[va-richmond-general] another article - from the NY Times on Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

 
May 7, 2006

13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker 
By JACK HITT

If I wanted to, I could claim something that fewer than two dozen people
on the planet right now can: I have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. It
was only a year ago that history was made when it was announced that
this legendary woodpecker ? also known as the Lord God Bird for the
excited cry said to accompany a sighting ? was not extinct, as had been
widely believed, but had been positively identified in a swamp called
the Bayou de View in Arkansas. On Feb. 26, I visited the bayou with Bill
Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day
in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cellphone, we
found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a
canoe and a big desire. "I'm game," he said in his slow, deep twang. So
we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of
Arkansas's most famous bottom-land swamp.

Even though I grew up among South Carolina's cypress swamps, I had never
seen cypress trees this huge and haunting. Towering beside them was the
ancient tupelo, like some Devonian Period beta version of "tree." These
thousand-year-old senator trees are large enough at the base to garage a
car, and then they suddenly narrow like a wine bottle before shooting up
into a regular tree. Tippit and I spent the day paddling into swampy
cul-de-sacs and just hanging there, strictly quiet, for half an hour at
a stretch. 

"You can't find the bird," Tippit said. "The bird has to find you." By
late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue
herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush
hour of swallows and sweeps. At times, the dimming forest could be as
chatty as a crowded cocktail party, filled with the call of the pileated
woodpecker. A relative of the ivory-bill, the pileated is common and
often mistaken ? very often ? for its more renowned cousin.
Then: "Ivory-bill!" Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the
canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where
he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a
large dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of
the swamp. 

I knew the drill. To confirm the sighting, I asked Tippit to report to
me precisely what he saw. As with any witness, it's important to set the
interview down on paper as soon as possible. Tippit called out: "Two
white panels on the back of the wings! It lit on that tree. It was
large. Also saw it flying away from me with flashes of white." 

Since that February afternoon, I have been able to say, "I saw an
ivory-billed woodpecker," yet I have not said it. It turns out it's not
an easy sentence to utter, and not only because all I really saw was a
distant flash of black feathers. I got a better sense of the difficulty
of this claim when I attended the Call of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
Celebration in February in nearby Brinkley (formerly Lick Skillet), Ark.
The town had so gussied itself up in midwinter woodpecker boosterism
that I fully expected to see a parade led by Robert Preston sporting an
ivory-bill haircut (available at Penny's Hair Care for $25). A modest
motel is now the Ivory Billed Inn. Gene's Restaurant and Barbecue offers
an ivory-bill cheeseburger. There's even ivory-bill blue: I bought a
T-shirt that reads, "Got Pecker?" And yet talk of seeing the bird was
curiously absent. It's hard to describe, but it's like saying you've
walked on the moon or been anointed by the Dalai Lama. It's a boast of
immense magnitude, frightening to claim, and here's why: In the weeks
after the initial sighting, Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology flew
down dozens of scientists to comb the swamp, and the Nature Conservancy
intensified its efforts to secure large swaths of the habitat. Even the
Department of the Interior got involved. The gravitas of powerful
institutions and eminent professionals now looms over every claim. 

During the question-and-answer period after a talk given by Sharon
Stiteler, a perky, witty, smiling blonde who is the host of
www.birdchick.com, I cut off a back-and-forth about bird feeders to ask
her, "Have you seen an ivory-billed woodpecker?" It was as if I'd
dropped a glass on the floor. The room went weirdly silent. The smile on
Stiteler's face flickered away quick as a chickadee. "I am not allowed
to comment on that," she said. "I was out with Cornell in December and
had to sign a lot of confidentiality agreements."

Soon after the original declaration of the discovery was made last
April, controversy broke out, and it quickly got nasty. The ugliness
derives from something deep in the heart of birding. Most people think
of birding as either a science worthy of a word like "ornithology" or a
harmless hobby pursued by rubber-faced old men in porkpie hats. But the
act of birding, ultimately, is an act of storytelling. For instance, if
someone said to you, "I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow
tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree," even the least
experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don't have yellow
wingtips and don't cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each
bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural history, the story of a
niche told in a vivid language of color, wing shape, body design,
habitat, bill size, movement, flying style and perching habits. The more
you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this
tale. 

