FIVE

Piney Woods and Cypress Swamps

Late April 2015

Red-cockaded Woodpecker

Out of the luminous mist in which the trees showed like ghosts I heard the forgotten voice of yesteryear—once and silence, again and silence, and again—at regular intervals from a grove of trees, the little buzzing, ascending wisp of song that the parula warbler gives off.

—LOUIS HALLE, Spring in Washington

The southern pinelands—or piney woods—cloak tens of millions of acres in the South. Migrant songbirds breed here, as do several rare and localized resident bird species, all prime incentives for me to visit the area. Pines grow in abundance in the uplands, but down in the flooded swamplands, the cypress flourishes.

Much of eastern Texas, western Louisiana, and southern Arkansas hold piney woods, and additional southern pinelands range from central Mississippi and northern Florida northeast to southernmost Virginia. Whereas the delta, with its deep black soils, supports row-crop agriculture, the pinelands’ sandy soil generates timber and pulpwood. As a result, after they are logged, these areas are quickly recycled back into monocultures of production pine forest. The good news is that the pinelands remain in a forested state. The bad news is much of this pine-forest acreage is overmanaged for timber and pulp, with relatively little left in its natural condition. Nearly gone are the magnificent and parklike Longleaf Pine savannas of the South, where tall pines once towered over sun-dappled grasslands. The open nature of those woodlands was maintained by periodic wildfire, but over the decades, as the pines were harvested for all sorts of construction tasks, from shipbuilding to flooring, wildfire was suppressed. Now less than 1 percent of that fire-dependent habitat remains.

Cypress, meanwhile, prospers in the standing blackwater swamps of oxbows and backwaters along the many tributaries of the Mississippi, from Louisiana north to southern Missouri and southernmost Illinois. Just as the piney woods are favored habitat for an array of songbird migrants, the cypress swamps attract their own songbird specialists. I searched for these birds with the help of various local naturalists as I traipsed from Texas and Arkansas to Missouri and Illinois.

ORIENTATION: THE INTERNAL COMPASS

As I moved about from site to site, I sought to get a sense of this large inland region. The wood warblers I followed did the same thing, not using maps and GPS as I did but instead employing specialized sensory faculties to orient themselves with respect to where they were and where they needed to go to arrive safely at their breeding grounds. Orientation is pretty simple in theory—it is the ability to distinguish north from south, and east from west. It essentially means that you have access to a compass. There is no doubt that migrant songbirds have the capacity to orient themselves properly with regard to compass direction. The mystery, of course, is how they manage to achieve this without having access to an actual compass.

Yearling songbirds in their northern breeding habitat first learn to orient in the late summer, when they must head south to their winter habitat for the first time. First they experience an innate urge to disperse from their natal territory, based on the birds’ internal annual calendar. This calendar is kept in calibration by external astronomical cues, including day length and the path traced by the sun across the sky each day. The birds also possess the innate ability to determine direction—an internal compass. What is the nature of this compass? We now know that birds possess several tools to orient themselves. The first is the sun. By tracking the sun’s path across the sky, a bird, with knowledge of the season of the year and the time of day, can orient itself to a proper compass direction. Second, birds can also detect the plane of polarized light in the sky—and thus the position of the sun—even after sunset or on cloudy days.

That said, many migratory songbirds migrate at night, well after the sun has set. What then? Songbirds use the starry night sky to determine compass direction. In their first summer of life, birds learn how to detect the rotation of the constellations around the North Star to determine north. They subsequently can use the pattern of the constellations to locate the North Star, from which they can orient themselves without having to detect stellar rotation.

But there’s more. Birds possess an internal magnetic compass: the ability to detect the lines of the earth’s magnetic field, which allows them to determine magnetic north. Birds and many other animals have small particles of magnetized iron (magnetite) in their bodies that apparently aid in this ability to orient themselves. In pigeons, the magnetite is located between the brain and the skull. Other research indicates that birds are able to generate magnetically sensitive internal chemical reactions that can serve a compass function.

Thus birds appear to have a minimum of four separate tools that provide compass orientation and guide their travels. They rely upon these multiple capacities because, just like a car with both a parking brake and a pedal brake, it is good to have backup systems for critical tools that one depends on in life-or-death situations.

Yet birds have still another trick up their wings. They can tell where they are on earth, not merely how to get there. In a later section, we’ll discuss that internal GPS capacity.

CYPRESS AND BIGFOOT

My first stopover is Caddo Lake State Park near Karnack, in northeastern Texas, not far from the border with Louisiana and Oklahoma. I’m here to spend five nights at cypress-filled, 25,400-acre Caddo Lake, which straddles the Texas-Louisiana line. Karnack, so small that it has no downtown, just a couple of intersections where convenience stores have settled, attracts visitors both to the state park and to Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where I plan to hang out with a university group doing a natural history field survey.

I set up camp in a corner of the park that I have all to myself: a spot in tall bottomland forest at the edge of a blackwater arm of the lake. Cypress trees rise from the water on one side of the tent, and great oaks on terra firma provide shade from the scorching Texas sun on the other. I’m deep in the woods near where Big Cypress Bayou flows into the lake. Soft green light filters onto the picnic table, and a male Prothonotary Warbler sings in a nearby tree. I eat my lunch watching the orange-tinted songster declare his territory in his unmusical, repetitive lisp.

Caddo Lake State Park was created in 1933, when Lady Bird Johnson’s father and several other local landowners contributed the property needed for the reserve. Using the National Park Service’s “natural design style,” the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) constructed the park roads and buildings, completing the project in 1937, at the height of the Great Depression. A number of the rustic CCC buildings, made of timber and stone sourced locally, still stand in the park today.

Caddo Lake is famous for a few reasons. First, it has been identified as a wetland of international importance through the Ramsar wetlands treaty (which designates globally significant wetlands around the world to encourage their conservation). Second, it is a favored weekend hangout for Eagles drummer Don Henley, who grew up in Linden, a bit north of Karnack. Henley founded the Caddo Lake Institute to foster conservation of the lake’s ecosystem and to assist with reintroduction of the endangered American Paddlefish to the lake’s waters. He is an example of a private citizen, albeit a well-known one, who has done more than his share to support conservation of habitat and endangered species because of his love for a verdant corner of the world that happens to be in his childhood backyard. And because northeastern Texas is rich in fishermen, Caddo Lake’s Large-mouthed Bass, White Bass, Crappie, and Sunfish are other reasons for its popularity. The lake is perfect for kayaking and birding as well.

