INTRODUCTION TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

A BIRD OF THE SIXTH WAVE

The first edition of The Race to Save the Lord God Bird was published on August 11, 2004, a full nine months before a gathering of prestigious scientists, conservationists, and officials publicly announced that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker had been rediscovered in Arkansas. I was not part of the search team, and was informed about the claimed sightings only a few weeks before headlines appeared everywhere.

It was a Nature Conservancy colleague who called me on a Sunday afternoon. “Are you sitting down?” he said. When he told me that experts, some from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, had recently sighted at least one Ivory-billed Woodpecker in an Arkansas swamp forest, I remember feeling first stunned and then skeptical. It just didn’t seem possible. How could even a small population of a bird not seen for sure in a half century have survived for so long? And if the bird they were reporting was the last individual, how old could it be? But soon tendrils of hope took root. What if it’s true? I kept wondering. How cool would that be!

My life as an author changed the instant the claim became public. There was overnight interest in my book. Sales heated up, and I was in sudden demand as a speaker. I flew down to Arkansas twice to give presentations and to join the search for signs of Ivory-bills. It was a gold-rush atmosphere of anticipation and excitement. Searchers paddled out every morning and came back at sundown to swap stories of finds, signs, glimpses, and near misses over dinner. I spent most of the next year on the road, narrating a PowerPoint presentation of the images in Race to Save to ever larger audiences. I visited twenty-six states and gave about eighty presentations to crowds at museums, schools, auditoriums, homes, Nature Conservancy field offices, downtown theaters, rural nature centers, a mansion in Kentucky, two zoos, and the Harvard Club of New York. A few times I co-presented with Gene Sparling, the kayaker who first reported seeing an Ivory-bill in Arkansas. We drew huge crowds. I would lead off with a presentation on the history of the Ivory-bill, its decline and attempts to save it, and then Gene would step forward to talk about Arkansas. He often brought audiences to tears.

As months went by, scientists began to author articles published in scientific journals challenging the claimed sightings in Arkansas. Their attitude was: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and what they were seeing wasn’t conclusive. As doubt and acrimony crept into the public discussion, my book appearances also took on a sharper edge. In the early, honeymoon phase, I would finish showing my slides, take a bow, and ask for questions. Audience members—shyly at first, and then with more nerve as conversation developed—raised their hands to discuss all sorts of things, from specifics of the Arkansas claims to the tragedy of extinction and what could be done about it. Those rooms were charged with hope and optimism. One time while I was signing books after an appearance in Louisville, Kentucky, I was startled to feel a hand crawl up my left arm as I scribbled my name with my right. The hand belonged to a woman, a complete stranger to me. “What are you doing?” I asked, jerking my arm away. “You’re channeling the spirit of that bird,” she said. “I want it, too.”

But once doubt surfaced, the question-and-answer discussions changed. A forest of hands would shoot up at the end. Nearly everyone wanted to know the same thing: Did I believe? Were the reports from Arkansas true? Was that really an Ivory-bill they saw? People did not want their freshly minted hope snatched away. To say Yes, I believe, was to be scorned by those who had lost the faith or never had it to begin with. To say No, I doubt, would mean that I was a spoilsport, a man incapable of hope, a wet blanket, an atheist. In those wild, fevered Arkansas days, I learned to present information, ignite discussion, and keep my opinions to myself.

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To become extinct is the greatest tragedy in nature. Extinction means that all the members of an entire species are dead; that an entire genetic family is gone, forever. Or, as ornithologist William Beebe put it, “When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

Some might argue that this doesn’t seem so tragic. After all, according to scientists, 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. And there have already been at least five big waves of mass extinction, caused by everything from meteorites to drought. The fifth and most recent wave, which took place a mere 65 million years ago, destroyed the dinosaurs along with about two-thirds of all animal species alive at that time. In other words, we’ve been through this before.

But the sixth wave, the one that’s happening now, is different. For the first time, a single species, Homo sapiens—humankind—is wiping out thousands of life forms by consuming and altering the earth’s resources. Humans now use up more than half of the world’s fresh water and nearly half of everything that’s grown on land. The sixth wave isn’t new; it started about twelve thousand years ago when humans began clearing land to plant food crops. But our impact upon the earth is accelerating so rapidly now that thousands of species are being lost every year. Each of these species belongs to a complicated web of energy and activity called an ecosystem. Together, these webs connect the smallest mites to the greatest trees.

This is a story about a species of the sixth wave, a species that was—and maybe still is—a bird of the deep forest. It took only a century for Campephilus principalis, more commonly known as the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, to slip from a flourishing life in the sunlit forest canopy to a marginal existence in the shadow of extinction. Many species declined during that same century, but the Ivory-bill became the singular object of a tug-of-war between those who destroyed and sold its habitat and a new breed of scientists and conservationists dedicated to preserving species by saving habitat. In some ways, the Ivory-bill was the first modern endangered species, in that some of the techniques used today to try to save imperiled plants and animals were pioneered in the race to rescue this magnificent bird.

I say the Ivory-bill “maybe still is” a bird of the deep forest because some observers, including some very good scientists, believe that a few Ivory-bills continue to exist. Since I first became interested in birds in 1975, I have read or heard dozens of reports that someone has just caught a fresh glimpse or heard the unmistakable call of the Ivory-bill. Again and again, even the slimmest of rumors sends hopeful bird-watchers lunging for their boots, smearing mosquito repellent onto their arms, and bolting out the door to look for it. Year after year they return with soggy boots, bug-bitten arms, and non-conclusive evidence.

The Ivory-bill is a hard bird to give up on. It was one of the most impressive creatures ever seen in the United States. Those who wrote about it—from John James Audubon to Theodore Roosevelt—were astonished by its beauty and strength. They gave it names like “Lord God bird” and “Good God bird.” Fortunately, in 1935, when there were just a few left, four scientists from Cornell University took a journey deep into a vast, primitive swamp and came back with a sound recording of the phantom’s voice and twelve seconds of film that showed the great bird in motion. It was a gift from, and for, the ages.

Cornell’s image sparked a last-ditch effort led by the Audubon Society to save the Ivory-bill in its wilderness home before it was too late. But others were equally intent on clearing and selling the trees before the conservationists could rescue the species.

The race to save the Ivory-bill became an early round in what is now a worldwide struggle to save endangered species. Humans challenged the Ivory-bill to adapt very quickly to rapidly shifting circumstances, but as events unfolded, the humans who tried to rescue the bird had to change rapidly, too. The Ivory-bill’s saga—perhaps unfinished—continues to give us a chance to learn and adapt. As we consider the native plants and animals around us, we can remind ourselves of the race to save the Lord God bird and ask, “What can we do to protect them in their native habitats while they’re still here with us?”