. He didn’t say it pretentiously or ominously. I could make it sound like the Buddha talking or Yoda training his Jedis. But it wasn’t like that. Sibley has a nearly petit way of talking. And this was Sibley at his most fragile and vulnerable, as if he wanted me to understand something but lacked the words for it. So he just said this thing that has stayed with me ever since.
“It’s a bird,” he said. Again, I got the glasses back on my eyes. But I realized there were no binoculars powerful enough to show me what he was seeing. I was furious, silently berating myself for my fatuous dismissal—so quick to see the tiresome seagull, the bird of landfills, the ocean pest, the flying rat, the scavenger gull of my teenage years when we all repeated the shoreline legend about what happened when you fed them Alka-Seltzer.
Later I saw him pleasantly lost in a reverie of crows. For Sibley, he’s always looking at birds he’s seen a thousand times as if he’s seeing them for the first time. That’s a skill born of love, amateurism in the best sense. It’s an obsession, the kind that makes you drift off into the woods in college, so consumed with the unutterable pleasure of the work that you forget, ultimately, about earning a degree.
One thing that marks the amateur, the best of them, is this talent for not seeing things according to the dominant paradigm. One of the traits Thomas S. Kuhn describes in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is this ability not to see things according to the reigning paradigm of the day. The much abused phrase “paradigm shift” is a regular feature of scientific breakthrough in part because certain people can see through the frame within which everyone else dwells and see something different.
A 2006 Harvard Business Review article detailed the Curse of Knowledge, reporting that many breakthroughs are achieved by people who don’t know the jargon and minutiae of a field, who work outside the realm of day-to-day expertise. Lacking that detailed scaffolding of understanding, they can often see things that insiders look right past. Think of those instruction manuals that came with the computers of the 1990s. They were written by the computer programmers who had lived deep inside the vast world of alt-shift-return-F7. To them, those instructions were easy because they lived inside the paradigm. To those of us outside, their manuals were frustratingly opaque, eventually hilariously so. We had to wait for some outsiders to write those PC for Dummies books so we could find out how to work a computer.
Once, in between sightings, I asked Sibley why he painted birds at all when you could so easily just take super-detailed digital pictures of what he saw in the lenses. He explained that a picture is a specific bird, and each bird is slightly different from the essential bird of that species.
Each oriole is different in the way that every person is different, yet there are certain qualities that capture the very essence of orioleness. And the way the brain works, he said, makes it crucial to paint. If we see the quintessential oriole, our brains can typically pick out all the variations and make that call. Sibley doesn’t paint any one oriole but (and this is part of what he’s looking for when he glues the binoculars to his eyes) a stylized oriole all of us can see.
Every time he lifts his binoculars, he is looking for tiny elements—secondary feathers, some tuft, a unique shape to the tail—that essentially capture the bird in view. What does a platonic seagull look like? And that’s why he can get lost with every winged creature that flaps within view. It’s a bird, to Sibley, but one that may yield one more detail, moving his understanding that much closer to the platonic bird of that species. There’s always time for one more look at some impish blue jay or pudgy owl. That’s why Sibley’s explanation of the Luneau video ended the argument for a lot of birders. They know that almost no one on the earth can see a bird the way that Sibley can. They know what I know. He may not be a credentialed ornithologist, but he is among the best bird spotters alive. Yet Sibley’s paper was careful. He didn’t say the ivory-bill didn’t exist. He carefully said that the Luneau video was not the proof.
Still, plenty of birders refused to believe Sibley’s evidence. And forget about wingbeats and de-interlacing, what about the seven ornithologists who saw the bird personally? And the sound tapes? There was still plenty of hope. And just before this latest challenge emerged, the hopeful convened in Brinkley, Arkansas, for what was headlined as the first annual ivory-billed woodpecker festival. I was offered a free tour of the swamp to try my hand at seeing the bird myself, so I booked a plane ticket.
First day out, I spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker.
Or at least I can now add my name to the list of those who make that claim. It was a mild February in the swamp when I visited the bayou with Bill Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cell phone, we found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a canoe, and a big desire. “I’m game,” he said in his slow, deep twang. So we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of Arkansas’ most famous bottomland swamp.
Even though I grew up among South Carolina’s cypress swamps, I had never seen cypress trees this huge and haunting. Towering beside them was the ancient tupelo, like some Devonian Period beta version of “tree.” These thousand-year-old senator trees are large enough at the base to garage a car, and then they suddenly narrow like a wine bottle before shooting up into a regular tree. Tippit and I spent the day paddling into swampy cul-de-sacs and just hanging there, strictly quiet, for half an hour at a stretch.
“You can’t find the bird,” Tippit said in his most casual Zen. “The bird has to find you.” By late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush hour of swallows and sweeps. At times, the dimming forest could be as chatty as a crowded cocktail party, filled with the call of the pileated woodpecker.
Then: “Ivory-bill!” Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a large, dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of the swamp.
I knew the drill. To confirm the sighting, I asked Tippit to report to me precisely what he had seen. As with any witness, it was important to set the interview down on paper as soon as possible. Tippit called out: “Two white panels on the back of the wings! It lit on that tree. It was large. Also saw it flying away from me with flashes of white.” He called it in on his cell phone. And since that winter evening, I have been able to say, “I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker.”
And yet I have not said it. Later that night, during the festival, when people would make conversation, they’d ask, “Did you go out today?” And I’d say yes and move on to marveling at the size of the cypress trees. I just didn’t have it in me to make the boast, and it felt especially odd because “ivory-bills” were everywhere.
The little town of Brinkley (formerly Lick Skillet, Arkansas) had really gussied itself up for the Call of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Celebration. I fully expected to see a parade led by Robert Preston sporting an ivory-bill haircut (available at Penny’s Hair Care for $25). A modest motel had been renamed the Ivory-Billed Inn. Gene’s Restaurant and Barbecue offered an ivory-bill cheeseburger. There was even ivory-bill “blue”: I bought a T-shirt that read GOT PECKER?
There were lots of T-shirts and tours, and www.ivorybilledexpeditions.com offered the cheapest rate at $325 per person. The deluxe was $2300 and your guide was Gene Sparling, the kayaker who first spotted the bird.
Soon enough there were limited reproductions of Audubon’s famous ivory-bill drawing from 1829, issued by “Discovery Editions.” Governor Mike Huckabee issued ivory-bill stamps. On a television set one might see a public service announcement asking for funds, which piped:
“Emily Dickinson said, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas would like to add that hope also has an ivory-colored beak and eats wood grubs.”
Ivory-bills were everywhere, and yet talk of seeing the bird was conscientiously absent. It’s hard to describe, but it was like saying you’d walked on the moon or been anointed by the Dalai Lama. It was a boast of immense magnitude, exalting to claim.
