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The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Continued

It has been an absorbing and strangely sad exercise, this phoning and interviewing the last people to see ivory-billed woodpeckers. I want someone to assure me that the great birds are still out there, but no one does. Some dismiss the idea outright, almost as if wanting to be the last to have seen it. Others seem wistful, yet dubious that new sightings are yet to be made. Clifford Shackleford has compiled recent, published sightings of the species in Texas. To this day, hundreds of purported ivorybill sightings come in to his office each year:

"There are a lot of people who claim to see it. I think people are just getting out more, and probably none of them who call in are competent bird watchers. The majority of the people are interested, but really don't realize there are two "by-gods" [colloquial name for pileated woodpeckers]. Everybody wants to see a ghost. I throw it in there with UFOs, and Sasquatch, and the Loch Ness Monster. I think people can convince themselves that they see it. I wish I could convince myself."

I think about how modern endangered species management practices might handle the discovery of a relict population. The birds captured, one by one, with giant mist nets strung near their roost holes. Taken into huge enclosures. Artificially inseminated. Their eggs placed in incubators in some humming laboratory; their chicks fed by lifelike puppets until they were ready to join their parents in the enclosures. Would the populations be built up until a precious few were deemed ready for release? Would there be any place to release them? Given a choice between such intervention and certain extinction, and the intellect to consider it, what would an ivorybill choose? I imagine it flying away, in a long, straight line, wing beats steady, putting miles of swamp between it and the further workings of humanity.

Almost as elusive as the bird itself is Jerome Jackson, a Mississippi State University biology professor widely considered the foremost living authority on the ivory-billed woodpecker. He keeps a punishing schedule that includes teaching, finishing up a massive book on the species for Smithsonian Press, and searching for ivorybills both in Cuba and in the last tracts of bottomland forest in the southern United States. We communicate via computer for a long time before I actually pin him down by telephone. Jackson was appointed in 1986 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to an ivory-billed woodpecker advisory committee that consisted of fellow woodpecker experts Lester Short and James Tanner.

"We had a meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the purpose of the meeting, we found out after we got there, was to put the stamp of approval on declaring the species extinct. I said I wasn't willing to go along with it. I said, 'How can you declare a species extinct when you haven't even looked for it?' The habitat has improved dramatically since [the 1940s], because there were still 50,000 acres of the Singer Tract that were still relatively virgin forest. As a result of my complaints and refusal to go along, they decided to give me a grant in 1987 for one year to look for it. I had to be on sabbatical to do it. There was no money for help, or a boat. I did spend that time searching the swamps of the southeast. I bought a boat and canoes on my own money, and canoes, and I took student volunteers. When you're in the Atchafalaya Basin, and it's over 100 square miles, it's like looking for a needle in the haystack."

"In '87, Malcolm Hodges, a student of mine, and I were in an area north of Vicksburg, Mississippi. We'd play a 4 to 5-minute segment of tape, walk for 15 minutes, and take transects. We got to a point where I said, 'Malcolm, this is the best habitat I've seen anywhere!' He said, 'There it is, there it is! Listen!' I couldn't hear anything. 'It's coming, it's coming, it's coming!' he said. It was repeating exactly the call on the tape. It got to within a hundred yards of us and then stopped, wouldn't come any closer, and it called for 18 minutes. Finally I said, 'Malcolm, we've got to see it; we've got to get a picture or at least a sight record.' On the count of three, we rushed toward it. Nothing, no more sound, no more bird. We never saw it. This is within 40 miles of the Singer Tract. If they left the Singer Tract, they could have easily ended up there. We went back in and the next day we met a forester in the area, cruising timber, and he informed us that they were going to take a million dollars worth of timber out of there. And the next year they did."

"They had to have old-growth forest with lots of dead and dying trees, no question. They were feeding on large cerambycid beetles. You had to have big trees for big insects, and big roost cavities. The humidity of the forest was important because it provided the fungi that would rot the wood that would allow the beetles to exist. It had to be humid, as in the tropics. They wouldn't have occurred farther north, except right along river bottoms. The beetles are still out there, but some of them are quite rare. The ivorybill is the tip of the iceberg. What else have we lost along with it that wasn't so glamorous?"

"I saw an ivorybill, and we heard them on eight different days, in Cuba in March of 1988. No one was able to find them after that. I continue to follow up on leads, and the F&WS continues to send me leads. I followed up on a lead in Florida, where a woman had one in her backyard. She described it perfectly; she described the call perfectly. But everyone reads the books. The habitat around her house was not at all appropriate, but there was appropriate habitat within five miles.

If all the stars aligned, and a population of ivorybills were ever discovered, what would be the best course of action? I put the question to Jackson. "The best thing that would happen would be to secure the property, not 1,000 acres, but 30,000 acres, and keep it from the public. The fortunate thing for the ivorybill is that any population that could be found would be in the most inaccessible of places."

Jerry Jackson, by virtue of his unique combination of ornithological expertise, woodsman's smarts, and unalloyed faith, refuses to close the book on the ivory-billed woodpecker. Alone among all those I've spoken with, he continues to search. He truly believes that, somewhere on the planet, ivorybills still hitch and rap and toss their fluffy topknots, pound their great shining bills into bark, fly in long straight lines over a sea of treetops. As much as I would like to see an ivory-billed woodpecker, I wish more that Jerry would see one.

As I read over my writing, I can't decide whether to use past or present tense when referring to ivorybills. I go back and forth between the two, tense in either camp. Ambivalence permeates my every thought about the great woodpeckers. I can't look at the old photographs of ivorybills and believe they're gone; it's like holding a still-warm bird in the hand, one that's just struck a window. Its eyes are wide, its feet soft and pliable, its wings snap back when they're extended. Surely it will regain its senses and spring into the air. It's too beautiful to be dead.

The ivorybill was an extravagant creature, by all accounts, a vision in ebony and white. It had a big bill, and just as big an appetite for oversized beetle larvae. It needed a lot of timber, with many old, dying trees, and it was willing to travel to make its specialized living. We cut its habitat right out from under it, and we continue to cut it. We've sent it countless messages with our saws and our columns of smoke. Leave or die out. Find somewhere else to live. This land is our land, now. And it just doesn't listen to us; it goes on, somewhere, I have to believe it; not dead, but missing in action; alive, defiantly, desperately, joyously, alive. No one can tell me I'm wrong, and, it seems, no one can tell me I'm right. There are those of us who cannot let it go.