Thoughts on the Ivory-Bill Spring 2005.

The announcement in Science of an ivory-bill woodpecker sighting in Arkansas made the news the day before Joan returned from her sabbatical in Cambridge. When I picked her up at Dulles and we were back in the car heading towards home I said, “Joan, there is news and its HUGE!” and then I quickly said “its not political, its Stephen, its HUGE for Stephen”. When I was working in Arkansas for the Archaeology Survey the Ivory-Bill was the essence of the mystery and magic that seemed to infuse the landscape of imagination at the border of history and prehistory. Beginning in Arkansas in the early-1970’s and for the next thirty years I spent days searched the hardwood bottoms of the Deep South for the Ivory-Bill, convinced that there was a great conspiracy of silence that sheltered the bird and the mystery. In Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas I’ve left trails behind, striking off into backwaters and abandoned sloughs, finding Indian mounds, rattlesnakes, alligators and snapping turtles and losing myself, my worries, the world beyond the next hummock, the next big tree. Walking and wading as silently as possible or drifting in the old canoe motionless, as still and as quiet as I’ve ever been, almost breathless with the waiting. Waiting and watching. A deep silence slipping back to an ancient past as deep as the river, as deep as time with no beginning and no end in sight or in mind. After a while the deer forget you are about, wood ducks approach unaware and slide away without a ripple, wild turkeys begin to shuffle about the forest floor, herons put down their raised foot. The bottomland cypress forests of the South, especially the Congaree outside of Columbia, were my church and as real a wilderness as any Alaskan mountain top or ice-choked Labrador shore. I’d been haunted by the promise and prospect that if I went further in, lingered longer, braved darkness and eschewed comforts and promises then, only then, might I be rewarded by seeing an Ivory-bill. Ironically, among the first stories I heard of the Lord God Bird were in north-central Arkansas where I was a guide on the Buffalo River, living in a small log-cabin without heat or plumbing and working on my senior honor’s thesis on Vermont Archaeology. The bird was the stuff of legends –huge, invisible, mysterious. None of the guides I worked with had seen the bird, but their fathers had and stories of it persisted. The Buffalo is a tributary of the White River, my cabin, by water, was less than 200 miles upstream of what appears to be the Ivory-Bill redoubt. But at the time the Big Woods of the lower White were not on my radar screen. I was thinking further south and west in the Felsenthal and the Big Thicket. Once I made a foolish ascent of a precipitous bluff wall behind my Buffalo River cabin, arriving exhausted and thrilled at the rim where I fell asleep leaning against a scrub-oak. It must have been the bird’s arrival that woke me, for when I opened my eyes there was, close-enough to touch, a pileated woodpecker. The majesty of that moment, and the awe in being so close to such an other-worldly being, has never left me. I thought that this is how St. Francis of Assisi must have felt, that the wild creatures would come to his hand. And I longed to look into the eyes of his larger, wilder, mythical cousin. Since that day my mind has often been down around the bend, ahead of me, scouting and waiting. Waiting for this strange ornithological Holy Grail, this anachronistic thing from another time and place. Such a burden for one creature to carry as if in its sighting we might erase our sins, our sins of greed. Some Smithsonian colleagues in Birds are already dismissing the Arkansas sightings as those of an oddly-colored pileated but then, following in the tradition of Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian has ever been in the vanguard of conservatism. Hopefully time will prove the ornithological curators as wrong in their interpretation of woodpecker plumage as Hrdlicka was in assessing the antiquity of human beings in the New World.

Grand River Trappers

Here is a passage about the old Grand River trappers in Labrador that I am frequently making reference to. It always struck me as an amazing story (and a good reason why not to get a haircut!!!) But just as amazing as surviving the disaster in the rapids is the nonchalance with which Goudie and Michelin pick-up and walk home whereas the rest of us would have been dead from hypothermia!

If the hunting is good they may stay out till after the thaw or they may strike up their traps in April and sledge out on the last of the ice. In either case it is a dangerous business. The old ice is worn by the current underneath as much as it is melted above by the sun, and often it gives no sign of its fragility until it gives way and deposits the unwary traveller in the swift flowing water beneath. Yet the first wild water after the break-up is more dangerous still. Quite suddenly the dams of snow and ice are broken and the river comes bounding down triumphant, sweeping with it tree trunks and pans of ice in an almost continuous rapid from the plateau to the sea. It is admittedly dangerous to navigate such waters especially with a valuable cargo of furs, but the good hunting is over and the trappers must get home quickly or waste their time in the woods. They know the river so well that, theoretically at least, they can get ashore in time and make a portage around the worst places; but sometimes their impatience overcomes their discretion. On one occasion Sam Goudie and John Michelin were racing home after a very long and successful season in the woods. They were both expert canoe men and could steer their way among the white eddies of the worst rapid, so they chose the river where most men would have gone ashore. They came round a corner and, just in front of them, the river swirled under a ledge of still unbroken ice. Goudie, who was kneeling in the bow, managed to jump on to the ice, but John Michelin had forced his legs under the tarpaulin which was lashed above the load and could not move in time. Goudie caught him by his long hair and jerked him to safety as the canoe disappeared beneath them with all their food and two thousand dollars’ worth of furs. They got home without much hardship, but they were poor men until the next season was over. pp.38-39
J. M. Scott (1933) The Land that God Gave Cain: an Account of H.G. Watkin’s Expedition to Labrador, 1928-1929. Chatto and Windus: London.

Wren in the Window.

It stood so still for so long, between the little bottles holding odd blossoms and plants taking root, and the window glass as if trying to fathom the betrayal of the light and the promise of an open space. Joan thought it was a cut-out from a magazine that I'd slipped in behind the plants. When it knew we were looking at it, had seen it, it waited a second and then darted away, in the manner of wrens, to secretive dark places under chairs and behind radiators. Nothing to do but draw all the shades and at the same time open all the doors. Being a wren it would find its own way out.