For instance, I went to a talk given by Sharon Stiteler, a perky, witty, smiling blonde who is the host of birdchick.com. Everyone knew that she had been invited by Cornell to spend a few weeks in the swamp. This very fact gave her an air of privilege and her talk a sense of potent authority—and she was discussing bird feeders. During the Q and A period afterward, she pointed at me for a question. So I asked: “Have you seen an ivory-billed woodpecker?” It was as if I’d dropped a glass on the floor. The room went weirdly silent. The smile on Stiteler’s face flickered away, quick as a chickadee. “I am not allowed to comment on that,” she said. “I was out with Cornell in December and had to sign a lot of confidentiality agreements.”
The act of birding, ultimately, is a very stylized form of storytelling. For instance, if someone said to you, “I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree,” even the least experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don’t have yellow wingtips and don’t cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural history, and this is what I picked up with Sibley: The story gets told in a vivid but almost private language of color, wing shape, body design, habitat, bill size, movement, flying style, and perching habits. The more you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this tale.
Claiming to have seen a rare bird requires an even more delicate form of storytelling and implies a connoisseur’s depth of knowledge. Saying “I saw an ivory-bill’s long black neck and white trailing feathers” requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay.
If you don’t pull it off, then superior birders diss you. It’s all about cred. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your skills—to trust you, to believe you. So just who gets to tell the story of seeing an ivory-bill? I spent the entire festival trying to find that out. Cornell claims that seven members of their search team saw the bird, but they weren’t gabbing in the halls about it either.
That intimidating institutional demand for silence was everywhere. There was a great ivory-bill story, but this, too, was very carefully stage-managed, coordinated, and controlled. I picked up the festival guide and saw the schedule. Cornell was holding it back—the telling of the most famous ivory-bill sighting. This was the dual sighting by the editor of Living Bird magazine, Tim Gallagher, and his good friend Bobby Harrison. These two men saw the bird together, and for this festival they were going to tell all about it. The story itself was the central event of the entire festival—an evening affair, after dinner, standing room only.
The fantastic story of the bird’s rediscovery begins with its Genesis tale. Every great find has one and the ivory-bill is no different. It’s the story of the first confirmed sighting and the written version can be found in Tim Gallagher’s book The Grail Bird, a history of the search for the ivory-bill and the book that was rushed into print with the rediscovery. Gallagher intended to interview every living person who had claimed an ivory-bill sighting. It turns out that there’s a whole subcategory of bird aficionados known as ghost-bird chasers, who look for birds presumed to be extinct. Gallagher himself was one, and over his years of searching, he met Bobby Harrison, a photography professor at Oakwood College in Alabama, who was also in this game.
The two men were made for the Chautauqua circuit and the kind of postprandial entertainment promised in Brinkley. Gallagher is a tall middle-aged man with white hair and a pleasantly restrained Yankee demeanor. In Arkansas he amiably confessed that he’d always thought the South was weird and that he considered Harrison his “interpreter and guide.” Harrison, a fun good ol’ boy with a head like a mortar shell, had his own schtick, like saying that he didn’t know “damn Yankee” was two words until he was twenty years old. The audience laughed wildly at their tale, which was, like the best sightings, a great adventure story full of snakes, mayhem, mud, bugs, and a bird.
Harrison is the kind of guy who loves his outdoor gear. When I first met him, he showed me his canoe draped in shredded camouflage material. He could climb in beneath this small bunker of camo, smear gobs of multicolored camouflage greasepaint all over his face, and float through the swamp—looking like nothing more than a drifting pile of leaves (or some whacked-out survivalist hiding deep in a bayou). By contrast, Gallagher is a restrained gentleman whose posture and courtesies make it easy to believe that he’s spent a great deal of his life at a desk on an Ivy League campus.
Their story was why everyone had gathered in Arkansas. And, it began in early 2004 when Gallagher was alerted to an online posting by another Southerner, the kayaker Gene Sparling, who reported that he’d seen an unusual woodpecker in the Bayou de View. Gallagher and Harrison each interviewed him and were convinced that Sparling had seen the bird. They rushed to Arkansas and entered swamp in canoes. The second day they were there—February 27, 2004—the two saw something burst into the sunshine. “Look at all the white on its wings,” Gallagher shouted. “Ivory-bill!” they both screamed. And it was gone. They wrote down their notes and drew sketches. Gallagher had a new ending for his book. Bobby got on the phone to his wife, Norma, and sobbed.
The audience was laughing one minute and stunned into teary solemnity the next. These were the two emotions of the night. We might be carrying on at Harrison’s schtick as a good ol’ boy making fun of the straight-man Gallagher or listening to the Yankee talk about how wacky it was to be in the swamp with Bobby and all that rednecky camouflage. Then the story might grow solemn as they took us into just enough detail to relate how emotional it all was: how they shouted when they saw the bird, how they flipped out as it flew by, and how they cried like babies as they wrote down their descriptions.
If you read the Science article, it’s clear that the other academic sightings aren’t nearly as entertaining as this Billy Yank and Johnny Reb rendition. So the Cornell rollout carefully controlled this crucial part of the narrative. Only the official speakers—the courtly intellectual Gallagher and the hilarious swamp rat Harrison—did the talking.
As they explained, after they had their emotional sighting, Gallagher flew back to Ithaca, New York, and back to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, headed by John Fitzpatrick.
As with any convincing rare-bird narrative, Fitz listened carefully and then, based on his judgment, he believed. So Fitzpatrick decided to throw the lab’s prestige and best resources into the search. Right away, Fitz learned that the Nature Conservancy had heard about the same Gene Sparling sighting that had attracted Gallagher to Arkansas.
“A few days after February 27, Fitzpatrick called me,” said Scott Simon, the state director of the Nature Conservancy, “and we danced around trying to find out what the other knew.” When they discovered that they knew the same thing, Simon became a partner and agreed to supply aerial photographs.
“Fitz emphasized the need to keep it quiet,” Simon went on to tell me. “They wanted to get in one full year of research uninterrupted and focused. For fourteen months we did that. We called it the Inventory Project, and we talked about it in code.” IBWO became the preferred shorthand for “ivory-billed woodpecker.” Cornell’s swamp operation moved swiftly into place in Arkansas in the spring of 2004 and kept thirty-six people on the ground at any one time. “Twenty-two paid staff; fourteen volunteers,” field supervisor Elliott Swarthout told me. Scattered throughout the forest, time-lapse cameras were mounted on trees. The ornithologists had also drawn up grids and transects and were systematically moving through the area with human eyes to conduct regular bird counts and spot roost holes.
There were twenty-four autonomous recording units, or ARUs, stationed at strategic flyways in the swamp. Hundreds of hours of audio recordings were clandestinely flown back to Cornell, where they were computer-searched for the patterns of the ivory-bill’s two most famous sounds. There is the “kent” call, a funny bweep that sounds like a kid’s toy horn. And there is the double knock—two heavy bill blows into a tree, so close together they almost register as one sound.
Eventually, when all the necessary groups were brought in, the Inventory Project had a sixteen-person management board. “And it was really fun,” Simon said. “These people met on a conference call every Tuesday night at eight thirty P.M., Central Time.”
The ivory-billed woodpecker—aka IBWO—became the subject of the greatest super-secret mission in the history of ornithology.
