swamp in Arkansas and that they had found the ivory-billed woodpecker. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the critter other than that the very name, like the yellow-bellied sapsucker’s, was cartoon shorthand for bird nut.
I typically avoid daily journalism, especially announcement stories (New Asian Weasel Discovered!), because I’ve spent most of my life in weekly or monthly magazines and breaking news was always tantalizinglyout of reach. But this one was different; there was time. So I asked him to let me check it out and immediately sped off to learn that, yes, this was North America’s largest woodpecker, but it also came with a backstory so bizarre, epic, covert, and overwrought that if we included birds among mythic Americans, the ivory-bill would keep company with Charles Foster Kane and Jay Gatsby.
Rumors among ornithologists and hunters that the bird still existed floated out of Southern swamps from time to time, and so the bird had become a kind of rural legend. No one had confidently seen it in more than sixty years. No doubt, it was the most sought-after bird in the world.
Native Americans long ago prized those white bills as emblems of power. John James Audubon marveled at their remote swampy habitats, the “favorite resort of the ivory billed wood pecker” with “the dismal croaking of innumerable frogs, the hissing of serpents, or the bellowing of alligators!” Early colonial hunters were stunned by the bird whose mostly black plumage at rest unfurled into a glitzy burst of white trailing feathers beneath a nearly three-foot wingspan. There was something aesthetic at work here, something unutterable, something semiotic. Its shape and style beguiled people, like the stride of a panther, the eyes of a koala, the sway back of a rhinoceros, the rolling shoulders of a gorilla.
The adult ivory-bill is a large bird and is exquisitely colored. Its yellow eyes, red crest, ivory bill, black feathers, and (when perched) the white lightning bolt marking on its neck—the mark of Zorro, the forehead of Harry Potter—give the whole bird a garish charisma. Connecticut’s state ornithologist Margaret Rubega wrote: “This is the Dennis Rodman of woodpeckers.”
In rare 1930s moving footage of the ivory-bill, it hops around the side of a tree with a cocky certainty, glancing about, seemingly aware of its ostentation. Back in the days when they were plentiful, the sight of them startling away from a tree in an explosion of whitelight was said to provoke blasphemous cries from the virtuous. The “Lord God Bird” is what the profane helplessly nicknamed it on their way to Hell.
I liked the idea of pursuing this story because I have a lucky streak with woodpeckers. I spent a week once with Beau Turner, Ted Turner’s son, in northern Florida as he explained to me how he was gardening an entire thousand-acre wood of longleaf pine with an eye toward its most fragile and reclusive tenant, the red-cockaded woodpecker. Standing amid the cathedral pines that afternoon, I instantly spotted one making a ruckus in the canopy. Another time, I was reporting a story in Tierra del Fuego. I wandered off in the woods trying to get as close as I could to the tiptoe of the Americas, as one is inclined to do down there. On an otherwise lonely path, an enraged Magellanic woodpecker, another Goliath of the clan, swooped in and landed for a face-to-face. This particular specimen wasn’t too pleased with me being near her nest, I guess, and she stood directly in my path, flapping her wings and making a racket. This was a really big woodpecker. But it was still a woodpecker. Maybe a foot tall, stretching it. But I’m city enough to know my Hitchcock movies, so I gave ground.
My friend at the Nature Conservancy called back that day to assure me that this woodpecker tale was a high-octane story. This was not merely the most sought-after animal in our mutual phylum—I was being let in on an expedition that would inevitably get
I typically avoid daily journalism, especially announcement stories (New Asian Weasel Discovered!), because I’ve spent most of my life in weekly or monthly magazines and breaking news was always tantalizinglyout of reach. But this one was different; there was time. So I asked him to let me check it out and immediately sped off to learn that, yes, this was North America’s largest woodpecker, but it also came with a backstory so bizarre, epic, covert, and overwrought that if we included birds among mythic Americans, the ivory-bill would keep company with Charles Foster Kane and Jay Gatsby.
Rumors among ornithologists and hunters that the bird still existed floated out of Southern swamps from time to time, and so the bird had become a kind of rural legend. No one had confidently seen it in more than sixty years. No doubt, it was the most sought-after bird in the world.
Native Americans long ago prized those white bills as emblems of power. John James Audubon marveled at their remote swampy habitats, the “favorite resort of the ivory billed wood pecker” with “the dismal croaking of innumerable frogs, the hissing of serpents, or the bellowing of alligators!” Early colonial hunters were stunned by the bird whose mostly black plumage at rest unfurled into a glitzy burst of white trailing feathers beneath a nearly three-foot wingspan. There was something aesthetic at work here, something unutterable, something semiotic. Its shape and style beguiled people, like the stride of a panther, the eyes of a koala, the sway back of a rhinoceros, the rolling shoulders of a gorilla.
The adult ivory-bill is a large bird and is exquisitely colored. Its yellow eyes, red crest, ivory bill, black feathers, and (when perched) the white lightning bolt marking on its neck—the mark of Zorro, the forehead of Harry Potter—give the whole bird a garish charisma. Connecticut’s state ornithologist Margaret Rubega wrote: “This is the Dennis Rodman of woodpeckers.”
In rare 1930s moving footage of the ivory-bill, it hops around the side of a tree with a cocky certainty, glancing about, seemingly aware of its ostentation. Back in the days when they were plentiful, the sight of them startling away from a tree in an explosion of whitelight was said to provoke blasphemous cries from the virtuous. The “Lord God Bird” is what the profane helplessly nicknamed it on their way to Hell.
I liked the idea of pursuing this story because I have a lucky streak with woodpeckers. I spent a week once with Beau Turner, Ted Turner’s son, in northern Florida as he explained to me how he was gardening an entire thousand-acre wood of longleaf pine with an eye toward its most fragile and reclusive tenant, the red-cockaded woodpecker. Standing amid the cathedral pines that afternoon, I instantly spotted one making a ruckus in the canopy. Another time, I was reporting a story in Tierra del Fuego. I wandered off in the woods trying to get as close as I could to the tiptoe of the Americas, as one is inclined to do down there. On an otherwise lonely path, an enraged Magellanic woodpecker, another Goliath of the clan, swooped in and landed for a face-to-face. This particular specimen wasn’t too pleased with me being near her nest, I guess, and she stood directly in my path, flapping her wings and making a racket. This was a really big woodpecker. But it was still a woodpecker. Maybe a foot tall, stretching it. But I’m city enough to know my Hitchcock movies, so I gave ground.
My friend at the Nature Conservancy called back that day to assure me that this woodpecker tale was a high-octane story. This was not merely the most sought-after animal in our mutual phylum—I was being let in on an expedition that would inevitably get
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