Caddo is a large blackwater lake adorned with huge stands of mature Bald Cypress, an antediluvian swamp conifer of the Deep South. The big trees, festooned with Spanish Moss, are its most remarkable and otherworldly feature, and, of course, they capture the attention of every visitor. Ringing the shallows, this cypress is a tree apart. A strange conifer that drops its leaves in autumn, it has knobby “knees” (function unknown) that rise out of the dark water like woody stalagmites. The tallest cypresses approach 150 feet in height, and the thickest trunks exceed sixteen feet in diameter. The most ancient of these cypresses is more than fifteen hundred years old. The wood of old-growth cypress is valued for its resistance to rot, and thus much was logged out by the early twentieth century.

Gazing at its ancient-looking cypresses and black water, one could imagine that Caddo Lake is a geologically ancient hydrological feature. Apparently not. The lake formed when Big Cypress Bayou was dammed by a landslide set off by the massive New Madrid earthquake of 1811. Thus Caddo Lake is a recent creation. In fact, geologists tell us that, in general, lakes are ephemeral features on the landscape, so perhaps this should not be a surprise.

Caddo’s unearthly looks have given rise to still another reason for its fame (one that I speculated about at my campsite). There have been rumors of hundreds of sightings of Bigfoot, otherwise known as Sasquatch, in and around Caddo Lake since 1965, which is perhaps why one shoreline community sports the rather remarkable name of Uncertain. In 2015, the Animal Planet channel sent a film crew to do an episode of Finding Bigfoot that featured the obligatory nighttime field search for the creature in the Caddo Lake area. (Why do these searches always take place at nighttime, with night-vision head gear? It would be easier to locate the creature by setting out a few dozen camera traps along well-worn game paths.) The search team was unable to capture Bigfoot on film, of course, but they did interview local residents who claimed to have glimpsed the big primate, a species probably considerably less abundant than the endangered American Paddlefish.

The paddlefish is actually the strangest creature that we know for sure lives here. A primitive ray-finned fish related to the sturgeons, it has a prominent, long, paddle-shaped snout and can boast relatives dating back 300 million years. Over a paddlefish’s thirty-year lifespan, it can reach a length of five feet and weigh as much as 150 pounds. The declining species inhabits the Mississippi basin and is primarily a filter feeder. Its population has dropped (as is the rule rather than the exception for large fish) as a product of overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution, and poaching for the fish’s caviar, which is an inexpensive substitute for Beluga Sturgeon caviar from the Caspian Sea. Henley’s Caddo Lake Institute has been working to reestablish American Paddlefish in Caddo Lake in partnership with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These groups have worked with the Nature Conservancy and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to ensure that water flow from upstream is sufficient to provide suitable habitat for this odd and ancient fish. Time will show whether their important experiment is a success. At Caddo Lake State Park, I saw plenty of wildlife but not a single paddlefish.

STATE PARKS: FORGOTTEN GEMS

State parks are America’s overlooked jewels. Most people know them as good places to camp, birdwatch, and fish, and typically state parks have infrastructure that makes staying at one a pleasure. At Caddo Lake State Park, for example, I camped in a tent in the forest, and yet each morning I could take a hot shower and shave in a spanking-clean bathhouse. Yet sometimes these parks—and there are 6,600 of them across the country—get a bad rap because they are not very wild or not terribly special biologically. But their glory is that they are local, accessible, and comfortable, and in many instances they offer the best of regional nature to visitors, many of whom come from nearby. Not to be confused with national parks, state parks’ main purpose is to offer local residents a place to get away on a weekend or a Labor Day holiday. The thousands of state parks across the United States feature lakes, wetlands, rivers, forests, and mountains that offer recreation for us all—at close range and at minimal cost. Their success is measured by the fact that they receive nearly three times as many visits per annum as national parks. For most citizens, state parks are where they first learn about and encounter nature in a welcoming setting.

The second morning at Caddo Lake State Park, I noted a public bird walk was offered by park naturalist Mia Brown, and I joined the group of about ten participants in an hour-long introductory course in field ornithology. None besides Brown and me had ever been birdwatching, and she was able to introduce the newcomers to birding in a welcoming way. She had binoculars and field guides in the back of her truck, and the group was very enthusiastic as we looked for birds from a long dock projecting over the lake. Barn Swallows, an Eastern Phoebe, a Green Heron, a Great Egret, a male Prothonotary Warbler, and a male Summer Tanager delighted the group. Back at the truck, Brown took a small roll of paper towel off the front seat. She carefully unrolled it and showed the group a freshly killed Magnolia Warbler that, she explained, had struck her office window and fallen dead upon the sill. The bird was in perfect condition, and the children in the group were moved by its fragile beauty. Brown noted that windows are major bird killers: the birds see a reflection of green vegetation, attempt to fly through the space, and hit the pane. Her take-home point was that the human environment poses threats to birds.

That evening, Brown would offer an owl walk, and later in the week she’d hold programs on alligators and on the history of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Through thousands of such field programs with visitors, state parks enrich the experience of weekend visitors in important ways. I tip my birder’s cap to Brown, and to all the staff who make state parks work.

HERP HUNTING

One creature I hoped to encounter on my journey north up the Mississippi drainage was not a bird at all, but a very large and frightening-looking aquatic denizen of the river’s tributaries, swamps, and wetlands—an Alligator Snapping Turtle. The biggest individuals can weigh 250 pounds. As I was not a herpetologist, I did not know how to find one of these turtles, but Brown told me that a university group was spending the weekend surveying the herpetofauna at the adjacent national wildlife refuge. Perhaps they could show me an alligator snapper.

