Analog SFF, October 2008 Read online

  No, I'm not talking about Bigfoot. I'm talking about a bird. A bird so magnificent it is sometimes known as the Lord God bird, presumably because the first sight caused old-timers to exclaim, “Lord God, what a bird!” It was a huge red, white, and black woodpecker with a thirty-inch wingspan, better known as the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis, for those who like Latin). Once, it lived in old-growth forests throughout the American Southeast. But the last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944.

  For sixty years, experts believed it extinct. Then, in April 2005, ornithologists from Cornell University announced they'd rediscovered it in a section of Arkansas known as the Big Woods.

  The find was hailed as the ornithological equivalent of finding Elvis alive. It was also a classic case of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't. Within months, another group, led by David Sibley, author and illustrator of the widely used Sibley Guide to Birds, challenged the claim. The Cornell team's blurry photos, they said, couldn't be distinguished from the common pileated woodpecker. Maybe the scientists had indeed seen an ivory-bill, but they'd failed to prove it.[1]

  [Footnote 1: The original team stuck to its guns, however, claiming among other things, that Sibley's group was misinterpreting video artifacts as plumage patterns on the bird. The find was published in Science on June 3, 2005 (pages 1460-1462); the rebuttal and response on March 17, 2006 (page 1555).]

  Whatever the bird in the photo actually was (and Sibley wasn't the only expert to question it), the debate, conducted in the prestigious pages of the journal Science, was enough to ignite the hopes of birders throughout the country. Perhaps, the Lord God bird wasn't extinct after all.

  * * * *

  Many woodpeckers need dead trees in which to peck for insects. That means they do best in old growth, where there is a good distribution not only of young, healthy trees, but also of the recently dead and dying. The ivory-bill was particularly dependent on mature forests because it fed on the larvae of a large beetle that lived in old, dead trees. “They were specialists in these big beetles,” says Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society.

  Beyond that, the birds weren't terribly picky: at one time they could be found both in upland pines and riparian hardwoods. But gradually, they were pushed into more and more remote areas by the combination of habitat destruction and hunting.

  Native Americans had long hunted the bird, says Jerome Jackson, a biology professor at Florida Gulf Coast University and author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, which chronicles his efforts to find the bird in the U.S. and Cuba. The feathers were used for a number of purposes, including decoration on war pipes. “I suspect that the red against black may have signified blood against the hair of an enemy that was successfully scalped,” he says.

  White settlers also killed the birds. “Some people believed that the bill was true ivory, so they would shoot them just to get the bill,” Jackson says. Others were shot to be stuffed and mounted or simply by curious people wanting a closer look.

  Gradually, the southern forests were converted to cotton fields. But it was only during wartime that logging pressure became intense. “Early in World War I,” Jackson says, “southerners saw war money going to the steel mills of the North. So a bill was passed providing for construction of a thousand ships of southern pine.”

  Only 320 of the ships were ever built, he says, and none saw service because pine is too leaky for boats. “Most of the wood lay on the ground and rotted,” Jackson says. But nevertheless, it was the end of the virgin pine forests of the uplands.

  But the bird survived. One of its last stands was a 50,000-acre tract of bottomland hardwood in Louisiana, which the Singer Sewing Machine Company had bought as a sustainable source of hardwood for sewing-machine cabinets.

  For a while, after ivory-bills were found there in 1932, the state was able to lease the tract as a wildlife refuge. “But along came World War II, and the wood was needed for pallets to ship [artillery] shells to Europe,” says Jackson. “It was needed for coffins. It was ‘needed’ for all kinds of things associated with the war effort.”

  The Singer Tract wasn't the only one to suffer this fate. “In the early 1940s, there was apparently a population of about six pairs [of ivory-bills], nine miles south of Rosedale, Mississippi,” Jackson says. “The timber went to the planks of PT boats.”

  “One of the worst things for the bird is warfare,” he says. “We cut timber in our national interest. We ‘need’ it for this or that, and environmental protection usually goes by the wayside in the name of national needs.”