By the end of the first year of searching, Cornell had many sightings but decided to put forward only seven of the best ones in the Science paper.
But those very sightings would eventually become their own controversy. Originally, Fitz sent down several people who were well known for being able to identify birds. But those specialists did not see the bird. That was the red flag Mark Robbins mentioned. How could Tim Barksdale, who almost never failed to get the shot, spend twenty-three hundred hours in the woods and return without a single decent frame?
It was only after these skilled birders failed that other researchers—who happened to be in the employ of Fitz and also inside this bubble of emotional secrecy—went down to Arkansas. All of them had, essentially, the same sighting. The bird never stopped and perched. It was always flying by. Of all the field marks that one might see—the famous white bill, for instance, so noticeably different from the pileated’s black bill—well, no one saw those field marks. Every one of them saw the burst of white trailing feathers—the one field mark most likely to be confused with a pileated.
And in each case, the sighting occurred in a surge of emotion. “As soon as Ron’s canoe rounded the bend, I began shaking all over and feeling as if I would cry,” wrote Melanie Driscoll of the day she made her sighting.
Could this be a case of group hysteria? That would ultimately become the claim from a lot of outsiders. When I first heard this charge, I thought that Cornell probably had seen the bird. I mean, “group hysteria”? Wasn’t that one of those TV diagnoses, like “amnesia” or “catatonia,” that show up as some kind of lame excuse in our pop culture rather than an actual reality. But, well, no. Actually, it turns out, such hysterias do happen. A lot. In the introductory book Sibley’s Birding Basics (published long before these sightings), Sibley warned against “the overexcited birder” and “group hysteria.” He cited “one very well documented case in California” in which “the first state record of the Sky Lark (a Eurasian species) was misidentified for days, and by hundreds of people, as the state’s first Smith’s Longspur.” Turns out, hysteria is practically a common problem among birders, ghost birders especially.
“There is a long list of well-studied effects,” Sibley told me. “There is peer pressure, the expectation of what they were there to do, as well as the authority effect of finding what the boss wants you to find.” Most of the Cornell sightings occurred in the surge of emotion immediately following Gallagher’s return to Cornell. Shortly after the sizzle of that emotion faded away, so did all the sightings.
It’s this emotion that almost every birder has described and has described at greater length, often, than the sighting of the bird.
I know what this emotion is like.
A few weeks after Tippit and I saw our bird, I went back into the swamp with none other than Bobby Harrison, the ivory-bill rock star. If you’re going to spend a day in a swamp, there is no one better to spend it with than Harrison. He had a nearly silent trolling motor, so we were able to penetrate the darkness of the swamp this time without a peep, except when we were beating off cottonmouth snakes with our paddles or portaging the whole rig over frustrating logjams. After three miles we came into an area called Blue Hole, and we had puttered up the way just past a visible ARU when suddenly: bam-bam. “Did you hear that?” Harrison said. I had. No question. We pulled the canoe onto a mud bank and stepped out. Visibility was becoming limited, not because of light but because the forest was in early bud. Leaves were growing bigger, it seemed, by the hour, making the distant vistas close right up around us. As Harrison and I stood there, a large black-and-white bird came from behind us and soared into the green. “Did you see that?” he said. I did. We both looked at each other. My face was a blank because, the truth is, I am a birder with greenhorn skills. Was that a woodpecker or a duck? Had I seen white on the trailing feathers? Honestly, I didn’t know. The moment was brief, and when it passed, Harrison’s eyes tightened with disappointment. “I couldn’t tell,” he said.
Had I declared that I had seen a panel of white, what might have happened? Would Harrison have then asked me: Was it on the trailing feathers? Well, maybe so. Was the bird large? Yes it was. Did it have a long neck? Yes, I think it did. And what if my editor, the day before, had told me that it would be a good story if I went out with Harrison but a cover story if I saw the bird with him? What if I knew that a confirmed sighting by a New York Times Magazine writer would land me on a half dozen prime-time news shows as the man who confirmed Cornell’s sightings after long absence? Maybe I’d get that interview with the secretary of the interior?
Instead, I shrugged because I didn’t see anything I felt comfortable confirming. And then we paddled on. But the adrenaline moment was right there. Had I given in—I could feel the tug, too—had we talked it out, the sighting would have been as real as if I had seen something. In short order, it would have been another sighting, pillowed as they all were by powerful emotions so that, recollected in tranquility, the details could be recalled with absolute certainty. Such emotions cushion every sighting.
The first sentence of Gallagher’s book reads, “I think I’ve always been the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests, most of which seem to involve birds.” This sentiment of deep longing grips all those from Cornell.
“It’s been a fixation since early childhood,” Fitzpatrick told me. In many ways, Gallagher’s book can be read not as a birder’s adventure of discovery but as a fanatic’s confession of self-delusion.
Gallagher admits he’s prone to “quixotic quests.” And in his own book, he notes that ivory-bill skeptics have long said things like “If you want to see an ivory-bill bad enough, a crow flying past with sunlight flashing on its wings can look pretty good.” The code name used for the bird during the Inventory Project was “Elvis.” As a Southerner, I immediately wondered if Cornell understood the joke. Elvis is, how you say, extinct. Only menopausal fans and postmodern ironists believe that bumper sticker: ELVIS LIVES.
If you read Gallagher’s book closely, you see that he provides that pedigree of sightings that led to his own. He had heard about the location in Arkansas from Sparling, the kayaker. But Gallagher also tells the story of how Sparling came to kayak in the Bayou de View. It involves a ghost-chaser named Mary Scott, who told Sparling that she had seen an ivory-bill in the Big Woods of Arkansas the year before.
Scott was a lawyer who in midlife abandoned her profession and decided to live in a yurt near her parents’ house in Long Beach, California. On one birding expedition, Scott took along a friend who knew a “woodpecker whisperer.” Mary called the clairvoyant on her cell phone from the swamp and learned that the bird wanted to be seen but was troubled by the group’s “energy.” Scott eventually wandered off by herself and, she says, saw the bird. In fact, Scott sees the bird quite a lot when she’s alone, and she’s also never able to get her camera out of the backpack in time.
“I must admit,” Gallagher nevertheless writes in his book, “I had come to believe strongly in her sighting.” And that’s the pedigree of the ivory-billed woodpecker sighting. Set aside the Department of the Interior, the Nature Conservancy, and Cornell University, and you have Harrison and Gallagher. Go back before them and you have the kayaker. Go back before him, following the chain of sightings, all linked by fervent ghost-chasers in a state of high emotion, and it leads back ultimately to a yurt-dwelling, courthouse dropout charting her course in the swamp with the help of a woodpecker whisperer on a cell phone.
Watching the massive rollout of IBWO 2.0 during the Bush administration was to see how much the methodology of the Massive Product Rollout has dominated the first decade of the millennium. Back in the summer before the Iraq invasion, some press members asked if war was imminent. Andrew Card, then chief of staff, famously noted, “From a marketing point of view, you do not introduce new products in August.” So we invaded the following March, a month whose very name seemed to synergize with the product (and/or service) being marketed.
The Rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was a product rollout that flooded the media pipelines and created a capital T Truth in the minds of the media and the public. So when it turned out that the new marketed truth was flawed, how could one push back against the Cornell publicity machine or the White House’s sycophantic press corps?
As for the attempts by Prum and Robbins on the one hand and Sibley et al. on the other, all went to scholarly journals. They were banking on a system that may no longer function. They expected the scholarly journals to pronounce their findings and stamp upon them the imprimatur of authority.
But as critics of the Bush administration discovered in the new media ecosystem, one cannot rely upon the media at large to spread any particular idea other than one issued officially from the high perch of authority. So if you don’t have a Cornell (or a White House) operation to flood the zone, it’s not easy to get the counter-story heard. The marketing plan dominates, the array of speakers stay “on message,” and the new truth continues to stand.
The quaint notion of old-school truth—just the facts, ma’am—cannot really compete with a Massive Product Rollout. It took a while for the public and the media to understand this new shift. By the time Bush had a national emergency to drive his marketing, rational truth had become so small a part of our national discourse that the Bush administration could easily dismiss it as the idle pursuit of the liberal media. The old Enlightenment sense that truth is mutually arrived at through dialogue and debate had been reduced to a hat tip and a slogan. The President would often proclaim that we had had a debate to get us past the fact that the marketing plan intended to skip that part.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had a chat about journalism and the Watergate story of Woodward and Bernstein that ended with this exchange:
STEWART: The truth is the media couldn’t break Watergate today?
COLBERT: That’s right, Jon, it just no longer has the credibility.
STEWART: The media?
COLBERT: No, the truth.
The problem for the “truth” was made even more difficult for the skeptics confronting the massive IBWO 2.0 rollout. All Cornell had to do was take the discussion further and further into the academic weeds of mind-numbing specifics and stay on message. The slow pace of Enlightenment-style scholarship meant that it would take another six months to a year for the skeptics to write a formal reply.
Pretty soon, the “debate” about the ivory-bill got very weedy. At one point, Cornell examined the blurred bird and determined that it beat its wings 8.7 times per second, which was what the historic tapes from the 1930s recorded for ivory-bills. Pileateds on the other hand averaged 7 to 7.5 beats per second. Now, in order for the academic system to rebut this claim, someone would have to step forward with a professional understanding of wing-beat theory, knowledge of how best to count wingbeats, an acquaintance with the problems of wingbeats on video, as well as the unique controversies of wingbeats on blurred video.
Oy. It would take scholarship years to respond to these snooze-inducing details. In the flowering of all the new media in the new millennium, though, there appeared one that moved at precisely the opposite speed of a peer-reviewed journal, and it rode to the rescue. The blog. Specifically, Tom Nelson’s blog.
Nelson was no expert. He’s an electronics engineer and a passionate birder with a healthy skepticism. His casual blog—tomnelson.blogspot.com—quickly became the gathering spot for all the amateurs in the larger sense—non-credentialed and credentialed birders who were outsiders to the Cornell clique.
Reading this blog while also listening to Cornell’s occasional statements is to see how amateurism at its best confounds uptight pros. Granted, Cornell had been fighting rope-a-dope ever since Mark Robbins and Rick Prum complained. But the bloggers simply delighted in the fight, while Cornell had empires to lose. Journalism critics who don’t much care for blogs always complain how they are infected with an infantile, sometimes potty-mouthed glee—snark. When you watch a real amateur assault on an academic and government fortress, it’s not hard to understand the pleasure. Cornell dug in and issued thin-lipped statements, while Nelson’s blog ruinously hooted at the “six-pixel bird.”
Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to seeing anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know. On the other hand, once you introduce the prospect of getting a piece of the Department of the Interior’s $10 million ivory-bill habitat restoration fund (or a no-bid contract in Iraq), that becomes its own massive distortion field. The immediate prospect of money, power, or prestige obviously blurs one’s ability to discern the truth. And it makes it much easier to look into the fuzzy image of some de-interlaced pixels and see not only 8.7 wingbeats per second but also, as Gallagher wrote insanely in his book, “what appeared to be a large bird with a black-crested head and a white bill peering out from behind a tupelo.”
What Sibley and his coauthors did with their observations about the bird in flight on the Luneau video, the Nelson blog did to every claim, every jot and tittle, regardless of how small or specialized. The rolling conversation of several years permitted every tiny aspect of the Cornell claim to get aired, challenged, defended, but—ultimately—debunked.
No issue was so difficult that some reader couldn’t provide a challenge and show that Cornell’s evidence was far more slippery than it appeared. For instance, since Cornell apparently only saw one bird, how unlikely is it that that bird was an albino or a bird with abnormal pigmentation in the feathers, known as leucism? A common pileated with enough abnormal addition of white feathers would look, on the fly, very much like an ivory-bill. One amateur’s posting slays Cornell in a simple pithy line:
what are the odds of an albino—remote—but they are more likely than a single unattended ibwo.
What developed online was an amateur effort at peer review. In the arcane world of birding, this was not unlike the fight in the larger culture between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia—a fight between highly authoritative versus user-generated content, between credentialed experts and enthusiastic amateurs. Science magazine published Sibley’s article and Fitz’s reply, but Science refused to publish Sibley’s subsequent answer to Fitz. Moreover, they kept most of their coverage out of the peer-reviewed section and ran a journalistic article or note about the ongoing coverage. It was all very delicate and Science is still afflicted by the fact that they ran this article. The original finding still stands and Science says it has no intention of retracting Fitz’s original article. Officially, then, in the annals of peer review, the ivory-bill flourishes in Arkansas.
But on the blogs, there was none of this supercilious fragility. The bloggers wanted to debate the evidence and test every claim. And they did it with brio.
The argument put forward by Cornell’s rollout formed a trio of claims—the video, the sightings, and the sound/scaling evidence. Each pillar of the argument crumbled—overwhelmed by amateurs dissecting it, testing it, reevaluating it outside the heat of Cornell’s august authority. It must have been infuriating for Fitz.
Those sounds recorded in the woods: readers quickly provided the more likely counterproof, with source and page number. Jackson’s In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, page 182, relates an account of hearing a blue jay give precisely the ivory-bill’s call in New Jersey—far outside the range of ivory-bills.
One of Cornell’s arguments for no one seeing the bird in the years after their small clique had a few emotional sightings was that the bird was elusive and shy—despite the bird’s well-known reputation as a show-off. There are photographs from the old days of people putting the ivory-bill on their own heads and posing for the cameras. Woody Woodpecker’s gregarious character is modeled in part on the ivory-bill.
Cornell argued that the more bashful birds had been selected out since the most gregarious and ostentatious ivory-bills would likely be the ones that got shot. Good point, until Nelson himself noted that the ivory-bill had been hunted intensively for two hundred years, which ends essentially around World War II:
I see no reason why the Ivorybill would stay half-tame through over 200 years of hunting pressure, then make a quantum leap to ultra-wariness during 60+ years of no hunting pressure.