I tracked the group down at their makeshift encampment in a large utility garage in the center of Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge. There, herpetologist Rich Kazmaier and six of his students from the Department of Life, Earth, and Environmental Sciences at West Texas A&M University were busy photographing snakes, turtles, and frogs they had collected the night before. They were happy to include an extra participant, so I dove right into macrophotography of their diverse array of creatures, which they’d soon release: an Eastern Hog-nosed Snake, a Rough Green Snake, a Diamond-backed Watersnake, a Rough Earth Snake, a Green Treefrog, a Gray Treefrog, a Spring Peeper, and a Red-eared Slider.

Kazmaier told me that the Caddo Lake ecosystem is one of the richest in the Deep South for snakes, turtles, and frogs, which is why, each spring, he and his students drive nine hours from Canyon, Texas, to come here. I myself was already seeing creatures I didn’t even know existed. While we photographed an adorable and cooperative Milk Snake, Kazmaier told me that he had netted a hundred-pound Alligator Snapping Turtle the previous year and that he hoped his traps would produce a similar behemoth this year. I crossed my fingers.

The team then ventured out for much of the night (without me), searching every likely spot for intriguing specimens. The next morning, I rejoined them at the refuge’s shoreline access to Caddo Lake; I wanted to be present when the herp hunters checked the traps they’d set in the depths of the lake. The first creature they brought in was a Mississippi Green Watersnake, a specialty of the area but rarely seen. The nasty-tempered serpent repeatedly sank its teeth into the arm of one very stoic graduate student. Next they brought in a truly bizarre creature called a Three-toed Amphiuma, an eel-like aquatic salamander with vestigial limbs, no eyelids, and no tongue. The creature was about eighteen inches long, dark olive, and smooth-skinned. Another underwater trap held a two-foot-long Spotted Gar. But no luck on the Alligator Snapping Turtle.

We returned to the team’s base to look at the terrestrial catch from the night before. Because they knew I wanted to photograph a Cottonmouth snake, they had brought one back for me (this species is so common and easy to identify that they don’t usually bother to catch it during their nightly surveys). The snake was quite docile, so I was able to get very close to photograph it, along with a DeKay’s Brownsnake and a Cajun Chorus Frog.

Although the herpetofauna is diverse in this part of the world, it does not fare well. Turtles crossing roads in spring get run over by cars, and nearly every snake that enters someone’s backyard meets a hasty end. And then there are the infamous rattlesnake roundups, such as the one in Sweetwater, Texas. These roundups are annual events in which rural communities collect and dispatch every rattler they can collect in a single long day of hunting. The objective is to rid the local environment of a venomous reptile, but in fact, these shy and long-lived creatures have a low reproductive capacity and are wiped out from areas where they are heavily collected. Most people, even those who love birds and other animals, do not give a snakes a break, and that’s a shame.

Cottonmouth snake

Some youngsters have an affinity for nature and for natural history fieldwork, and the group Kazmaier taught was composed of just such kids. There was not a slacker in the bunch. Spending time with the group, I witnessed excitement and passion for nature among the students, who already knew a lot about local herpetofauna, birdlife, and plant life. And of course, their teacher was a true expert, with encyclopedic knowledge; Kazmaier loved both nature and sharing his knowledge with his students (a nine-hour drive is well beyond most professors’ call of duty), and I am confident that at least several of the students will make careers in wildlife biology. These sorts of intense field experiences can transform the lives of students and encourage the growth of natural history field study in the United States. The classroom component is important, but it is in the field where students fall in love with their prospective profession. And these young knowledge keepers become leaders in the next generation, populating local, state, and federal agencies in charge of wildlife and parks and passing on their own knowledge and enthusiasm to yet another generation.

KAYAKING CADDO LAKE

In the afternoon, after my last visit with Kazmaier and his students, I drove south from Karnack on Highway 43 to look at the T. J. Taylor estate, where Lady Bird Johnson was raised by her father, a local “big man.” The large white house sits above the road, handsome and substantial for the area but nothing out of the ordinary. Taylor, a widower, was smart and financially successful but also a bully. As a child, Lady Bird suffered with her unsympathetic father, and her marriage to LBJ was likewise difficult. But later in life she became something of a national saint. Her love of wildflowers and her campaign to beautify the nation’s roadsides created a legacy that persists to this day. Lady Bird’s flowers now bloom in glorious profusion in various places along Texas’s highways, and as I drove I reflected on the power of individuals to change the world for the better. The accomplishments of Don Henley, Rich Kazmaier, and Lady Bird Johnson are examples to us all.

I spent my last dawn in Texas kayaking among the blackwater cypress in a narrow arm of Caddo Lake named Carter’s Shute. A cold front had passed through, bringing blue skies and crisp temperatures. In places the fragrance of honeysuckle was overpowering. At the boat landing, I heard the distant, low, evocative drumming of a Pileated Woodpecker in the cypress. Low mist spread across the still, dark water as I followed a marked route through a flooded stand of the trees, draped with Spanish Moss. An Anhinga soared overhead. A Red-shouldered Hawk cried out in the distance. In a side channel, a Barred Owl perched low on a cypress stub. I quietly drifted toward it in my kayak as it mutely watched me. I snapped pictures until I got too close to use my long lens. I saw not another soul on my two-hour circuit. It was utterly peaceful.

As the sun rose, birds started to sing—first North Cardinal and Carolina Wren, and then Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Prothonotary Warbler, Northern Parula, and—as an addition to my quest list—Yellow-throated Warbler, singing from the moss-draped canopy of a cypress. I had seen the species earlier on the trip, but only as a migrant. Here the species was breeding in the cypress swamp. Common in the Deep South and wintering in Florida, the Caribbean, and Central America, this crisply patterned bird has a big yellow throat patch, black and white markings on the face and flanks, white wing-bars, and a dove-gray cap and back. It has an unusually long and narrow bill, which it uses like a pair of fine tweezers to capture creeping insects in treetops. Its syrupy song is a descending series of slurs that abruptly ends with a sweeet note. Given the bird’s canopy-dwelling habit, the song is critical to locating the species, which often nests in hanging bunches of Spanish Moss like those festooning the great cypresses of Carter’s Shute.

BIG CORPORATIONS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Late at night, a powerful thunderstorm passes over my campsite. Lightning strikes nearby, the wind blows, rain falls in buckets, and large branches tumble out of the canopy. I lie in my tent waiting for a branch to come down onto my tent, which once happened to students of mine in New Guinea (they survived, with some broken ribs). Perhaps now it is my turn. But luck is with me tonight.

