The Hiding Bird
In the first pages of my birding field guide there is
a section on extinct birds. Birds that you can only see in the pages of
a guidebook, birds that won’t come back. The great auk, the Labrador
duck, Bachman’s warbler, and the heath hen. Passenger pigeons that
once blotted out the sun in flocks of no less than a billion. Carolina
parakeets whose social bonds were so strong that, if one was shot, the
rest would return to the body, calling out to it, only to be killed themselves.
The parakeet once shared its lowland, swampy, virgin forest habitat with
another bird that rests in those dreary pages.
This bird’s body is almost that of a hawk or kite, with pure white
wing tips, glossy black shoulders, and a stiff black tale. The bird’s
black back curves slightly into its neck which then shoots up straight
to the top of its brilliant red crest. From there, the head slopes down
until it ends in a mighty, sharp, ivory bill.
His huge eyes, big head, and skinny, little neck give him a slightly dopey
look, like he’s not quite sure what’s going on, but he really
really wants to peck the crap out a tree. But while that male ivory-billed
woodpecker sits on a tree in the ‘extinct’ pages of my handbook,
somehow, another male ivory-billed woodpecker sits on a tree in Arkansas,
jubilantly peeling bark from dead cedars and pounding, not just into trees,
but through them, with his huge powerful bill. Extinction, it would seem,
is not forever.
In 1939, there were 22 known ivory-bills in America. Every one lived in
a 120 square mile swath of swamp and forest land along the Tenas River.
With no national will to protect the birds, the land was cleared for agriculture
in 1948. The ivory-bills dispersed. Without huge amounts of old growth
forest on which to forage, the birds could not feed their young. They
disappeared.
Ivory-bills were in the ‘extinct’ section of my bird book
for more than ten years before Gene Sparling, a lone kayaker in Arkansas,
saw what he believed to be a very large, very strange pileated woodpecker.
He posted his account on the web. Within days he was contacted by a scientist
at the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Over the next year, the woodpecker was
sighted seven more times, and once caught on film.
The largest American woodpecker, with a huge red crest and a call that
can be heard for miles, had been hiding for over sixty years.
Extinction is extinction. Passenger pigeons will not return, nor the dodo,
nor the Tasmanian tiger. Humans push powerful, mysterious, and necessary
organisms into extinction daily. The ivory bill was the bird that first
pushed the truth of what humans can do into my heart. And so, to me, this
is a miracle.
They’re back, and we are committed to saving them. Coalitions have
been formed, the interior department is sponsoring the birds to the tune
of ten million dollars. We sometimes find it difficult to place value
on an individual animal’s life, but even under the Bush administration,
this animal, this one ivory-bill, is worth at least 10 million dollars.
A species cannot be replaced, cannot be recreated. Whether it appeared
through instantaneous creation, or through millions of years of evolution,
it belongs in this world. If there is a chance for the survival of this
species, a chance that the ivory-bill won’t ever be in the extinct
pages of a guide book again, what can be done should be done.
Driving ivory-bills from their native ground was a mistake that may stain
our country forever. Forests could be forever incomplete, children might
know only sadness in the story of the ivory-bill, and the clan of the
woodpeckers might forever be without a king. If he is alone in this world,
the last of his kind, then our atrocity is complete. But if the forest
that hid sixty years of ivory-bill life and death from our notice contains
his mate, or his children, or just one single female ivory-bill, we may
yet be absolved.
For a full year I wrote a weekly column for a daily paper in Boulder CO. I wrote about being young, poor and green, and the column was widely loved throughout the city. It remains one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
If you've got some time on your hands...check 'em out.
Colder than the Hinges of Hell
Four More Ounces of Responsibility