Some of the blog posts do not address science at all, but just human nature. One writer pored over Harrison’s various statements and publications and put it bluntly and without ornamentation:
Bobby [Harrison] has seen an Ivory-bill FIVE times now.
Another of the best sightings among the Cornell team was Casey Taylor’s. She heard the double knocks and then saw the bird. That elevated her sighting in the minds of experienced birders since having more than one indicator is a pretty good index to authenticity. But Nelson read the account closely and noted:
In “The Grail Bird,” page 246, Gallagher says that Taylor heard all the raps, and then: “Casey sat still for about a half-hour without seeing or hearing anything of interest.” Only after this half-hour without rapping did she glimpse a woodpecker.
Open-source peer review brought up issues that individual scholars wouldn’t be able to see in time. For instance, the bloggers kept a running account of how many details got nudged ever so slightly in the direction of confirming the bird.
Like Casey Taylor’s sighting, there existed a form of evidentiary drift in Cornell’s accounts, and Nelson’s blog caught every speck of it. The Luneau video? When Bobby Harrison first watched it, he said, “It makes a bad Bigfoot movie look good.” Then, slowly but surely, he found himself agreeing with Fitz that the blurry image was “clearly an Ivory-bill.” Gallagher elevates the blur to solid proof, saying: “Virtually all of the ivory-bill’s major field marks were there, albeit fuzzy.”
When 60 Minutes did a piece on the bird, Nelson questioned the description of Arkansas woods as some vast wilderness. The TV host purplishly described the bayou as “one of the most exotic and the most inhospitable environments in America, a vast primordial ooze, a place so wild, that the Big Woods have been called this country’s Amazon.” Forget the facts—constantly noted in the blog—that most sightings occurred within earshot of an interstate and the white noise of speeding traffic. (That was definitely true for my visits, too—the whine of distant high-speed traffic was inescapable.) But Nelson nailed it perfectly:
Ok, the Big Woods isn’t small, but let’s not get carried away. According to this link, the Amazon’s total drainage basin is about 2.7 million square miles in size. The Big Woods of Arkansas is about 860 (.00086 million) square miles in size. In terms of square miles, South America’s Amazon is over 3000 times larger than “our Amazon.”
Ultimately the blog settled on a metaphor for the Cornell sighting, and it was infuriating to the Ivy League ornithologists: Bigfoot. The bloggers organically generated a set of entertaining but serious Bigfoot rules to explain why the evidence in both the ivory-billed woodpecker and Bigfoot cases involved blurry video, fleeting sightings, and ambiguous proof of presence (scalings, footprints).
The blogger explanation for why the video is always fuzzy (whether it’s Bigfoot, IBWO, Loch Ness, Chupacabra—doesn’t matter) was brilliant: The minute the view of, say, a Loch Ness Monster gets clearer, then the person can see that it’s a log. Similarly, the reason no one ever caught sight of the bird’s eponymous field marking—IBWO’s ivory bill—is because when observers did see the bill, it was black, like a pileated’s. The reason Bigfoot is always looking away or at an angle is because if you saw him square on, the bear’s trademark ears would give him away. The reason the bird never perches is because that would give the observer an extra second or two to calm down from the adrenaline rush of seeing an ivory-bill and realize that the markings are actually those of a pileated. And I should simply add, when I went out in the Big Woods with Tippit and later with Harrison—both times—the forest was full of pileateds. At dusk, especially, they rioted everywhere.
Nelson cited a quote from Benjamin Radford of the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, nicely summing up the problem of having so much marginal evidence serving as solid proof: “I liken it to a cup of coffee—if you have many cups of weak coffee, they can’t be combined into strong coffee.”
The one great flaw of blogs and journalism is that they have no way of making grand pronouncements. Both of those media are about unfinished things, first, rough drafts of something or other—discussions, not declarations. That’s the one thing about high authority. They do that declaration thing very well. Blogs and lowly reporters can get the word out, slowly, but they don’t get pageantry, flags, granite-chiseled peer-reviewed findings, $10 million budget lines, or press conferences.
Today’s exploded, highly niched media ecosystem has not yet worked out a meaningful way to accommodate the new forms of truth assessment, especially in light of the Internet’s retooling of wikified amateurs into an uncoordinated form of (always ongoing) peer review. So what happens when the Great Citadel of Truth is assaulted successfully by the outsiders? In theory, it should be that the new facts get declared and everybody goes home to start fresh, working off the new reality. But it’s not like that in the real world. In the real world, you end up eating “Sweet-and-Sour Bovine Penis Braised, with Testicular Partners.”
Let me explain.
Even while more and more birders were tuning in to the skeptics’ arguments, and as they were becoming more and more convinced that the declaration of the IBWO was a perfect storm of misunderstanding, the alternate reality of the flourishing ivory-bill was enjoying glamorous balls on Park Avenue. Not long after I returned from the swamps of Arkansas, I got invited to the Explorers Club annual gala. Among the highlights on the bill that night was the Harrison and Gallagher show with kayaker Gene Sparling, too.
The Explorers Club is a grown-up version of the Boy Scouts, minus the solemnity of tying knots. In the Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom, the evening required a tuxedo to join thousands for a sit-down dinner. More than a few of the members literally paraded about in pith helmets, and these members often favored entertainingly baroque mustaches, as well. The entertainment was exotic, of the old-school aristocratic style. For instance, there was a visit, in the ballroom, from a llama. A real-life march of the penguins occurred on stage. At one point, a massive raptor hawk was released from the balcony and swooped, on cue, above our dinner tables to the podium. It eyeballed the crowd with stern accipitrine judgment and then flew back. The ivory-bill trio mingled among the crowd, looking fairly uncomfortable, especially Harrison, whose camouflage ghillie suits fit him better than black tie. Tonight they would be honored with the coveted President’s Award for Conservation. Their sighting story was the early party chatter, as we all hung around a banquet table loaded with those braised bull penises with sweet and sour testicles, as well as “Kangaroo Balls Bourguignon.”
I have long kept my genitalia consumption restricted to the metaphorical realm, and my tradition survived the evening. I did try the Spanish goat and the weird fish. Otherwise, the presentation that night by the ivory-bill performers was their usual tale of derring-do, of initial disbelief, of high emotion, of sighting the bird and the Oprah moment of sobs that followed. The audience of thousands loved it. And even if anyone in the room had read the blogs or Sibley, the explorers appeared to think of the ivory-bill the way children think of Tinker Bell, and they clapped the fading specter back to life with insistent and thunderous applause. Here I witnessed what I had come to see in other realms. There are two phyla of media consumers—high-information voters versus low-information voters. The high-information voter knows the details, the facts, and the ambiguities—that the full story is “complicated.” The low-information voter knows the surface contours of the story and just enough details to shake an affirming head when someone says that life, in fact, is “just that simple.” And so it was at the Explorers Club. The chatter beneath the pith helmets was about the thrill of the ivory-bill’s rediscovery. Reports of Sibley’s critique were out there, yet here one heard not a peep of dissent near the “Mealworms with Durian Paste, on Toastettes.”