  But logging wasn't the only factor. As far back as the late 1800s, as the birds were becoming rare, hundreds were shot as museum specimens or for private collections.

  Exactly how big a factor this was in their demise is open to debate. Geoffrey Hill, a biologist at Auburn University, compares it to putting a bounty on the remaining birds. “Deforestation greatly reduced ivory-bill populations,” he says, “but collectors took hundreds of birds from the remaining patches.... I think the woodpecker would have survived. It was the shooters that put it out. There's hundreds of these things in museums.”

  “There was always enough forested area to support ivory-bills,” he adds, noting that in Florida, only prime cypress was cut, and other trees were left standing. “The loggers just high-graded the timber.”

  Sibley agrees that the shooting was despicable, but thinks it's an error not to point at habitat destruction as the prime cause. “None of the last known Singer Tract birds were shot,” he says. “They just disappeared when the trees were cut down.”

  * * * *

  Double-Knock on the Choctawhatchee

  With the on-again off-again find in the Big Woods, American birdwatchers were a-twitter with rumors. Based on enthusiastic claims in his e-mail, Butcher told me in early 2007, “It seems like [the ivory-bill] is the most common bird in North America.”

  Unfortunately, subsequent expeditions into the Big Woods haven't found anything new, despite what Butcher describes as the most thorough such search ever conducted. There has even been an effort to use a robot birdwatcher. Described at the 2007 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, this endeavor used two robotic cameras pointing opposite directions across along a power line cut. The cameras were programmed only to record images of objects moving at twenty to forty miles per hour—believed to be the speed of an ivory-bill in flight—but to date, they've failed to find an ivory-bill.[2]

  [Footnote: 2 The project's website is: www.c-o-n-e.org/acone/.]

  Perhaps the failures mean the bird isn't there. Or perhaps it's because the Big Woods is indeed big, sprawling over 550,000 acres, a region one-quarter the size of Yellowstone National Park. Even for a large, brightly colored bird, that's a lot of dense timber in which to hide.

  Then in May 2005, Hill went kayaking. A decade earlier, he'd gotten a telephone call from someone who thought he'd seen an ivory-bill on Alabama's Pea River, but he'd treated it with the skepticism usually reserved for reports of extinct animals. Now, with excitement mounting in the Big Woods, he and two assistants decided to check it out.

  The first day was disappointing, revealing little in the way of potential ivory-bill habitat. “We weren't interested in another day on the Pea, so on the spur of the moment we decided to shift,” Hill says.

  Based on a not-very-detailed map, his team picked the Choctawhatchee, in the Florida Panhandle. “We just kind of blundered into it,” Hill later said. “I didn't even know how to pronounce the name.” (It's Chok-ta-HATCH-ee.)

  Within an hour, one of Hill's assistants spotted what he was sure was an ivory-bill in flight. At about the same time, Hill heard a “double-knock,” the unusual pecking sound that distinguishes ivory-bills from other woodpeckers.

  “It was just to be a weekend outing looking for potential habitat,” Hill said. “We never dreamed we'd actually find an ivory-bill.”

  The following weekend, the
team returned to the river, where another of Hill's assistants reported a clear view of a female ivory-bill. The assistant didn't have the opportunity to snap a photo, but said he saw the distinctive plumage of the ivory-bill, which has a white trailing edge on the upper wing, white stripes down its back, and an all-black crest.

  Hill and his colleagues are confident of their discovery but aware that they have yet to prove it.[3] “The only evidence that would constitute irrefutable proof is a clear photograph or video,” he says, “and such an image has to date eluded us.”

  [Footnote: 3 Their findings were published in September 2006, in the online journal Avian Conservation & Ecology.]

  His team, however, has recorded fourteen sightings and worked with Canadian scientists to collect ten thousand hours worth of sound recordings from unmanned listening stations, tallying three hundred sounds matching those believed to be made by ivory-bills. They have also found nest cavities too large for other local birds and places where very big woodpeckers appear to have been pecking on trees.

