“The ‘Lord God’ Bird Returns

by Les Tuck, Saint Louis Zoo

 

In April 1985, an expedition from the American Museum of History in New York found three Ivory-billed woodpeckers in eastern Cuba. Originally found throughout eastern Cuba and the Southeastern United States, the Ivory-bill had been in serious trouble since before the start of the twentieth century; in 1985 there hadn’t been a substantiated sighting of the bird in the US since about the time the United States entered World War Two. Writing about these, the last verified sightings ever in the twentieth century, Audubon writer Michael Harwood observed,

 

On and off for most of this century the large and handsome ivory-bill… has been thought to be extinct…. Shot at, deprived of prime habitat and finally ignored the ivory-bill has suffered two centuries of disaster because of man. (p.109)

 

In those two centuries, the Ivory-billed woodpecker had been observed and documented by some of the legends of American orthinological history. In 1820, John James Audubon reported that he had seen “plenty” of them in Mississippi, at a time when they were already under serious pressure from hunting and land clearance for timbering, agriculture and steamboat fuel.

 

By 1880, wholesale timbering had pushed them into free-fall, and collectors rushed to obtain specimens before there were no more to collect.[1] Between 1880 and 1910, Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology alone obtained 70 specimens, eight of which were shot by a single hunter in Florida in less than a week.

 

By 1930, nobody knew how many were left, and the general impression was that there were none. A small population was “discovered” (the locals were well aware of them, but people were learning to be closed-mouthed about sightings) in 1932 in Louisiana, along the Tensas River. The site was an 82,000-acre tract of hardwood mostly owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

 

In 1935, a team from Cornell University visited the Singer tract; among their number was a young man named James Tanner, who would (literally) write the modern book on the Ivory-bill. Tanner spent the next three years looking throughout the southeastern United States, and he found five Ivory-bills in that time, all on the Singer tract. Based in interviews during this period, he estimated that there were about two dozen scattered across the area he surveyed. Even if he underestimated by 1000%, then there were still no more than 300 left at this time.

 

In December 1941, as the United States went to war, Tanner saw the bird for the last time; after that, it officially vanished again. It seemed that the extinction of the species “within a comparatively short time seemed inevitable.” (Harwood, p.110) Reports of sightings were “given increasingly diminished credence, and in the past twenty years people who have dared to report Ivory-bills have been ignored, sneered at, and been forced to face… ‘Ferocious cross-examination’.” (Harwood, p.110)

 

For example, in the winter of 1977-78, a deer hunter in Louisiana reported seeing what the locals referred to as a ‘Log God’ on the Upper Grand River. The description was good enough that Louisiana State University mounted an expedition; they heard possible calls and had one possible sighting. Several more trips that year produced no better results.

 

By now, the idea that the bird had to be gone was firmly entrenched, and there were several factors digging the notion in deeper. In a time of arising environmental awareness and activism, the scientific establishment was wary of becoming a tool of the conservationists. The Ivory-bill had been officially ‘listed’ since the creation of the Endangered Species Act[2], and verification of it’s continued existence would cause great controversy. It was much more convenient to think, “You can’t protect what isn’t there…”, but in truth, it might be more accurate to characterize the thinking as “You don’t have to protect what isn’t there…”[3] Without official proof of the bird’s continued existence, there was no need for official action. Rumors abounded in the 1980s about sightings, but no official announcement was made. It made sense to a certain degree: If landowners [4]suspected that there was a federally protected species on their land, then they would also know that a confirmation would bring significant restrictions on the use of that land. Not to mention about five thousand birders, a few hundred of which would do anything, legal or not, for a sight of the bird.[5]

 

Compounding the difficulty was the fact that there was no single source of reference for knowledge of the bird’s habits, character or requirements. Most of the information about it came from Audubon’s accounts of the bird in 1831, or from Tanner’s comprehensive observations in the 1930’s. A handful of other sources were in print, and in sum, they formed a fairly complete picture, but nobody had ever consolidated them.

