When nature writing outlasts the nature written of, we should re-read it. While it may never have been originally intended as such, what we’ll have before us are the words of a witness to another world, one now alien to us. In our imaginations, something of its inhabitants survive.
On 30th September 2021, a bureaucratic formality caught the public eye, and mine. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed that Campephilus principalis, the ivory-billed woodpecker, was extinct, and so slated for removal from its endangered species list. Per official regulations, comments on this proposal were open to the public and would be taken into consideration before a final decision was rendered. Four years later, the comments have forestalled it. Perhaps withholding that final commitment is prudent? There’s otherwise the risk of a ‘Romeo error’: acting rashly, catastrophically, on the assumption of a death. For a critically endangered species, premature declarations of extinction could induce it, obliging the withdrawal of funding and abandonment of protective effort. Yet, probabilistic modelling, the basis by which these extinct/extant categorisations are made, holds conservationists in a stress position, tensing caution with the needs of triage.
It became a debate, and the debate a pantomime: “the woodpecker survives” versus “oh, no, it doesn’t.” It’s been going on for some time. To me, the former position seems one of faith. I say this because I come from the latter, doubt, with reluctance. The ivory-bill was (is?) charismatic, it’s said, (once?) the largest of the North American woodpeckers, a muscular icon in red, cream, and obsidian. Its wingspan was meant to be the length between the fingertips of an adult’s crucified arms. I’ve never seen it, though, other than in pictures. Artists have sketched it head-on, its bill punching larvae on your eyeline. That’s to draw it like an accusation, its irises wasp-yellow, yolk-yellow, boreholing your skull. If I’ve ever dreamt of it, I don’t remember. I think I must have done, to even write this.
Of its nicknames my favourite is the one which hints – suitably, without subtlety – at its impact on the human psyche. It’s the ‘Lord God bird’ which, I assume, came from its surprise value as much as its size; that it’d shock you if it swooped too near your face. Its beak was gigantic; its colour china white and shape an ungainly cone, tip crimped in a vice and its sides malleted flat. But would you really shout “Lord God!” if you were startled? There’s a syllable too many there, for me. The Christ! bird is more plausible. The Fuck! woodpecker, too.
The first test of faith is how dissuaded you are by irreverence. For years, I’ve followed the debate across message boards, memoirs, and articles. The writing about the ivory-bill has both the authority and internal tension of scripture. On its survival today there’s disagreement, but on two persistent elements, there’s consensus. Firstly, to humanity was attributed a substantive, if not necessarily decisive, role in its decline. We cut down its trees. Secondly, there was an undisputed witness to it, a last sighting on which all agree. This was in 1944, in a thoroughly logged forest in Louisiana; today, the Tensas River Wildlife Refuge, a four hour drive from New Orleans. The laity come there in their Gore-tex now, webbing on their backpacks, blisters in their boots. In clearings, the articles of their pilgrimage are unpacked: collapsible poles and water bottles, binoculars, notebooks, and cameras. The Lord God bird could appear, if they’re prepared. When the laity go home, it’s occasionally with elation, but always with data.
The debate plays out in academic journals, neutrally toned in each edition. From Troy, et al., writing in Ibis in January 2023: “based on available information, this [FWS] decision seems logical.” From Latta, et al., writing four months later in Ecology and Evolution: “it is clearly premature.” Scrupulously bloodless, numbers instead whelm the reader. Passion about the bird as a being is diverted instead onto methods. I read an estimate of 578,000 hours, over 17 years, of cameras collectively running. I read the technical specs of acoustic sensors and the frame rates of video from drone flights. I read how it was all fed into ravenous algorithms and masticated in the hope they’d spit indelible, discriminative pixels. I read how if you pause it there, then it was, it was.
The broader literature on anthropogenic extinction is also as dauntingly vast, with the topic now approachable from every position possible between deliberation and rage. It’s been treated crisply, with tranquil academic detachment; aesthetically, in respectful prose showing tender attentiveness; and ethically, with values orated in both tsk tsk tones and with incensed castigation, by jeremiad bluster or softer, subtle, exhortation. The writing on the ivory-bill spans all of it. I’m drawn, though, to a subset of accounts; the words of those who say they’ve seen it, certain above all the Lord God bird still flies. Even the academics, professionally downplaying it, can’t conceal their ecstasy. From Latta, et al., again (with italics mine): “most observers had an instant reaction to their sighting, dominated by astonishment at seeing a bird clearly different from any other, and manifested in the realization that in a sharp and focused manner, they needed to record every detail.”