Claiming to have seen rare birds requires a more delicate form of
storytelling and implies a connoisseur's depth of knowledge. Saying "I
saw an ivory-bill's long black neck and white trailing feathers"
requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and
discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay. 

If you don't pull it off, then people presume that you are lying or
stupid. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a
rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your ability as a
birder ? to trust you, to believe you. To say I saw an ivory-bill ? and
Tippit says we did ? would put me in one camp; on the other hand, to say
that I'm not sure totally disses my canoe partner's integrity. And I
came to like and trust Bill Tippit quite a lot. He pointed out about a
dozen birds to me that afternoon that I never would have seen without
his keen eye. I don't want to deny him. So I cagily keep myself
suspended between two potential truths, which is where a lot of birders
now find themselves.
The ivory-billed woodpecker is, essentially, Schrödinger's cat, the
famous physics paradox in which a cat in a box is neither dead nor alive
until you open the box. By keeping my mouth shut (about as rare an
experience as an ivory-bill sighting), the bird is both extinct from the
planet and nesting in the swamps of Arkansas. 

But this is not one of those crummy stories that ends with some annoying
riff about "ambiguity." Birding is not philosophy. Birding is
storytelling, and ivory-bill birding is the most exquisitely nuanced
yarn of them all. It requires that you consider the different facets of
the ivory-billed woodpecker from every angle. (My experience with Bill
Tippit and this philosophical mumbo jumbo are but two.) There are, with
some editing, 13 ways of looking at the ivory-billed woodpecker, and
there is an answer to the burning question Did I see the damn bird or
not? Here's the thing ? I'm not able to give the answer. It's a birding
story. Only you can.


The fantastic story of the bird's rediscovery begins with the first
confirmed sighting. Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine,
published by Cornell University's ornithology lab, was writing a book,
"The Grail Bird," a history of the search for the ivory-bill. He
intended to interview every living person who had seen one. It turns out
that there's a whole subcategory of bird aficionados known as ghost-bird
chasers, who look for birds presumed to be extinct. Gallagher himself
was one, and over his years of searching, he met Bobby Harrison, a
photography professor at Oakwood College in Alabama, who was also in
this game. 

The two men were made for the Chautauqua circuit, which they're now in
fact on, sometimes together, sometimes solo, telling the tale of their
sighting. Their appearance before an awestruck audience capped the
Brinkley celebration. Gallagher is a tall 55-year-old with white hair
and a pleasantly restrained Yankee demeanor who introduced himself in
Arkansas by confessing amiably that he'd always thought the South was
weird and that he considered Harrison his "interpreter and guide."
Harrison, a fun guy with a head like a mortar shell, had his own
schtick, like saying that he didn't know "damn Yankee" was two words
until he was 20 years old. The audience laughed wildly at their tale,
which was, like the best sightings, a great adventure story full of
snakes, mayhem, missteps, mud, bugs and a bird.

In early 2004, Gallagher was alerted to an online posting by another
Southerner, a kayaker named Gene Sparling, who reported that he'd seen
an unusual woodpecker in the Bayou de View. Gallagher and Harrison each
interviewed him and were convinced. They rushed to Arkansas and put in.
The second day they were there ? Feb. 27, 2004 ? the two saw something
burst into the sunshine. "Look at all the white on its wings," Gallagher
shouted. "Ivory-bill!" they both screamed. And it was gone. They wrote
down their notes and drew sketches. Gallagher had a new ending for his
book. Bobby got on the phone to his wife, Norma, and sobbed.


Back at Cornell, Gallagher told John Fitzpatrick, the head of the
school's lab of ornithology, and Fitzpatrick was persuaded by
Gallagher's description. After quietly deploying a few pros (and then a
lot of them) to poke around Arkansas, Fitzpatrick decided to throw the
lab's prestige and best resources into the search. Meanwhile, Gene
Sparling, the kayaker, had contacted the Nature Conservancy, the
environmental group best known for buying undeveloped land. According to
Scott Simon, the conservancy's state director, the group had helped save
some 120,000 acres of this part of Arkansas, known as the Big Woods, a
good bit of the habitat where the bird might be. 