As the evidence crumbled, though, there almost seemed to be a battle afoot to see which metaphorical conceit could possibly capture the tragedy here. Was this a Bigfoot story, or was it more ominous? Some bloggers—furious that Cornell would not admit that it might have made a mistake—argued that persistence in a known mistake amounts to a kind of fraud and compared the ivory-bill to notorious hoaxes, the Piltdown Man (“fossil” of transitional early human dug up in England) and the Cardiff Giant (“bones” of a ten-foot petrified man found in New York State). Or was this more like Bush’s invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction?
“The Arkansas ivory-bill is the WMD of ornithology,” Prum told me at one point. Or was Jackson’s “faith-based ornithology” spot-on from the beginning with all that talk of “these woods are my church” and the nearly Calvinist insistence that not everybody is chosen to “see” the bird.
With all this metaphor-mongering, what was plainly evident was that something much deeper than bird-watching was tugging at this story. News storms like this one are no different than really great novels or blockbuster movies—the themes and the details manage to somehow gather up strands of wayward anxiety and pluck complex chords that resonate in ways far beyond the facts (or lack of them).
My first real hint of this came when I went out with Harrison to look for the bird. It was a chilly morning in Arkansas when Harrison and I drove just outside of Brinkley to visit with a Fish and Wildlife clerk named Karen, sporting ivory-bill earrings. She winked at Harrison as I got my permit, and she told us she’d been hearing something coming out of an area called the George Tract. The ground there was not exactly swamp—just wet, full of sinks and little bogs—but some had reported a few trees with scalings that might be indicative of the ivory-bill. We were grateful since her telling us this was like a competitive angler betraying a prime fishing hole. As our truck rattled down the road, I asked Harrison if he could remember when he first got bit by Ivory-bill Fever.
“Oh, sure,” he said without pausing. “It was after reading Don Moser’s article in Life magazine in 1972. I was seventeen years old.”
I had been hearing about this article—an account of a search for the ivory-bill—since the festival. Gallagher had mentioned it in his talk, and I noticed how often it came up in lunchtime chats with visiting birders. “I remember reading that Life magazine article,” Fitzpatrick later told me. So I ordered the old magazine. From paragraph to paragraph, Moser’s story quivers with melancholy and wistful longing, and, as is typically found in Yankee writing about the South, the author’s prose goes all damp as he contemplates a landscape of things lost and, at twilight, almost found.
“If the question of its existence remains unanswered it will continue to range the back country of the mind,” Moser trembled, “and those who wish to trail it there can find it in their visions.” The article speaks reverentially of the earlier two Cornell expeditions, the first one by the director, Arthur Allen, that resulted in the famous films and recordings in 1935 and the return in 1937 by Cornell graduate student James Tanner, who spent two years studying the birds.
“It’s a funny thing about that magazine,” Harrison said. “I cannot tell you how many people I stumble upon out here in the woods, and when we get to talking, I find out that they were inspired by the exact same article.” The editor of Science, too, went on in his own pages about how a magazine article on the ivory-bill changed his life.
When I went back to read up on those original expeditions into the Singer Tract in Louisiana, I discovered that each time there was the indispensable local who knew the land, understood the ways of wildlife, and happily agreed to tell funny stories while leading the academics into the woods. In 1935, Allen made his way in the swamp working on a tip from a colorful local guy named Mason Spencer.
Two years later, Tanner was accompanied by another folksy local yokel, named J. J. Kuhn. The more I read up on these two expeditions, the more I found myself concerned less with the bird than with the characters.
Every time, these expeditions seemed to be remakes of the exact same buddy flick. The courtly intellectual from the Yankee Ivy League college gets taken into the woods by the joshing redneck who knows the ground instinctively. It was The Gallagher and Harrison Show each time—these two iconic characters partnering up to enter the woods, as if they were required to give the claim some kind of deeper credibility. Read about enough of these ivory-bill sightings, and they have the same eerie quality of those group pictures in the movie The Shining—the same people turning up in the picture, no matter what year it was taken.
In his editorial on the rediscovery, Science’s editor gushed over the authenticity of the local who “guided two members of the Cornell team into the right area.” Kennedy added: “It is fortunate for science that it attracts people who may lack special training or higher degrees but have found the knowledge and confidence to know that they can do real science.”
Despite all the press mentions that Fitz’s sightings were the first in “sixty years,” it turns out that there have been regular, notable sightings (later dismissed) every few years or so since Tanner left the woods with the last verifiable pictures of the bird: In 1950, Chipola River, Florida. In 1955, Homosassa, Florida. In 1958, Altamaha River, Georgia. In 1959, Aucilla River, Florida. In 1966, Big Thicket, Texas. In 1967, Green Swamp, Florida. In 1971, Atchafalaya Basin, Louisiana. In 1975, near Baton Rouge. In 1978, DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi. In 1982, Pascagoula River, Mississippi. In 1985, Loxahatchee River, Florida. In 1987, Yazoo River, Mississippi. In 1988, Ojito de Agua, Cuba. In 1999, Pearl River, Louisiana. Each sighting has mythic tones, and not just because the iconic bird could never be definitively seen. There was often that repetition of plot that marks the cultural myth—the Mutt and Jeff characters, the almost-confirmed sighting, the fuzzy image.
Some of these sightings led to vicious disagreements. The 1966 sighting by a very respected birder, John Dennis, was dismissed by none other than the godfather of ivory-bills, James Tanner: “Dennis wants to believe he saw something,” Tanner said. “But he didn’t.” In 1971, George Lowery came forward with a story that he had befriended a knowledgeable local, a local Indian who trained his dogs in the swamp. Lowery refused to identify the Indian or the location of the sighting. But the Indian had given him two fuzzy Kodak instamatic pictures of an ivory-bill on two different trees.
After critics had a little time with the two pictures, they noticed that the ivory-bill had the exact same body posture in both pictures. The conclusion was that the bird was stuffed and put up in the tree. Lowery stood by his Indian friend, never revealing his identity, until his death. He died a disgraced birder.
The burden of the ivory-bill history runs from Tanner’s beautiful book to Lowery’s ignominious exile from ornithology. “Am I worried?” Fitzpatrick mused to me when I asked him where in that spectrum this sighting fell. “That if the ivory-bill is never seen again, that people will look back and say Fitzpatrick laid an egg? No, I did the right thing to jump on the story and put resources on the ground. We continue to focus on this as a conservation story whether or not the bird decorates the treetops.” As always with Fitz, the bird is a decoration, a badge—on the large suit of forest restoration.
In South Carolina in 1968, a disputed sighting petered out when the professionals entered the woods with one of the most colorful men the state has ever produced: Alex Sanders. (Alex is an acquaintance of mine.) The hubbub around the possible sighting eventually led to the protection of the Congaree Swamp. That seems to be another mythic quality to the story: The result of a flawed sighting is the protection of vast forests, a desperate effort to reclaim some part of the past that is, well, past. After the 1971 disputed sighting in Texas, 84,550 acres would become the Big Thicket National Preserve. The Nature Conservancy says that it will simply carry on the work of expanding the Big Woods Conservation Area.