All the while, for four years and more, the faithful have been sending in their evidence. I wanted to see what they’ve seen, but none of it is tangible. They’ve no eggshells, feathers, carcasses, or scat. They’ve no fledglings, roost sites, or nests. They’ve only glimpses, blurry snapshots of partial woodpecker, like the faces of saints on window mould and toast. The sceptic vituperates and jabs at a ruling: what’s required, write the FWS, is only clear photo or video footage that can be repeatedly, independently, interpreted the same way. It all seems so simple, if only one believes.
The second test of faith is how dissuaded you are by inconvenience. It’s thought the ivory-bill wasn’t at all that territorial but nomadic, and kept itself to dense, mature hardwoods, pummelling the dead bark there for beetles. In his masterwork, The Birds of America, J. J. Audubon warned that, accordingly, the ground of its “favourite resorts” had a dangerous nature: “would that I could represent to you their oozing, spongy and miry disposition…” He’d written – longingly, it seemed – of a “beautiful but treacherous carpeting” of wetland flora, a foot-swallowing morass of sweet flags and mosses. His descriptions were lush and to the masochist, practically coquettish: “would that I could give you an idea of the sultry pestiferous atmosphere that nearly suffocates the intruder during the meridian heat of our dog days…” This would certainly have been true before the tarmac, well over a century ago.
The third test of faith is how dissuaded you are by insistence. There are so many reasons for doubt, coolly and not unkindly expressed. From the mathematics alone, you’d need a breeding population of thousands to ensure the ivory-bill’s survival unto today. In an age of ubiquitous camera phones, no one, amateur or expert alike, has convincingly framed even one of them. We’ve simply eradicated its habitat, felling all those hardwoods for desks, pews, parquetry, and planks. Other objections are technical. Those aren’t the characteristic double raps of the Lord God bird’s beak – they’re the colliding wings of a flock of flying ducks. Those aren’t its kent-like calls replying to your audio recording – there are blue jays in the area and they’re mimics. That’s the tell-tale white plumage, alright, but it’s not an ivory-bill – it’s another type of woodpecker, but albino.
I can’t dispute the sceptics. Even so, despite it all, I still browse the enthusiasts’ literature, looking at imperfect snapshots, waiting to come to faith. It’d be wonderful. On this, the eyewitness is unambiguous.
In April 1944, within a fortnight, a painting and a poem were made on one of what, at the time, were becoming the ever-rarer uncut sections of the Singer Tract, an 80,000-acre stretch of swamp forest near Tallulah, Louisiana. Before the sawmills, it had been a muddle of sweet gum, oak, ash, and elm. A 23-year-old wildlife artist, Donald Eckelberry, had been dispatched to the tract by the Audubon Society, tasked with finding and painting a rarity: a lone female ivory-bill spotted a few months earlier by a researcher, Richard Pough. This last undisputed sighting of the Lord God bird is a direct quote from Eckelberry’s notes: “she came trumpeting into the roost, her big wings cleaving the air in strong, direct flight, and she alighted with one magnificent upward swoop. Looking about wildly with her hysterical pale eyes, tossing her head from side to side, her black crest erect to the point of leaning forward, she hitched up the tree at a gallop, trumpeting all the way.”
His painting doesn’t capture this animacy. The ivory-bill, red crest alight, has wings held as rigid as a plane. It soars above a grove of stumps, detached as a wartime bomber. But the accompanying poem, untitled, isn’t mournful. It even hints – or is this wishful? – at an egg:
Mostly we are preserved
In life beyond our time
Glazed, pickled, set in amber
And casketed above the ground.
Ornithological reports generally demonstrate attentiveness as a type of adoration, precision as interest and respect. Eckelberry’s notes are different, told in prose more affectionate than forensic. His emotional engagement is as unconcealable as a blush. The Lord God bird in flight: magnificent, wildly, hysterical, and trumpeting.
References
Eckelberry D (1961) Search for the rare ivory-bill. In: Discovery: Great Moments in the Lives of Outstanding Naturalists (ed. Terres JK), pp. 195-207. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott.
Fitzpatrick JW, et al. (2005) Ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) persists in continental North America. Science. 308(5727):1460-1462.
Jackson JA (2004) In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books.
Latta SC, et al. (2023) Multiple lines of evidence suggest the persistence of the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) in Louisiana. Ecology and Evolution. 13:e10017.
Michalak P (2024) Echo of extinction: the ivory-billed woodpecker’s tragic legacy and its impact on scientific integrity. BioScience. 74:740-746.
Solow A, et al. (2011) Uncertain sightings and the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Conservation Biology. 26(1):180-184.
Steinberg MK (2008) Stalking the Ghost Bird: The Elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.
Troy JR and Jones CD (2023) The ongoing narrative of ivory-billed woodpecker rediscovery and support for declaring the species extinct. Ibis. 165:340-351.