"A few days after Feb. 27, Fitzpatrick called me," Simon told me, "and
we danced around trying to find out what the other knew." When they
discovered that they knew the same thing, Simon became a partner and
agreed to supply aerial photographs.
"Fitz emphasized the need to keep it quiet," Simon went on to tell me.
"They wanted to get in one full year of research uninterrupted and
focused. For 14 months we did that. We called it the Inventory Project,
and we talked about it in code." Eventually, when all the necessary
groups were brought in, the Inventory Project had a 16-person management
board. "And it was really fun," Simon said. "These people met on a
conference call every Tuesday night at 8:30 p.m., Central Time." The
ivory-bill was now the subject of the greatest supersecret mission in
the history of ornithology.


Cornell's swamp operation moved swiftly into place in Arkansas in the
spring of 2004, and it is still there today. "We have 36 people on the
ground at any one time," the field supervisor, Elliott Swarthout, told
me. "Twenty-two are paid staff; 14 are volunteers." There are 28
Autonomous Recording Units, or A.R.U.'s, stationed at strategic flyways
in the swamp. Hundreds of hours of audio recordings are routinely flown
back to Cornell, where they are computer-searched for the patterns of
the ivory-bill's two most famous sounds. There is the "kent" call, a
funny bweep that sounds like a kid's toy horn. And there is the double
knock ? two heavy bill blows into a tree, so close together they almost
register as one sound.

Scattered throughout the forest, time-lapse cameras are mounted on
trees. The ornithologists have also drawn up grids and transepts and are
systematically moving through the area with human eyes to conduct
regular bird counts and spot roost holes. They have flown as many as
four ultralight aircraft low over the swamp canopy to flush out
ivory-bills. By the end of the first year of searching, Cornell had
registered seven brief sightings of the bird. 

In April 2004, a compelling piece of evidence came in. A computer
scientist named David Luneau was videotaping in the swamp when his
camera, fixed in the canoe and focused on his colleague, captured a
large black-and-white woodpecker in the background. The woodpecker was
half-hidden by a tree and was startled before making an out-of-focus
escape into the swamp. The tape lasts four seconds. Fitzpatrick and 16
colleagues slowed down the tape and concluded that the fuzzy white
patches appeared in the right places. 

Fitzpatrick waited a full year, studying the habitat, before taking the
discovery public. On April 28, 2005, the peer-reviewed 17-author paper
was published with much fanfare by Science magazine on its Science
Express Web site. Cornell and the Nature Conservancy launched
www.ivory-bill.com and provided the media with easily downloaded images.
The lab's marketing department fired off electronic press releases to
1,000 members of the media. Cornell's press office beefed up its
presence in Washington and assisted in the media rollout of news items:
43 radio shows, 174 television programs and 459 newspaper articles.
Overnight, the ivory-billed woodpecker became a generally accepted
scientific fact.


But not for long. Within weeks, both professional ornithologists and
amateur birders were starting to have doubts. Four world-class bird
specialists, led by Richard Prum of Yale University (who is a neighbor
of mine) and including a renowned ivory-bill expert named Jerome
Jackson, prepared a peer-reviewed paper, arguing that the Science
magazine material did not rise to the standard of scientific evidence.
It was a heavy charge. 

But then last summer, as the authors prepared for publication, Cornell
sent them some fresh and exciting evidence: recordings of kent calls and
double knocks. Prum was temporarily won over, publicly stating that the
"thrilling new sound recordings provide clear and convincing evidence
that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct." The authors pulled
their paper. 

But as the months passed and no new evidence materialized, the doubters
were heard from again. In January, Jackson published a direct attack on
Cornell's science in The Auk, a respected bird publication. He charged,
among other things, that Gallagher's original sighting suffered from
what might be called "story creep." Gallagher's book, published in May
2005, estimates his distance from the bird at "less than 80 feet." In
the July 2005 issue of Audubon magazine, his wife wrote that it was
"less than 70 feet." In an interview on "60 Minutes" in October,
Gallagher said the bird was "about 65 feet away." At one news
conference, Fitzpatrick observed that if Gallagher and Harrison had not
shouted, the bird "might even have landed on the canoe." Jackson wrote:
"Observations can become more and more 'real' with the passing of time,
as we forget the minor details and focus inwardly on the 'important'
memory." He characterized Cornell's science, memorably, as "faith-based
ornithology."