This repetitive quality to the stories, with so many of the same features—the experts, the fuzzy image, the pleas for belief and the collapse of the evidence, the Yankee intellectual and the Southern woodsman, the ultimate quest for land protection—meant that the search for the ivory-bill wasn’t merely a Freudian story of childhood dreams. This was American mythology.
One afternoon while I was ivory-bill hunting, I stopped into the Gene’s BBQ there on the main drag in Brinkley to catch an ivorybill cheeseburger. Bobby Harrison was there, and a couple of locals started talking to us about the bottomland swamps. Talk like this in the South usually means you’re going to be discussing special places to hunt—where to find the good turkeys, where the mallards feed. But at one point, one of the old guys referred to one spot as particularly hard to navigate since the growth had really come back after “all that cutting.” When I asked when that happened—the cut—he said, “Oh, more than a century ago.” This is one aspect of my native South that I have always admired: People carry around knowledge of long-ago events as if they just happened.
Most people couldn’t tell you what happened on their own land a year before they bought it, but a century ago? Yet these guys talked repeatedly of the “logging” as if they were referring to 9/11. In terms of terrorism, the comparison is almost appropriate.
The swampy areas in the South are “hardwood bottomlands,” and upland areas tend to have favored a longleaf pine forest. A century or so ago, these two interwoven, interconnected ecosystems had a wide range. During a lecture at the festival by a Nature Conservancy guy, he posted a slide showing the range of these ecosystems and the range of the ivory-billed woodpecker that used to flourish in them. It hit me like a slap in the face.
The longleaf pine system, for instance, ran down the East Coast from Virginia to Florida’s panhandle and then ran west as far as Texas, covering ninety million acres, and was said to be the largest single-species ecosystem in the world. And when you set over that the range of the ivory-bill, which is a slightly smaller version of that image, and then step back, you realize you are looking at an ecosystem that already has a name.
Dixie. How coincidental was it that the world of this bird and this larger ecosystem roughly bracketed the world we would come to call the Old South?
Many early naturalists visiting the South looked upon the longleaf ecosystem in awe. It was not the deep dark forest as most of us come to understand it. Almost no thickets grew in this forest. It was open, cathedral-like, populated largely by tall longleaf pine poles, which grew straight and true. A longleaf forest looks orderly and tidy and endless. Horseback riders could gallop through it effortlessly for hours. This ecosystem was also called the “fire forest” because it would naturally burn every year. The longleaf pines dropped their luxurious needles, some as long as eighteen inches, throughout the year. Coated in a highly flammable resin, they stacked up slowly, and by the really hot months of July and August, a lightning strike would catch them on fire. The fire was unavoidable, and so combustible are these needles, there are accounts of the forest burning even in a rainstorm. But it’s a ground fire, more than a smoldering fire, not an all-consuming forest fire. It’s just enough for the longleaf, which can survive a ground fire, to burn back its competitors—the oak tree, the gum, the hickory, etc. It’s one impressive adaptation.
Even the animals that live in a fire forest have adapted to it, almost like some kind of Disney movie. In the southernmost portion of the fire forest, the gopher tortoise, a fairly large creature that grows a little bigger than a dinner plate, digs a burrow some thirty feet in length. During the fires, the burrow becomes a kind of air raid shelter for all kinds of insects, snakes, birds, mice, everybody. Biologists who’ve studied this arrangement have determined that some three hundred different species make temporary use of the gopher tortoise hole when the fires hit. Meanwhile, all their competitors flee. Evolution, doing its thing.
So a fire forest, when it is not burning, is distinguished by its open, sunny quality. The earliest settlers for instance found these woods so repetitive in appearance that it was easy to get lost in them. You would not enter them without taking a local guide. In Savannah, Georgia, the town fired a cannon at the day’s end, so that men in the woods could follow the sound home. There were special laws governing widows whose husbands wandered off into the forest and never came back.
It was a place where, according to ivory-bill expert Lester Short, the ivory-bill could dine all day and where the bird preferred to live. “The habitat in the United States is usually cited as being deep, tall swamp forest,” Short wrote in his classic Woodpeckers of the World. “However, it is my view that the species originally inhabited the virgin pine forests of southeastern North America. These pines were cut over rather early, because of their accessibility, probably restricting the Ivorybill to less optimal swamp hardwood forests.”
The story of that cut-over is one of the hidden histories of the South, surviving mostly in the anecdotal remarks of men sitting around barbeque joints. It’s the largely unknown story of what happened in the cruel decades after the Civil War when the survivors in the South, black and white, had no economy and struggled to find a way to make ends meet.
Beginning in roughly 1880, speculators saw the easiest business opportunity in the history of the world: ninety million acres of the most beautiful pine on earth and, living right on top of it, a desperate, starving labor force.
There was even a book published in 1880 called How to Get Rich in the South, written by W. H. Harrison Jr., who was either the grandson of the President by that name, or a man who never corrected the assumption. I bought an original copy off the Internet, and it is a breathtaking read.
The chapters have names like “Cattle” and “Duck,” breaking the South down into every exploitable commodity no matter how small. There are chapters on “Beans, Snap” and “Cabbages, Early.” And on down it runs until the last chapter on timber. It encourages speculators to hurry because “the lumbermen of the North are buying up large tracts of valuable timber lands and putting in saw-mills.” Land in the South, the author tells his eager readers, that “is now for sale at $1 to $3 an acre will bring $50 to $100 within twenty years, for its timber. Southern timber land is an absolute certainty as a profitable investment.”
And the speculators descended, and the timber companies also came, buying up land in 100,000-acre dollops. One can argue about the dates, but, effectively, between 1880 and 1920 the eleven states of the Old South were clear-cut into a confederacy of muddy stumps. Railroads were temporarily erected into even the most inaccessible areas. When Bobby Harrison and I fought our way three miles back into the Blue Hole area of the swamp, we came across the rotting remains of a raised railroad line, a century old.
These loggers were sloppy, wasteful, and reckless. In the slang of the day, they “cut out and got out.” Rivers churned with what looked like and was the melting sludge of hills dissolving into plains. Ghost towns appeared after an area was “sawed out.” The mountains of sawdust left behind often would catch fire from lightning and smoke for years. Visitors to the South in this time would comment on how no amount of travel could get a tourist away from smoke coming from somewhere.
The devastation was so extensive that state revenues dropped as taxable forest property had to be reclassified as nontaxable wasteland, thus extending the economic crisis of 1865 into an eighty-year catastrophe.
Other economies eventually arrived in the mid-twentieth century, such as planting over the old longleaf soils with loblolly and slash pine to feed the paper mills. Historians have written about the paradox of this timber era. It was a culture that was so remote and brutal, it left no songs or slang, no famous workers or evil foreman and barely any written accounts. Almost effortlessly, the shame of this massive clear-cut receded into history, largely without leaving one.