My next stop was Crossett, Arkansas, about three hours northeast of Karnack, where I planned to shoot an environmental video with the Georgia-Pacific company and participate in GP’s annual Water Ways Festival. The skyline of Crossett, deep in the piney woods of southeastern Arkansas, is dominated by the large GP mill, which produces paper towels and toilet paper. West of town, I started to set up my tent beside the cypress-filled Ouachita River bayou, but before I’d done much, Terry and Sheryl, the park managers, came by in a golf cart to warn me that the bayou’s water was supposed to rise twelve inches that night. They instructed me to move my tent to an upslope campsite.

At dusk, a neighbor at an adjacent site was busily cleaning several huge fish at his picnic table. I asked him the fish’s name and how he’d caught them. In his eighties, the fisherman was friendly and had a sense of humor, like everyone else I met in the South. He happily said he was long retired but, to keep busy, worked as a freelance commercial fisherman netting Black Buffalo fish from the Ouachita River. The Black Buffalo can grow to nearly a hundred pounds, and its flaky white flesh, which he informally sold to locals in Crossett, is highly prized. The fish he’d caught that day each weighed more than thirty pounds and yielded a lot of fillet meat. This entrepreneur was making a killing selling them in town, he said; he was tickled to be able to do this work in his sunset years, as it made him feel useful.

As it got dark, a Chuck-will’s-widow, the southern piney woods cousin of the more familiar Whip-poor-will, sang in a pine not far from my campsite. This southern night bird, which I’d heard sing only a handful of times, is not uncommon in the piney woods, but it is very difficult to see, as it roosts in a hidden perch during the day.

Early the next morning I birded the tall pines of the campground as I waited for the GP crew to pick me up, and I was rewarded with the highlight of another male Yellow-throated Warbler, this time singing from a tall pine. It would be a cool, sunny day for shooting the educational video; I worked in front of the camera with GP’s wildlife program manager as we toured GP’s wildlands, extensive local production forests of Loblolly Pine owned and managed by GP partners, and pine stands within nearby Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge that support colonies of the endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Passage migrants sang throughout the woods (a singing Swainson’s Thrush was the high point), as did Neotropical migrants on their breeding habitat, including White-eyed Vireo, Northern Parula, Painted Bunting, and Pine Warbler—yet another quest warbler for me (number 12).

The Pine Warbler is a strict inhabitant of stands of pine during both the breeding season and in winter; to locate the bird, finding a good stand of pines is a prerequisite. It will inhabit just about any pure pine stand, even those planted as plantation monocultures. This warbler does not get much respect because it is rather dully plumed: mostly plain olive, with white wing-bars and undertail and a drab olive-yellow throat and breast, with some obscure streaking. In addition, it mainly winters in the vast pinelands of the Southeast, so we don’t find this species winging over the Gulf of Mexico twice a year. As a breeder, the Pine Warbler ranges northward to southern Canada, so the species is widespread in the East. Perhaps the best thing about this bird is its song: a very sweet trilled series, invariably given from the canopy of a tall pine.

The following morning, I made my way to the Crossland Zoo, situated in a wooded section of Crossett City Park, and set up a “Spring Migration” table at the seventh annual Water Ways Festival, hosted by GP and focusing on the importance of water conservation and wise water management. I had been invited to host the station for groups of elementary school students, who were the event’s target audience. Other institutions hosting visiting stations included the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, the Boy Scouts of America DeSoto Council, the Crossett Centennial Garden Club, Georgia-Pacific, the Crossett Fire Department, the Crossett Rescue Unit, and the Crossett Zoo. Groups of fourth-graders visited each station for fifteen minutes to learn various aspects of water use and water conservation.

I hosted ten groups over the day, taking each batch of students on a short bird walk and talking about spring songbird migration. I’d worried that I might not find birds to show to the fourth-graders in a city park, but to the sharp-eyed, the woods were fairly birdy that day: Mississippi Kite, Gray-cheeked and Swainson’s Thrush, Yellow-throated Vireo, and Orchard Oriole were in evidence, plus a Tennessee Warbler in song and—best of all—a very cooperative Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that was managing a sap resource at a small elm tree near my station. The sapsucker tended its neat rows of drill holes about three feet above the ground, a perfect position for the students, many of whom had never seen a woodpecker. The children quietly approached to within about fifteen feet of the tree to take a good look at the foraging bird. Remarkably, despite the crowds and noise, the sapsucker remained at its elm from morning until the end of the festival in the afternoon. I told the students how the bird managed a water resource that provided it with sugars and other nutrients, and how it ate various insects attracted to the sap.

This sapsucker winters here in Arkansas, and this one would soon make its way north to its breeding territory in the Great North Woods. In fact, I wondered if I’d see this very same bird in late June in Ontario, when the forests ring with the cadenced drumming and squealing calls of the birds. The species is distinguished especially by its habit of drilling rows of small sap wells in certain favored trees, an unusual foraging specialization known only among the genus Sphyrapicus, the sapsuckers, which comprise four species that nest in the United States and Canada. Their favorite sap-producing trees are birches and maples (think maple syrup). Ruby-throated Hummingbirds appreciate the work of the sapsuckers and forage for sap at these manufactured resources, as do Cape May Warblers, bats, and even porcupines. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is the only completely migratory woodpecker; like Neotropical songbird migrants, it entirely departs its breeding range in the winter. It nests in the northern United States and Canada and migrates to a geographically distinct wintering range in the southern United States, Mexico, and Central America. I looked forward to making contact with the species on its breeding ground in the young mixed forests of Ontario; I grew up with these birds in the Adirondacks, and whenever I see a sapsucker now, it reminds me of summer in the North Woods.