The video has always been held out by Cornell as the most solid proof.
After all, the pileated has white on the front undersides of the wings;
the ivory-bill's wing is distinguished by a lot of white on the top
trailing feathers. But in March of this year, David Allen Sibley, the
author of "Sibley's Guide to Birds," issued a frame-by-frame analysis of
the video. (I know Sibley and have been in the woods with him on a few
occasions.) Sibley's critique (which Cornell quickly rebutted) offered a
completely different interpretation of the video. As Sibley saw it, the
bird pushed back from the tree and rotated its wings furiously, scooping
the air to gain initial flight. In other words, the "topside trailing
feathers" you could see were actually the underside feathers of a wing
strenuously wrenched backward in the act of getting airborne. The most
famous ivory-billed woodpecker of the 21st century looked to David Allen
Sibley like a pileated flying away.


Early last month, I was back in the swamp, this time with Bobby
Harrison, the ivory-bill rock star. If you're going to spend a day in a
swamp, there is no one better to spend it with than Harrison. He had a
nearly silent trolling motor, so we were able to penetrate the darkness
of the swamp this time without a peep, except when we were beating off
cottonmouth snakes with our paddles or portaging the whole rig over
frustrating logjams. After three miles we came into an area called Blue
Hole, and we puttered up the way just past a visible A.R.U. when
suddenly: bam-bam. "Did you hear that?" Harrison said. I had. No
question. We pulled the canoe onto a mud bank and stepped out.
Visibility was becoming limited, not because of light but because the
forest was in early bud. Leaves seemed to grow bigger by the hour,
making the distant vistas close right up around us. As Harrison and I
stood there, a large black-and-white bird came from behind us and soared
into the green. "Did you see that?" he said. I did. His eyes tightened
with disappointment. "I couldn't tell," he said. Me either. 
The problem with double knocks is that they are not that distinctive a
sound. As Fitzpatrick himself told me: "There are certain double-knocky
sounds that come from wood ducks flapping wings on the water or running
into each other." Two branches banging in the wind can make that sound,
as well as a distant truck running over a manhole cover.

When I was out in the canoe with Bill Tippit in February, we were
disturbed by some amateur birders nearby, loudly discussing their dinner
plans. Tippit hammered the side of our canoe twice with his paddle:
bam-bam. The woods went so totally quiet that I might have been able to
hear the birders scratching down the notes of their encounter if it
hadn't been for Tippit's chuckling. 


The first sentence of Gallagher's book reads, "I think I've always been
the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests, most of which
seem to involve birds." This sentiment of deep longing grips all those
now on the prowl in Arkansas. "It's been a fixation since early
childhood," Fitzpatrick told me. If you accept the thinking of Jackson
and Sibley, then it's possible to reread Gallagher's book not as a
birder's adventure of discovery but as a fanatic's confession of
self-delusion. He sometimes seems to undermine his own claims. Gallagher
confesses to be prone, for example, to "quixotic quests." The code name
used for the bird during the Inventory Project was "Elvis," an unusual
choice given that Elvis is now someone seen by true believers but who
is, well, extinct. In Gallagher's book, you can find Harrison's initial
reaction to Luneau's video: "It makes a bad Bigfoot movie look good." 

Gallagher also tells the story of a ghost-chaser named Mary Scott, who
had an Arkansas sighting a year before Gene Sparling, the kayaker, and
was the first person to alert Gallagher to Sparling's account. Scott is
a former lawyer who in midlife took up residence in a yurt near her
parents' house in Long Beach, Calif. On one birding expedition, Scott
took along a friend who knew an "ivory-bill whisperer." With the
clairvoyant on the cellphone, the search party learned that the bird
wanted to be seen but was troubled by the group's "energy." Scott
eventually wandered off by herself and, she says, saw the bird. In fact,
Scott has seen the bird quite a lot, so much so that she is openly
scorned by other birders. "I must admit," Gallagher nevertheless writes,
"I had come to believe strongly in her sighting." 

Trace back the involvement of the Department of the Interior, Cornell
University, the Nature Conservancy and a half-dozen other groups on the
ground, and you'll find that all of them, arguably, owe their presence
in Arkansas to a tent-dwelling courthouse dropout taking her guidance
from an ivory-bill whisperer on a cellphone. 