 

Finally, and most simply, there was the persistent belief that Ivory-bill and Pilated woodpeckers are easily confused. This made it easy to dismiss reports from amateurs, no matter how gifted, as mistaken identification of the Pileated woodpecker.[6]

 

Regardless of how it happened, in the last decade of the twentieth century, it was more and more accepted that the Ivory-bill was gone. Ironically, it was now obvious what could have saved it: Land… a lot of land. Not only is it the best way to save a wide-ranging species, it’s the only way.[7] There was a month-long search in Louisiana by a six-person team in 2002, and they came up empty handed, without so much as a possible sighting or call heard. It seemed the final word on the Ivory-bill was that it “offers a marvelous object lesson, but we can only look at the lesson and shake our heads.” (Harwood, p.123)

 

In 2004, a man named Gene Sparling changed all that. While in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas (known as The Big Woods), he saw an Ivory-bill. He later said that he experienced a kind of mental loop, being fully aware of what he had seen, but also fully aware that they were “extinct”.

 

Obviously aware of what he was up against if he reported the sighting, he brought Tim Gallagher from Cornell University and Bobby Harrison, a photography professor from Alabama whose life ambition was to photograph an Ivory-bill, with him to the Big Woods two weeks later. When they saw the bird, Harrison put his head down and sobbed, “I saw an Ivory-bill,” over and over.

 

Within weeks, Cornell University and The Nature Conservancy had coordinated a massive effort to obtain the proof that they knew the skeptics would demand. Under conditions of strict secrecy, over fifty biologists were combing the Big Woods for the elusive bird they referred to as “Elvis”. Often, even their family members didn’t know where they were, let alone what they were doing. The secrecy was essential if they were to avoid swarms of birders invading the Big Woods and to avoid controversy before they had their proof.[8]

 

After fourteen months, “Elvis” had been sighted less than two dozen times, always fleetingly, including one encounter that produced several seconds of video. The team never saw a female and they never saw two birds together. They also obtained over 17, 000 hours of audio recordings during the search, including what they were sure were Ivory-billed calls.

 

What was particularly odd was the bird’s elusive nature; James Tanner had reported that they were noisy and tame in his presence. This had always been puzzlement for people looking for Ivory-bills; they should have been easier to find. In retrospect, however, it was pointed out that Tanner had been working with a group with a long family history in the area. Or, it could have been as simple as this: The shy ones were the ones that didn’t get shot.

 

However it went, by April 2005, they were confident enough that the Department of the Interior, The Nature Conservancy and Cornell University jointly announced that the Ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered. On August 2nd and 3rd, 2005 the first ever Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Team met in Little Rock, Arkansas, to begin developing a recovery plan for a bird first listed in 1967.[9]

 

We can but hope that finally, the Ivory-bill will get what it needs from us: Space and respect. If it does, then future generations will have the same opportunity that people of Audubon’s generation had: To look up at one soaring by and exclaim, “Lord god, what a bird!”

 

References:

Harwood, Michael “You Can’t Protect What Isn’t There” Audubon (Volume 88, #6) November 1986

Weidensaul, Scott “Return of the Ghost Bird” Smithsonian (V 36, # 5) August 2005

United States Fish and Wildlife Services Press Release “No Changes Planned for Public Access at White River National Wildlife Refuge” August 2nd, 2005


[1] A dark irony if ever there was one.

[2] It entered the list as a Priority Three, and was quickly upgraded to Priority One.

[3] This is hardly an isolated case of such thinking. Currently, in Missouri, many agencies exhibit a similar resistance to the idea that cougars live in Missouri, apparently preferring to believe the cats sighted are merely tourists from Kansas.

[4] Much of the wild land in the south is owned by hunting and/or gun clubs, a not-inconsiderable consideration.

[5] Certainly, a temptation would exist for landowners to make a project of making sure there never was a confirmation.

[6] Amateur, as in non-professional. For a halfway competent birder, it would be very difficult to confuse the two species, especially in flight, given a look that lasted more that a couple of seconds.

[7] It’s also pretty cost-efficient, since it also benefits everything else that lives there.

[8] It also allowed The Nature Conservancy and Cornell University to raise $10 million dollars and quietly buy up land in the Big Woods area.

[9] Even as they were planning to meet, scientists from Florida Gulf Coast University, Yale University and the University of Kansas were preparing a paper expressing doubt about the evidence presented. On August 1st, 2005, they withdrew the paper after reviewing some of the audio recordings from the Cache River and adjacent White River National Wildlife Refuge areas that “strongly suggested the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers there.” (US FWS Press Release Aug 2nd)