It might be surprising, but one sponsor of my spring field trip was Georgia-Pacific, a major wood-products corporation, through a grant to the American Bird Conservancy. Although corporations are a part of America’s wealth and its gigantic economy, big resource-extracting industries have done plenty of harm to the country’s natural environment. Just think of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, which took out every last bit of old-growth forest in the Tensas basin. Big companies cleared ancient forests across North America at a prodigious pace between the 1840s and the 1940s—it boggles the mind to think of the billions of acres of ancient forest cut down during that hundred-year stretch. Yes, the timber was harvested to build American homes and other infrastructure, but the timber companies rarely left even an acre of original forest standing. Harvesting operations sought to maximize immediate yield, not long-term sustainability of the harvest, and there is no question that their focus on extraction changed the face of the eastern half of the United States forever. Only now is mature forest returning to some of the logged-out sites, and climate change may prevent the full and proper return of the old-growth forests that predominated across the East prior to the Civil War.

So, it is easy to speak negatively about America’s extractive industries and their long-term record. But going forward, it is worthwhile considering how to effect change for the better, and most industries and corporations today are seeking to balance their negative environmental impacts (which continue) with their beneficial environmental offsets (which are more and more commonplace). For instance, GP partners with the Wildlife Habitat Council’s Conservation Certification Program to improve stewardship over the corporation’s extensive properties to benefit wildlife and nature. The interventions that GP carries out are audited by the Wildlife Habitat Council, and the council publicly recognizes outstanding efforts on behalf of nature conservation. Recognition of GP’s conservation achievements then encourages other corporations to carry out similar beneficial activities for nature. Given the wealth of most of American corporations, it is rather straightforward for their leadership to commit to investing a percentage of the annual corporate budget in environmental good works. These can take place on the campus of the corporation (as is the case with Conservation Certification), or the corporation can make investments elsewhere. Amoco Production Company, as we saw in chapter 3, donated the oak woodlands and rookery pond on High Island, Texas, to the Houston Audubon Society, thus performing a permanent good—land conservation—that offsets the company’s negative impact elsewhere.

The best results on this front tend to arise from partnerships between big corporations and environmental organizations. For instance, Walmart has worked closely with Conservation International to make its supply chain more efficient, thereby substantially reducing its use of gasoline and diesel fuel. This has had three positive effects: it has saved Walmart money, of course, but it also has reduced fossil fuel emissions and made both Conservation International and the company look smart and good. Today most Fortune 500 companies invest in offsetting their negative environmental impacts, and that is a step forward.

Yet tension remains in the tug-of-war between exploitation and preservation. Before departing Crossett, I joined GP forester Don Sisson to make a pilgrimage to the Morris Tree, a locally famous three-hundred-year-old Loblolly Pine that is 56 inches in diameter and 117 feet tall—famous because it is the largest and oldest remaining tree in the Crossett environs. The Morris Tree exemplifies what presumably many Arkansas pines looked like before the arrival of Columbus. Standing by the great tree, I was humbled by its grandeur, but also annoyed that commercial foresters had not demanded that their companies set aside representative plots of virgin forest within every large forest block that they harvested for timber. Such preservation plots, useful sources of seed stock and cuttings for future reforestation activities, would have been very beneficial to silviculture science over the long term and would have also had substantial educational value. For timber companies to set aside representative samples of virgin forest would have been another form of conservation offset, but, of course, it is now too late for that in Crossett or anywhere else in the Southeast, where the virgin forests all have been converted to lumber, and those lands converted to monoculture plantations of young pines.

THE RCW AND THE ESA

On my last morning in Crossett, I head into the pinelands of Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge. I hope to photograph the Red-cockaded Woodpecker, a species I have not seen since 1992, when I visited a pine plantation managed by International Paper in northern Florida. As I search for the bird, many hundreds of dragonflies patrol the gravel roads. So many odonates in one place! They remind me of the butterfly effusion I saw on Mill Road in the Tensas.

The Red-cockaded Woodpecker (or RCW, as forest managers call it) colonizes only old stands of living pines that have a relatively clear understory produced by periodic wildfire. Only a bit larger than a Downy Woodpecker, the RCW has a big white cheek patch and abundant black and white barring on its back. The adult male displays a small narrow red slash behind the eye. It’s a small bird, but it has a big story.

The RCW is an important part of the southern pine ecosystem because family groups of the bird excavate large numbers of nesting holes across their home range, perhaps to give group members a range of night roosts that help them avoid predators. These drilled-out cavities are subsequently used by other woodpecker species, Brown-headed Nuthatches, Great Crested Flycatchers, Eastern Bluebirds, flying squirrels, and even tree frogs.

The RCW’s global population is now a mere 1 percent of its estimated presettlement population. Historically a specialist inhabitant of Longleaf Pine savannas, this ecologically sensitive species declined drastically with the conversion of virtually all the 90 million acres of its fire-associated old-growth Longleaf Pine habitat in the eastern part of the country. Its classification as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1970s created a firestorm of controversy among the large corporations that managed millions of acres of pine plantations between North Carolina and Texas. Keeping the RCW from extinction (and satisfying the requirements of the Endangered Species Act, or ESA) has required millions of dollars of investment by state, federal, and corporate entities. Today many southern pine forests are young and an absence of fire has created dense pine-hardwood mixes, but the woodpecker requires trees older than eighty years and an open midstory without the successional hardwoods that sprout up in the absence of fire. Things are complicated still more by the species’ social system, in which each breeding pair is assisted by offspring of a preceding year (called helpers); by each family group’s territory size (exceeding a hundred acres); and by the fact that even with the assistance of helpers, RCW reproductive output is not high. The RCW is one of an array of threatened species in the United States that is conservation dependent, meaning that its survival depends upon substantial ongoing intervention by humans (we’ll hear about another such conservation-dependent species—the Kirtland’s Warbler—later in the book).