From the moment the Inventory Project began, according to Scott Simon,
environmental organizations carefully laid out a fund-raising strategy.
The Nature Conservancy immediately went to work raising money to buy or
option some 18,500 more acres. "Because 18,500 acres is about $28
million," Simon said, "we went to about seven or eight key donors who
have supported other projects. We shared everything with them, like you
would with a board member." Simon contacted people like Marshall Field,
the department-store owner; Roger Sant, a founder of AES Corporation;
and John Norris of Lennox Corporation. They were briefed on the
ivory-bill after being asked to sign confidentiality agreements. 

The conservancy was raising millions. Cornell, meanwhile, had committed
itself to an extensive ground research operation costing, Fitzpatrick
told me, "between half a million and a million dollars a year." At the
time of the 2005 announcement of the discovery, Gale Norton, then the
secretary of the interior, pledged more than $10 million in federal
funds to help secure the bird's habitat. She called it the Corridor of
Hope. 

In his article in The Auk, Jackson describes the pressure this put on
the bird sightings: "How many major donors, how many granting agencies,
how many government officials would contribute to the more than $10
million associated with this effort, if the message had been only,
'There might be ivory-billed woodpeckers out there'?" The ivory-bill
suddenly looked less like Audubon's stately woodpecker and more like
Hammett's Maltese falcon. 


The one sturdy argument on behalf of the ivory-bill is that there were
repeated sightings, all by the Cornell team, during the secret mission.
After Cornell got Gallagher's first sighting report, the ornithology lab
excitedly sent down another experienced birder. He didn't see anything,
but he returned with enough enthusiasm to inspire a half-dozen more
birders to head down. Expanding the clique while still incubating the
secret, Fitzpatrick dispatched ever-larger contingents.

"For me, it was just a recipe for misconception," Sibley told me
recently. He and other birders believe this expanding pool of people
being let in on a secret sighting may well have fed a kind of
groupthink, leading to wishful sightings. But could such a thing happen
among birders? Actually, it turns out, it does happen. A lot. In
Sibley's introductory book, "Sibley's Birding Basics" (published long
before these sightings), he warns against "the overexcited birder" and
"group hysteria." Sibley cites "one very well documented case in
California" in which "the first state record of the Sky Lark (a Eurasian
species) was misidentified for days, and by hundreds of people, as the
state's first Smith's Longspur."

"There is a long list of well-studied effects," Sibley told me. "There
is peer pressure, the expectation of what they were there to do, as well
as the authority effect of finding what the boss wants you to find."
Most of the Cornell sightings occurred in the surge of joy immediately
following Gallagher's return to Cornell. Since then, they have come less
frequently. At the ivory-bill celebration in Brinkley, the organizer got
up on the big night and said, "We were hoping that tonight we'd be
making news with a big announcement from Cornell, but apparently we
won't be."

These two opposing views in birding now exist side by side. Each day
more birders join the Prum-Jackson-Sibley side. But the
Gallagher-Harrison-Sparling view is not yielding any ground. In March, I
was invited to attend the annual dinner of the Explorers Club, at the
Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The group is a grown-up version of the Boy
Scouts, minus the solemnity of tying knots. In the hotel's Grand
Ballroom, there was a visit from a llama and, of course, a march of
penguins. The ivory-bill trio were onstage in black-tie to receive the
coveted President's Award for Conservation. Around a banquet table
loaded with exotic appetizers ? "Sweet-and-Sour Bovine Penis Braised,
With Testicular Partners" and "Mealworms With Durian Paste, on
Toastettes" ? the chat was about the thrill of the ivory-bill's
rediscovery. Reports of Sibley's critique were still in the newspapers,
yet there was not a peep of dissent to be heard near the "Kangaroo Balls
Bourguignon." 

The bird was both seen and unseen. "The Arkansas ivory-bill," Prum later
told me, "is the W.M.D. of ornithology." 


One morning last month in Arkansas, a Fish and Wildlife clerk named
Karen, sporting ivory-bill earrings, winked at Harrison, handed me a map
of the swamp and told us she'd been hearing about an area called the
George Tract. 
The ground there was not exactly swamp ? just wet, full of sinks and
little bogs. We didn't find much. We were just chatting when I asked
Harrison if he could remember when he first got bit by ivory-bill fever.

"Oh, sure," he said, without pausing. "It was after reading Don Moser's
article in Life magazine in 1972. I was 17 years old." 