So the wild primeval swamps and the cathedral stretches of pine forest in the South were sheared into flat farmland by the time Allen and his party headed south. In fact their destination, an 81,000-acre stand of virgin forest, was known as the Singer Tract because the sewing machine company owned it to cut wood to make the cabinets for their sewing machines. It was the last, large section of Dixie’s original forest.
It’s hard to imagine that it’s a coincidence that the story of the ivory-bill so often involves a re-creation of the outsider coming down and hooking up with a local guide for an expedition into the endless forest. The penitent Northern scientist coming South to find a smart-alecky good old boy from Dogpatch—these two light out for the swamp and find the elusive bird with mythic regularity.
The ivory-bill’s habitat is the South’s Eden, the haunting swamps, the majestic pine forest. The names of the areas where it’s been sighted—the Big Woods of Arkansas, the Big Thicket of Texas—suggest the very landscape it needs to survive: a large and wild habitat, crowded with patriarchal trees and brimming with wildlife. To see an ivory-bill is to confirm that we haven’t destroyed what feels like the very origin of life. The swamp’s ivory-bill is Noah’s dove, surviving improbably long after a catastrophe we’d rather not remember, to tell us we are pardoned. Lord God Bird, forgive us our trespasses.
After Tanner returned from his famous 1937 study, a massive effort was launched to save the ivory-bill and its last known address, the Singer Tract. By then, in the middle of World War II, this last and biggest stretch of wilderness was leased by Chicago Mill and Lumber. The company wanted to sell the land, since there was no labor to cut the wood at the beginning of the war. A man named Richard Pough recognized its value and arranged to buy it as a way to conserve it. He would later found the Nature Conservancy. He had four governors sign on to this project, as well as President Roosevelt. He traveled to Chicago to ink the deal. When the president of Chicago Mill entered the room, he apologized and said the deal was off. “We are just money-grubbers,” he explained. He went on to say that they had found some labor. The Chicago Mill learned that German soldiers were being held in Mississippi POW camps and could be used to cut down trees practically for free. The meetings ended, and, despite the intervention of four governors, the last large stand of virgin forest in the Old South was clear-cut by Nazis.
The ivory-bill is a bird we’ll be seeing again and again. The story tugs at too much history and too many emotions to be resolved in some neat and tidy way, like a child’s story, happily ever after. Here’s how powerful a tale it is. Almost immediately after the Cornell announcement and as the certainty of their proof began to falter, the bird flew to the northern panhandle of Florida. There, an Auburn professor and ornithologist named Geoff Hill went to the Choctawhatchee River and the satisfaction came quickly. His assistant Brian Rolek, whom Hill describes as a “novice birder,” was the only one to spot the bird.
“Brian had studied the field marks of a perched Ivory-bill before our trip but not those of an Ivory-bill in flight,” Hill wrote in Bird-Watching magazine. Naturally, he saw the bird in flight and didn’t see the white bill, just “large patches of white only on the back (trailing) portion of both the upper and underwing.”
After a while, the team was hearing about ivory-bills all over the place. “Despite the small scale of our search, we amassed substantial evidence—including more than 300 sound recordings of kent calls and double-knocks—that Ivory-bills were in the forests along the Choctawhatchee River,” Hill wrote. And they had thirteen sightings, nearly twice as many as Cornell. Hill notes without irony or embarrassment: “All of the sightings were of flying birds.” And his “best sighting” occurred “as I watched an Ivory-bill fly away from me.”
It was as if the team had not read any of the counterarguments or accumulated wisdom of the amateur bloggers. How else could you write something like this: “How could we detect birds so dependably for a full year and not get a photograph? My answer is that the woodpeckers do not want people close to them. They invariably detected us before we detected them.” No other bird in the world is as successful at avoiding trained bird-watchers as the Arkansas and Florida ivory-bills.
Hill’s team often catches sight of the “diagnostic shape, plumage pattern, or flight behavior characteristics of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers,” but never any of the definitive field marks. At an American Ornithologists’ Union meeting, Rolek presented “a grainy video of a bird that he identified in life as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.”
A grainy video? Well, that rounds out the story, doesn’t it? It’s like that scene in Shrek where all the stock characters of all the children’s fairy tales gather at the king’s palace, and you find yourself happily picking out the ones you recognize. Oh, there are the dwarfs. There is a troll. It is comforting when you recognize the ones you know are supposed to be there. When I heard that Hill had a blurry video, I felt oddly warmed by the flush of déjà vu. Of course there wasn’t enough enthusiasm this time, being so close to the Cornell sightings, to fluff interest in a festival. So donors to Hill’s search could only earn a “limited edition collector’s pin commemorating the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Florida panhandle” for $100 and Hill would throw in a “golf shirt with a specially-designed commemorative logo” for $250.
Although he has only amassed even more of the weak coffee that Nelson’s bloggers so smartly conclude doesn’t make for a strong brew, Hill nevertheless concludes: “Our evidence suggests that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers may be present in the forests along the Choctawhatchee River and warrants an expanded search of this bottomland forest habitat.” He added: “We are going to receive some state and federal funding for the upcoming field season, money that will allow us to have a much larger search team and to deploy many remote cameras.”
The money flows, and there’s pots of it because the federal government also apparently hasn’t kept up with Nelson’s blog or read Sibley’s articles. The Fish and Wildlife Service had a budget of $27 million to produce a “Recovery Plan” for the ivory-bill and still maintains a website to keep us all updated on the progress: www.fws.gov/ivorybill/. The site boasts that America “has a comprehensive recovery plan ready to implement wherever and whenever it is needed.” We can all sleep soundly now. Meanwhile, Cornell has withdrawn its forces and retreated into determined, if not pathetic, defense: “We found one bird,” said Fitz grimly, and he hasn’t really spoken about it since.
Prior to the Cornell finding, the official status of the bird was “endangered,” with no definitive sightings since the 1940s. And that is right back to where we are. The government officially holds that the bird may exist in this habitat and is now committed to preserving the habitat to maintain the bird. In one bizarre case in Arkansas, a judge actually halted a development because the construction work would imperil the ivory-billed woodpecker.
For now, the IBWO officially exists, on paper, and with federal protection to salve our mythic memories. At the very least, the government’s bedrock truth will lay the groundwork for a sighting in the future, when a new generation finds its own bookish intellectual to buddy up with some rustic from Mississippi (“You ought to hear him tell stories, seriously, he’s so funny”) and tell once again the tale of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Only to have it unraveled and unstrung by another band of committed amateurs.
The man who led the famous 1968 woodpecker hunt in South Carolina, Alex Sanders, says that he still gets questioned about it: “Over the course of the past thirty-five years, I have often been asked, ‘Where is the ivory-billed woodpecker?’ I’ve always answered truthfully, ‘I don’t know where he is now; but I know where he was when we needed him.’ Depending on who is asking, I sometimes add, ‘When we need him again, we’ll find him.’ ”