  Still, without photos, everyone is being cautious. “Nothing is confirmed, but there is a lot of good evidence,” the Audubon Society's Butcher said. “They seem to have found some very good habitat and have been very diligent in trying to document it.”

  Sibley, who helped deflate the Big Woods claim, is less optimistic. Although he saw the findings as “intriguing,” he noted that the Choctawhatchee region is small, with relatively young trees, and heavily traveled by boaters, fishermen, and hunters. “I think the sighting and audio evidence is questionable and mostly based on wishful thinking,” he said with obvious regret.

  * * * *

  Corvallis Resurrection

  Birds can be hard to photograph. Not so with other species. In the spring of 1999, Rana Foster was volunteering for the National Audubon Society, monitoring bluebird nests, when she spied an unusual flower in a nature preserve on the outskirts of Corvallis, Oregon. The plant was only an inch tall, but bedecked with striking blossoms like purple trumpets, streaked with white and yellow. It was growing in a muddy channel where a few months earlier a river had jumped its banks in an unusually high spring flood.

  Foster described her find to Steve Northway, an amateur botanist helping the city restore the preserve from four decades of rye grass cultivation. The moment he saw the flower, Northway knew what it was: a type of wild snapdragon called the vernal pool monkeyflower, or Mimulus tricolor—once plentiful, but thought to have been extinct in Oregon since 1991.

  In the next few days, Northway tallied a thousand more Mimulus plants in the 73-acre preserve, guessing he'd only found about a third of them before he tired of counting.

  A month later, I was sprawled on the ground, examining one of the flowers close up through a camera lens. I had the odd sense that neither it nor I was supposed to be there—that it might vanish if I reached out to stroke its fuzzy leaves. For the past hour, Northway and Foster had been discussing its startling return. Northway speculated that the seeds’ hard, nutlike capsules had survived for years, buried in the sod until the flood stripped the grass away and gave them their chance.

  The Mimulus, he explained, had once thrived both in flood channels and vernal pools: ponds that lasted late into spring, then dried to caked mud during the Willamette Valley's four-month summer drought. The rapid shift from puddle to near-desert made it hard for other species to grow, creating a niche where the ground-hugging monkeyflower could germinate, bloom, and die in a matter of weeks.

  Only a few decades ago, the flower had speckled the hundred-mile-long valley with splashes of color. But plowing and stream diversions had destroyed so much of its habitat that eight years previously, it had disappeared from Oregon—although a remnant population still clung to life in California.

  And now, amazingly, it was back: a miracle in a city park.

  * * * *

  If the ivory-billed woodpecker has survived, it's obviously not because eggs have slumbered through the decades. Rather, a few survivors must have lingered, undetected, for more than sixty years.

  It's not impossible. The California sea otter was believed to have been hunted to extinction early in the twentieth century, killed off by fur hunters seeking to make their fortunes from its incredibly fine pelt. But a tiny colony, perhaps only a few dozen, survived off the rugged Big Sur coast, protected by ranchers who refused to tell the outside world of its existence.

  Then in 1938, word got out and a photographer confirmed it with a grainy black-and-white image of some seventy-five otters—quite possibly the entire population—in a single, large group. Today, Pebble Beach golfers can hardly fail to spot the creatures, only a stone's throw offshore.

  Nobody appears to have been hiding a colony of ivory-bills. But for half a century, their forests have been regrowing. If a few managed to survive ... somewhere, somehow ... then maybe, just maybe, they're starting to reclaim their one-time range. “There's every reason to believe that a population could expand if there are still breeding pairs around,” Butcher says.

  One place where the ivory-bill might have survived is along Florida's Suwannee River.

  “[The Suwannee] is the heart of where the birds were once abundant,” Jackson says. “That really was the homeland for ivory-bills. Where the Suwannee goes into the Gulf is really wild.” There were once so many woodpeckers there, he says, that about half of the four hundred specimens now in museums were collected in the region.

  If the bird does survive, Jackson thinks it's been protected in part by the hunting culture of the South.