The Red-cockaded Woodpecker is a flagship species of the Endangered Species Act. Signed into law in 1973, the ESA mandates a strict set of rules for the management of lands holding species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identifies as endangered. For corporations that depend on exploitation of habitat-based resources, the presence of an ESA-listed species, such as a colony of RCWs, can have serious negative financial impacts. In the case of the timber and pulp enterprises, the presence of the woodpecker in a company’s piney woods requires the development of a management plan to ensure the protection of the birds. As with the Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest and the Piping Plover along the beaches of the East Coast, local citizenry came to hate what they thought of as “job-killing” wild creatures fostered by the ESA. Communities disliked the federal mandate that required local action for endangered wildlife; it was expensive and cost jobs. But over time, businesses have adapted and recovery plans have been implemented, and today the Red-cockaded Woodpecker is protected on federal, state, and private lands throughout its range across the South, and the species is no longer in decline. Two remarkable technical innovations have aided the RCW’s recovery from the brink. The first is wholesale translocation of family groups from areas with high densities of the birds to other areas of suitable habitat that lack the species. Birds are trapped at night, when they are in their roost holes, and safely released at the new site. Their transition to their new home is aided by the second innovation: the development of an artificial nest cavity, manufactured of molded fiberglass. These nest cavities can be readily placed in trees throughout a site that will receive a translocated colony to smooth their transition to a novel patch of pine woods. The RCW, of course, will never return to its original abundance, but with the mandated assistance provided by the ESA, it will continue to survive in its little colonies scattered through the piney woods of the South. It is a success story for the ESA.

Yet finding the RCW at Felsenthal wasn’t as easy as I thought it might be. Instead I found an abundance of other woodpeckers, especially Red-headed and Pileated. Finally, stopping at a likely tree plot, I heard a telltale high-pitched sneeze. I looked up to see a single bird in female plumage busily scaling pine bark in search of food. She ignored me and my tripod. Periodically, she headed to her nest hole and fed offspring, which I could hear squeaking but could not see. They must have been quite young, as more mature nestlings typically poke their heads out of the nest hole to grab food from the parent’s beak. The hole, high in an old Loblolly Pine, was made obvious by the big, messy swath of milky yellowish sap that covered the bark around its perimeter. The adult birds scar the trunk to produce these sap effusions in order to keep predatory snakes from entering the nest.

FELSENTHAL AND THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE SYSTEM

A few miles west of downtown Crossett, Felsenthal is among the federal properties where RCWs are being protected and managed. Established in 1975, the sixty-five-thousand-acre refuge boasts an abundance of wetland resources, including Felsenthal Pool and sections of the Saline and Ouachita rivers. The lowest-lying sections of the refuge support seasonally flooded swamplands that give onto cypress and hardwood bottomlands. The uplands are dominated by pinelands. Historically, the Caddo people occupied the area, and important archaeological sites are well preserved within the refuge.

Felsenthal provides major local habitat for twenty species of wintering waterfowl, Blue-winged Teal, Black Ducks, Gadwalls, and Ring-necked Ducks among them. Bald Eagles concentrate at the refuge’s wetlands in winter, and its upland forests serve as important breeding habitat for some Neotropical songbirds and as productive areas for passage migrants headed to more northerly breeding grounds. Its small population of Black Bears is one of only a few such populations remaining in the Deep South.

The National Wildlife Refuge System, of which Felsenthal is one unit, includes 521 refuges and more than 93 million acres of wildland habitat protected and managed for wildlife and game across our fifty states. Twenty million acres of this system have been declared as “wilderness” under the Wilderness Act of 1964. Far more so than the national parks, the national wildlife refuges are important wildlife habitat for migratory birds, especially for waterfowl and Neotropical songbirds.

The Mississippi Flyway is home to nearly a hundred of the refuges, encompassing nearly five million acres of protected wildlands. Most refuges here not only protect important wetlands resources, but also, as at Felsenthal, include an array of other productive wildland habitats useful for migratory birds. Most, but not all, of the refuges welcome visitors and provide trails and drivable wildlife loops so that birders, nature photographers, and the curious can get a look at America’s natural patches. In season, fishing and hunting are permitted in designated sections. I would visit twenty national wildlife refuges—each a critical component of wild America—during my backroads journey.

MINGO AND JOINT VENTURES

My next destination is Mingo National Wildlife Refuge, a 21,600-acre reserve situated where the eastern edge of the Missouri Ozarks meets the northern extension of the Mississippi Delta—a perfect place for migratory birds. I plan to meet American Bird Conservancy field scientist Larry Heggemann here, early in the morning, a few days after I depart Crossett.

Mingo features all the goodies—cypress swamp, expansive marshy wetlands, grasslands, oak bottoms, and hilly and rocky upland forest. Centered on an ancient abandoned channel of the Mississippi River, the reserve also has a twenty-five-mile wildlife loop, perhaps the longest in any national wildlife refuge.

Heggemann, with his thirty-plus years as a conservationist, is an expert on Missouri wildlife and a perfect guide at Mingo. More generally, I also wanted to learn about his work with joint ventures, or JVs: regional institutional partnerships working to conserve migratory songbird habitat in the various Bird Conservation Regions across North America. These regions are ecologically distinct areas with similar bird communities, habitats, and resource management issues, and they were delineated by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, a continent-wide partnership that includes state and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, corporations, and tribes. JVs use state-of-the-art science to ensure that a diversity of habitats are available to sustain migratory bird populations. In the United States, eighteen habitat-based JVs address bird habitat conservation issues within their identified geographic zones. Four habitat JVs focus on ecosystems in Canada. And three species-based JVs, all with an international scope, further the scientific understanding needed to effectively manage a species or a group of species (the Black Duck, Arctic geese, and sea ducks). JVs have a long history of successfully leveraging public and private resources to draw partners together to focus on regional conservation needs. Since the first JV was established in 1987, JV partnerships have leveraged government-appropriated funds to help conserve 24 million acres of critical habitat for birds and other wildlife.

Heggemann, I learned, is responsible for promoting habitat management, land protection, and policies and programs beneficial for birds of conservation concern in the Central Hardwoods Bird Conservation Region (CHJV), which includes parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana. Heggemann works closely with state and federal agencies, NGOs, and other partners to seek opportunities to restore and manage natural communities that are critical to the needs of priority bird species on both public and private lands.

The particular species that are conservation priorities for the CHJV were identified in assessments performed by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative. Several hundred species of birds depend on habitat in the CHJV during critical periods of their life cycles. Many breed or overwinter here, while others stop over during migration between breeding and wintering grounds. Some species are doing well, but populations of others are exhibiting long-term declines. Species with the greatest need of conservation attention typically suffer some combination of vulnerabilities, such as a relatively small range, a small overall species population, or a reliance on a habitat under threat.