I had been hearing about this article ? an account of a search for the
ivory-bill ? since the festival in February. Gallagher had mentioned it
in his talk, and I noticed how often it came up in lunchtime chats with
visiting birders. "I remember reading that Life magazine article,"
Fitzpatrick later told me. So I ordered the old magazine. From paragraph
to paragraph, Moser's story quivers with melancholy and wistful longing,
and as is typically found in Northern writing about the South, the
author's prose goes all damp as he contemplates a landscape of things
lost and, at twilight, almost found. 
"If the question of its existence remains unanswered it will continue to
range the back country of the mind," Moser wrote of the ivory-bill, "and
those who wish to trail it there can find it in their visions." 

"It's a funny thing about that magazine," Harrison said to me in the
bog. "I cannot tell you how many people I stumble upon out here in the
woods, and when we get to talking, I find out that they were inspired by
the exact same article."


The greatest search for the ivory-bill was a 1935 expedition led by
Arthur Allen, who, like Fitzpatrick, headed the Cornell ornithology lab.
As Gallagher relates in his book, Allen and his team ventured into some
virgin swamp in Louisiana known as the Singer Tract, owned by the
company that bought such forests to make cabinets for its sewing
machines. Allen not only saw the bird but also filmed it, photographed
it and recorded it. Today, when Cornell scientists play the famous kent
calls in Arkansas hoping to attract the bird, they are playing Allen's
70-year-old recordings.

After the expedition, Allen sent his best student, a young man named
James Tanner, down South to spend three years observing the bird. Out of
that work came a slim book, still in print, and no ghost-bird chaser is
without a dogeared copy. 
The burden of this noble history is undeniable. "No doubt about it, this
is a venerable institution," Fitzpatrick said, "and one of the things
I'm doing is sitting in Arthur Allen's chair." But that burden carries
much more than the reputation of Cornell University. If the ivory-bill
is a story, it is one that reaches deep into America's most anguished
history. 
After the Civil War, when the South lay in smoldering ruins with no
railroad or economy and with federal troops occupying many of those
states until 1877, there were no jobs for the freed slaves or the poor
whites living on the land. When Reconstruction ended, the Northern
timber companies descended. "Some 200 million acres of forest were cut
in about 30 or 40 years," Scott Simon of the Nature Conservancy told me.
(At one talk at the festival, a conservationist put up a slide depicting
the annihilated "range of the ivory-bill." It was essentially the
Confederacy.) These primeval swamps and old-growth forests had been
sheared into flat farmland by the time Allen and his party headed South
to visit the last stand of virgin woods.

It's hard to imagine that it's a coincidence that the story of the
ivory-bill so often involves a serious Northern expert coming South to
hook up with a smart-alecky good old boy from Dogpatch, and these two
lighting out for the swamp to find the iconic bird. The stately
Gallagher found Bobby Harrison, just as Allen and Tanner found an
amusing local lawyer named Mason Spencer and a woodsman named J.J. Kuhn.

After Tanner returned from his famous study, naturalists undertook a
monumental project to save the ivory-bill and its habitat. Chicago Mill,
a lumber company that had bought the timber rights to most of the
81,000-acre Singer Tract, expressed some willingness to sell them, since
there was no labor to cut the wood at the beginning of World War II. But
in 1943, as Phillip Hoose recounts in his book "The Race to Save the
Lord God Bird," negotiations with government officials and
environmentalists broke down when company executives learned that German
soldiers were being held in P.O.W. camps nearby and could be used to cut
timber practically free. "We are just money grubbers," the company's
chairman explained with a long-lost candor. Despite the intervention of
four governors, the last large virgin forest in Dixie was clear-cut by
Nazis.

After that, there has not been a single undisputed sighting of the
ivory-bill. Some theorize that the bird, unable to find appropriate
habitat, simply died out. Others disagree. "The bird didn't just die,"
Harrison explained to me. "He went ? somewhere." 