  “Large forest areas have been preserved as places to hunt,” he says. “They go in and hunt deer in the fall and turkeys in the spring, and the rest of the time it's left alone. Those are places where the ivory-bill might still exist."[4]

  [Footnote: 4 What he's talking about are private hunting preserves, where other activities are strictly prohibited.]

  Jackson himself made a determined effort to find the bird along the Suwannee in the late 1980s. He's convinced it persists, but, like other ivory-bill searchers, failed to find definitive proof.

  Today, the river is being promoted as a recreational region, but Jackson doesn't think that will deter ivory-bills from repopulating the area. “I don't think people in kayaks or canoes are going to make a lot of difference,” he says.

  The Audubon society's Butcher agrees. What the bird really needs, he says, is several square miles of undisturbed habitat. “They're a big bird, so they need a lot of food, and since the food they eat is fairly specialized, they need a big area in which to find it. But there's no reason to suspect that they'd be more disturbed by hunters, boaters, or birdwatchers than any other bird,” he says.

  A bigger threat is real-estate development.

  “If we have any hope for ivory-bills in the area, we've got to find them now and get the habitat protected,” Jackson says. “It's not going to be there in twenty years. It might not be there in ten years.”

  * * * *

  Disappearing Delphinium

  Although it was June, my day in Corvallis had been darkly cloudy as a dreary spring refused to heed the dictates of the calendar. But eventually, sunlight burst between late-afternoon clouds. I put away my camera and stood up, observing a prairie transformed to an eye-searing expanse of green.

  Northway asked if I wanted to see another flower—desperately endangered, but not yet extinct: the peacock larkspur, or Delphinium pavonaceum. It, too, was once common, but exists now in only a handful of stands. “Come see, so that when we're old there will be a few of us to testify that it really existed,” he said.

  It was an impossible invitation to pass up. Northway, Foster, and I caravanned along a succession of farm roads until Northway pulled to the shoulder. “There,” he said, indicating a plant like a tall, ragged lupine. Most larkspur are deep blue with light-colored centers, but this one had reversed the colors, with white flowers boasting pale lavender centers.

  “Ten years ago, we couldn't have d
riven out here without seeing these everywhere,” he said. But now, the state had tabulated only 53 patches, of which half were probably already gone, killed off by single, unknowing swipes of hay balers or lawn mowers. The rest are all that remain in the entire world.

  Northway had been monitoring five of the known patches. This particular one had been thriving. “Four years ago, there were only seventy plants,” he said. “This spring I counted 476.”

  He had concluded that there was no sense in hiding such discoveries. Experience had taught him that the biggest risk was an inadvertent mowing, plowing, or herbicide spraying. Like the Big Sur ranchers protecting the sea otter, most farmers are thrilled to give up a single bale's worth of hayfield to help spare a remnant of a shrinking past.

  Northway left, but I lingered as the last of the sunlight graced his elegant Delphinium. It was the summer solstice—longest day of the year—and somehow that seemed appropriate. It's a day both of jubilation and sorrow, simultaneously marking the onset of summer and the fact that now the days would grow increasingly short as the world spiraled toward winter. I wonder which lay ahead for the Delphinium: a summer renaissance or a long slide toward oblivion. Only three days earlier, Northway's determination not to hide his endangered species had been put to a severe test when somebody destroyed one of his other four patches. The flowers hadn't just been picked by someone who'd found them pretty. They hadn't been mowed by accident. They'd been selectively pulled up by the roots in what could only have been an act of malice. “There were five [patches],” Northway said softly, shortly before he left. “Now there are four.” It would take so little to save this plant, but the oncoming winter loomed closer than the warm summer twilight.

  Northway also told me that the flower, rich with nectar, was once the primary early summer forage for Willamette Valley bumblebees, now themselves in decline. As I watched the Delphinium sway in a breeze blowing in from the distant Pacific, I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a bumblebee.

  * * * *

  It is easy for stories like this to become depressing. Progress marches; Delphinium and woodpeckers fall by the wayside. But it isn't always that way. Sea otters and Mimulus miraculously reappear. That makes this a story of anticipation and still-open frontiers.