At 6 a.m., Heggemann and I were alone in the parking lot of the Mingo refuge visitor center until another car arrived and two birders popped out. Serendipity had brought us Mark Robbins and another expert birding colleague, who were doing a four-day bird survey of the state. I had first met Robbins, senior author of The Birds of Missouri, more than three decades earlier at an ornithological meeting in Philadelphia, and now Heggemann and I tagged along with these two top-gun birders. Robbins has a phenomenal ear and knowledge of songs, calls, and chip notes.

Birding alongside local experts of a certain age is special for several reasons. Of course, they know the birds of the area, but over the years, they have also visited all the region’s nooks and crannies and divined the best spots for particular species, knowing when and where to look for each avian rarity. Moreover, they have lots of stories to tell. Heggemann and I knew we had stumbled upon an ornithological goldmine, and we mined this rich vein for all it was worth.

With help from Robbins, we recorded lots of thrushes and vireos, and more than a dozen migrant warblers to boot. I was able to list quite a few passage migrants at Mingo: Chestnut-sided, Magnolia, Bay-breasted, Tennessee, and Black-throated Green Warbler, plus Northern Waterthrush. These six were headed north, mainly to Ontario—my northernmost destination. As the birds and I moved north, I heard more and more species in song, which aided their discovery. But I was finding that the passage migrants, although present, were scattered thinly throughout the abundant habitat. It was like an Easter egg hunt: I needed to look under every bush and in every treetop to find the quarry. Teale’s vaunted waves of migrants, of which I had dreamed, seemed no longer to exist.

Among the warblers I tallied with Robbins was a new quest bird: the Yellow Warbler. This specialist of pasture edges and willow swamps is a commonplace open-country warbler that rivals the Common Yellowthroat in continental abundance. The male is olive-backed and rich yellow elsewhere, with an abundance of rusty orange streaks on its breast. The Yellow breeds from northern Georgia to Alaska and Labrador, winters from the Yucatán to northern South America, and is a species most birders come to take for granted because it is a vocal breeder just about everywhere. It is a true rural roadside warbler, its bright song heard while one drives down country roads. Mingo, with its marshlands and openings, is prime breeding habitat for this species, but it is surprising that I hadn’t recorded the bird earlier in my journey.

SONGBIRDS’ INTERNAL GPS

When a Neotropical songbird migrant such as the Yellow Warbler passes over the Gulf and up through the southern United States to a breeding ground like Mingo, it must rely upon a sort of biological global positioning system. Migrant songbirds, as we noted earlier, not only have a “compass” that helps them distinguish north from south; they also possess a map sense that helps them navigate to a precise location on the earth’s surface. With these two tools, the migrating bird can get where it wants to go.

The migrant bird’s GPS system remains something of a mystery to scientists at this time. Yet we can understand some of its components, including its four central tools: magnetism, smell, low-frequency sound detection, and a bird’s powerful memory of places and routes. Experimental evidence suggests that birds may use the earth’s magnetism to detect their location on the globe, based on how the magnetic lines of force alter in declination based on distance from the equator. The closer one is to the North Pole, the more that magnetic lines of force trend toward horizontal. Nearer the equator, they are much declined due to the relative position of the North Pole and the spherical nature of the earth.

Moreover, studies of homing pigeons, European Starlings, and swifts support the remarkable notion that birds employ their sense of smell to detect location. This idea is not so far-fetched—recall that migrating salmon return to their natal stream by detecting the unique scent of its water, even when they’re in the ocean. Some mammals’ sense of smell is also keen: witness the dogs trained to locate hidden drugs or land mines. Such a skill could be very useful for adult birds returning to a breeding or wintering site.

Birds also can detect infrasound—very low-frequency sounds—which they use to locate known topographic features that produce distinct sound signatures (such as wind striking mountain ranges or waves striking coastlines). Animals’ use of sound for navigation is probably more widespread than we know, mainly because humans lack this capacity. Think of the impact, for example, that the U.S. Navy’s underwater sound propagation experiments have had upon populations of whales and other cetaceans.

Finally, older birds’ ability to remember places and earth features may allow them to retrace routes year after year, in the same way that we remember the details of places we visited in decades past. It is clear that learning is a major part of the map sense, for young birds are unable to make their way accurately to a specific site, whereas adult birds can do it with uncanny precision. Many field experiments have translocated birds hundreds or thousands of miles from their nests. The displaced birds were able to return with remarkable speed to their nests.

Experiments have proven birds’ ability to take GPS-like actions, and we will speak more about these faculties when looking at research on thrush migration in a later chapter. In reality, however, there are still more questions than answers about birds’ internal GPS. It’s up to practicing research scientists to divine experimentally the finer details of the mechanism’s construction and operation, and probably many amazing discoveries will be unearthed by future researchers working on an array of bird species across the globe. At this point, we must simply recognize the awesome navigational capacities of migrating birds.

RESTORING THE OAK GLADES

In the late afternoon, following Robbins’s advice, I visited Cane Ridge, northwest of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to look at an oak savanna restored by the U.S. Forest Service as part of local JV activities. In the protected landscape of southern Missouri, there is a heavy predominance of closed-canopy oak woods that shut out open-country birds. Here, west of the Black River, the managers of Mark Twain National Forest were opening up patches of oak forest to provide breeding habitat for American Woodcock, Red-headed Woodpecker, Blue-winged Warbler, Prairie Warbler, and Yellow-breasted Chat, among other open-country migratory birds.

This area was restored through selective clearing followed by managed fire to open the canopy and allow grassy understory to attract early successional bird species. Historically, this process happened naturally through the action of fire and large grazing ungulates (such as Bison and Elk), but these days, the management happens largely by mechanical means and follows a strict plan of intervention. At Cane Ridge, the plan had worked—I saw all the birds listed above. Such a prescription is needed in many more places.

While I walked the heavily altered habitat, an Olive-sided Flycatcher sang out its quick-three-beers. This rare migrant species was headed north to some boreal bog in the North Woods—and it was the first Olive-sided Flycatcher I had seen on my road trip. It was a reminder both that I was soon to begin the northern half of my journey and that active habitat management can provide benefits for passage migrants as well as a wide range of breeders.

