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.