A lot of birders believe this, and perhaps that is why the recent
Arkansas sightings are hardly unique. Ivory-bills have been seen
sporadically since the end of World War II. In 1950, Chipola River, Fla.
In 1955, Homosassa Springs, Fla. In 1966, Big Thicket, Tex. In 1971, in
Atchafalaya Basin, La. In 1975, near Baton Rouge. In Cuba in the 1980's.
In 1999, Pearl River Swamp, La. Each sighting had mythic tones, and not
just because the iconic bird could never be definitively seen. There was
also that repetition of plot that marks the cultural myth ? the
friendship of a Billy Yank and a Johnny Reb, the almost-confirmed
sighting, talk of resurrection, sometimes a media circus or a fuzzy
image. Some of these sightings led to vicious disagreements. The 1966
sighting by a very respected birder, John Dennis, ended brutally:
"Dennis wants to believe he saw something," intoned James Tanner
himself. "But he didn't." In 1971, George Lowery Jr. came forward with a
story that he had befriended a local man who trained his dogs in the
swamp. Lowery refused to identify his swamp-loving sidekick, who had
given him two fuzzy Kodak Instamatic pictures of an ivory-bill on two
different trees. Critics right away noticed that the ivory-bill had the
exact same body posture in both pictures. The conclusion was that the
bird was stuffed and put up in the tree. Lowery went to his death
standing by his mysterious friend and the pictures. 

"Am I worried?" Fitzpatrick mused. "That if the ivory-bill is never seen
again that people will look back and say, 'Fitzpatrick laid an egg'? No.
I did the right thing to jump on the story and put resources on the
ground. We continue to focus on this as a conservation story whether or
not the bird decorates the treetops." After the disputed sighting in
Texas in 1966, 84,550 acres became the Big Thicket National Preserve.
The Nature Conservancy says it will be satisfied if this sighting has a
similar ending. "There may not be an ivory-bill there," said Steve
McCormick, president of the conservancy, "but it's a habitat that now
and forever could sustain an ivory-bill."

The ivory-bill's habitat is this Edenic swamp, an old and majestic
forest. The names of the areas where it has been sighted ? the Big Woods
of Arkansas, the Big Thicket of Texas ? suggest large and wild habitats,
crowded with senator trees and brimming with other life. The swamp's
ivory-bill is the storied messenger bird. He is Noah's dove, surviving
improbably after a catastrophe to bring us grace. Lord God Bird, forgive
us our trespasses.


Back three miles in the bayou with Bobby Harrison, the swamp air got a
bit awkward. "We heard a double knock," he said from the back of the
canoe. "That is so exciting." 

"Yeah, I heard it," I replied. Harrison brought up the double knock a
half-dozen times on our way in. He was plumbing my level of enthusiasm.
He was listening for that certain tremolo, the true believer's
excitement. I was cradling Schrödinger's cat as delicately as possible. 

"That is such good news," he said. "It is the first indication all
season that I had that tells me the bird is still here." We dragged the
canoe through a shallow part of the swamp. The sun was setting. "I feel
optimistic," he said.
But the truth is, few of the people involved in the hunt feel all that
optimistic anymore. "It would be a shame if the bird is not there and a
marvel if it is," McCormick confessed to me one day last month, "but
what I care most passionately about is the integrity of the ecosystem
and the fact of its rebounding, even if the bird is not there." When I
asked Fitzpatrick recently what he had learned after studying the
ivory-bill for two years, he said, "The bird is not that common." 
Harrison attributed Fitzpatrick's slim finding to the Yankees' grids and
transepts, which he mocked as a form of intellectual clear-cutting. "The
Cornell method is a bust," he told me, adding, "They had a tiger hunt
the other day. You know what a tiger hunt is? When the servants run
through the woods banging pots and pans so the maharaja can walk in at
the end and shoot the tiger." (Fitzpatrick prefers to call them
saturation searches: "Using 30-odd people spaced out in the swamp with
G.P.S.'s so that anything that moves that day, we'll find.") "It just
shows you how desperate they are," Harrison added. "They'll never see
the bird if they keep scaring it off." Harrison prefers the Tippit
method, floating and sitting. Harrison has a camouflage rig that covers
all of him and his canoe, leaving only his eyes to poke out of some fake
leaves. "I want to become part of the landscape," he said, as much a
dream as a strategy.

Since bird-watching season begins when the leaves fall off the trees, I
asked Fitzpatrick if he intended to hit the swamps with the same ground
operation this fall. "The answer is probably no," he said. "We will try
to get more robotic. We'll use more technology without human effort." 

The 22 paid staff members of this past winter will most likely be
downsized to somewhere "in the 3-to-5 range," he said. But Fitzpatrick
affirmed Cornell's commitment to Arkansas. "We'll be looking for years,"
he said. "Maybe for the rest of my life." 

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine
was about abortion in El Salvador.

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