I added two new quest species at the Cane Ridge oak glades that I visited in Missouri: the Prairie and Blue-winged Warblers. The Prairie Warbler, which specializes in open, gladelike formations and old fields with scattered small trees, is a handsome bird with a breeding range almost entirely confined to the eastern United States. All yellow below and olive above, it is enlivened by black flank markings, a patterned face, and reddish streaks on its mantle. Its song, a rising series of buzzy musical notes, sounds like an energetic version of the song of a Field Sparrow, a species with which it can often be found. The Prairie is a partial migrant, with both breeding and wintering birds resident in Florida and the remainder wintering in the Caribbean.

The Blue-winged Warbler, a specialist of old field regrowth and shrubby clearings in disturbed woodlands, is a typical Neotropical migrant, wintering in the Caribbean and Central America and breeding in the eastern and central United States. Interestingly, the yellow and blue-gray Blue-winged hybridizes with its rare sister species, the Golden-winged Warbler, where the two species meet. The by-products of these crosses, informally called Brewster’s and Lawrence’s Warblers, are quite rare and create considerable excitement when they are encountered by birders. These two hybrids were originally described as novel species but now are understood to be the product of mixing of two closely related species.

Both Blue-winged and Prairie Warblers are uncommon because of their reliance on ever-changing early successional habitat. Breeding populations of the two species have to shift over time to track the movement of successional habitats across the landscape. Moreover, early successional habitats are becoming less common in the twenty-first century because of intensifying land-management practices.

CACHE RIVER

From Missouri, I head east across the Mississippi to southern Illinois, passing through the historic riverside city of Cape Girardeau (pronounced “Jer-AR-doh”), Heggemann’s home town. The bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio, Cache, and Mississippi rivers converge, includes the northernmost bottomland swamp forest that retains a Mississippi Delta accent. Here in the last of the great southern swamp country, I plan to meet Mark Guetersloh, natural heritage biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, who provides management guidance for the Cache River State Natural Area.

I was first introduced to this area by ecologist Scott Robinson in May 1993, when he and I, along with conservationist David Wilcove, did a Warbler Big Day based out of Robinson’s field station at Dutch Creek. Traipsing high and low through many sectors of southern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest in search of wood warblers, we finished with thirty-two species, the highest single-day count of warblers I have ever been party to. During that incredible day in this little-known, wetland-rich world, I was amazed by how verdant it is, and how filled with birds and snakes and other wildlife. This is the case, of course, because southern Illinois is where the Ozarks meet the northernmost reach of the delta. This rural landscape also features a long list of conservation lands. I planned to spend three days in the area, reacquainting myself with the wonders of this “last of the South,” where Bald Cypress trees grow in swamplands rich with water-loving Cottonmouth snakes.

In the early afternoon, I met up with Guetersloh, a visionary forester and ecologist who knows a great deal about the ecosystems of southern Illinois and who works on restoring the hydrology of the swamps and wetlands of the Cache River basin. Together we toured Heron Pond and Big Cypress, two wetland areas featuring cypress. During our travels through the Cache environs, Guetersloh told me that there are serious challenges to protecting the health of the Cache River ecosystem, including management of water levels, damming, and the presence of a canal cut to drain the Cache into the Ohio back in 1915. Different local interest groups—farmers, conservationists, and hunters—have disparate visions about water use, and the future of the Cache seems to be in the hands of the courts.

The natural places I saw here remain impressive to the visitor from outside, with their imposing stands of Bald Cypress and patches of old-growth bottomland hardwood. Walking the boardwalk at Heron Pond, Guetersloh showed me two Cottonmouths in the dark water and pointed out the lovely high, musical peeping of a Bird-voiced Treefrog—bright green–backed, with lichen-patterned gray and white on its sides. Late in the afternoon, he took me to see a state champion Cherrybark Oak with a diameter of more than seven feet that stands some 100 feet tall, with a spread of 113 feet. The Cache River wetlands are home to ten other state champion trees as well as the national champion Water Locust, and the lower Cache is home to trees more than a thousand years old. John James Audubon, passing through here in the winter of 1810, wrote about these forests with admiration:

Though the trees were entirely stripped of their verdure, I could not help raising my eyes towards their tops, and admiring their grandeur. The large sycamores with white bark formed a lively contrast with the canes beneath them; and the thousands of parroquets [Carolina Parakeets, now extinct] that came to roost in their hollow trunks at night, were to me objects of interest and curiosity.

Guetersloh made clear that conservationists have to fight the good fight to conserve all the natural benefits that these places offer migratory birds and native plants and animals. It is not simply a matter of determining the right path forward for nature, but also one of ensuring that the best intervention is undertaken even in the face of opposing political forces.

WARBLERS OF PINELAND, OAK GLADE, AND CYPRESS SWAMP

My visits to the piney woods and cypress swamps had delivered close encounters with breeding wood warblers as well as their passage migrant counterparts. As I reviewed the warblers I’d seen in these lands before I departed for the North, I recalled that many of the tall pinelands I visited had rung out with the sweet slurs of the Yellow-throated Warbler, which I first saw on its breeding ground at Caddo Lake. One of the southern breeders, in some places it prefers pines and in other places prefers bottomland sycamores and cypress. The Yellow-throated is an unusual warbler because it is a partial migrant. In most warbler species, the bird’s breeding habitat is distant from its wintering habitat. But in the northern parts of the Yellow-throated’s breeding range, populations of the species entirely depart south in winter. In contrast, in parts of the coastal Deep South, some Yellow-throated populations breed and winter in the same site. In many pine stands, I’d also heard the soft trill of the Pine Warbler, the pinelands specialist that I first found at Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge. Another partial migrant, it is a summer visitor to northern North America but a year-round resident in the southern pinelands. And I’d seen the partial migrant Prairie Warbler in the Missouri oak glades, along with the fully migratory Blue-winged Warbler. My warbler count was now at fifteen, thanks to the advice of Mark Robbins.

I am now about to leave the South and embark upon the second half of my journey. I’ll trade my zig-zagging route through the South for a northward-trending route up the big river, bound for the Mississippi headwaters, the Canadian line, and the Great North Woods. There will be little lingering and much more movement. As with the songbird migrants themselves, the northern half of my journey will carry me northward faster and via a more direct route: straight up the main stem of the river.