The Race to Save the Lord God Bird

by Phillip Hoose

  Baker probably woke up on the day of the meeting with a cautious feeling of hope. With the labor shortage and the money that had been raised, maybe the companies would at least sell the rights to Greenlea Bend. But something else was happening that Baker didn’t know. Chicago Mill was no longer short of workers in Louisiana. Help had arrived—from an unimaginable place.

  Entrance to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company mill, Tallulah, Louisiana

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  VISITING WITH ETERNITY

  When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and

  another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

  —William Beebe (1906)

  Madison Parish, Louisiana—1943 — 1944

  TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BILLY FOUGHT SCUFFED HIS BOOT IN THE RED DUST AS HE WAITED for his school bus to come where Sharkey Road crossed the Chicago Mill railroad tracks. It was a late autumn day in 1943. The leaves were already starting to turn. Billy and his ten-year-old brother, Bobby, were new to the countryside. After their mother had died, their dad had moved them from Tallulah to take a job driving a spur train for the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. Now they were “swamp rats,” living in Chicago Mill’s portable logging camp and playing and fishing in the bayous. But they still had to go to school, and so there they stood, alone, waiting for the bus.

  The Ivory-bill made its last stand within the Singer Tract, at John’s Bayou, once the site of Camp Ephilus and the birthplace of Sonny Boy

  Billy looked up when he heard a motor. Instead of the bus, he saw a black truck, filled with men. The truck stopped, and about twenty husky young white men were ushered out by armed guards. The men wore identical blue jumpsuits, navy-blue caps, and armbands with the big letters “PW.” Whatever they were saying to each other, it sure didn’t sound like English.

  Billy had heard the grownups talking about this, but it hadn’t seemed possible. German soldiers, the enemy—Nazis—had come to work in their woods. But it was true. Day after day, the truck arrived at the crossroads and the young men jumped out, some carrying hand-carved wooden lunchboxes. Enemy soldiers from the very same army that was trying to kill American soldiers halfway around the world—soldiers from Tallulah, even—stood around the clearing, stretching and chatting for a few minutes each day until they were led into the woods or sent out to work on the railroad tracks. One day, one of them actually beckoned to Bobby and offered him a candy bar. As Bobby slowly reached out his hand for it, Billy grabbed his arm. “Don’t eat it!” he hissed. “It might be poison!” The German got down on one knee to look directly at Bobby. He said, in English, “Please take it. I have a boy at home, too. You remind me of him.”

  The German on the other end of that candy bar had seen a lot of the world in the past two years. He had been captured in North Africa, where he had fought as part of an elite German unit called the Afrika Korps. Its mission was to conquer Egypt and seize control of the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and Mediterranean so that the Axis forces—Germany, Japan, and Italy—could command the oil fields of the Middle East.

  Instead, caught in a trap between U.S. and British forces, the German soldiers were defeated. Many were killed and a multitude—hundreds of thousands of Axis troops—were captured. Since British jails were already full, the British asked the United States to take them, and the War Department reluctantly agreed.

  The prisoners were marched onto big, flat-decked “Liberty Ships” that sailed from North Africa to Scotland and then on to Liverpool, England. Most prisoners probably assumed they had reached their destination, but there was yet another body of water to cross—the Atlantic. Weeks later, when the great ships approached New York City, all prisoners were ordered on deck to see the Statue of Liberty and the giant skyscrapers take shape on the western horizon. Many stared in open-mouthed disbelief, for their officers had told them New York had been destroyed. Some thought it was a trick—a Hollywood film set.

  In New York the men were put on trains and transported under guard to prison camps throughout the United States. It surprised some German prisoners that they were allowed to sit in cars reserved for whites, while blacks, who were fighting for America, sat in segregated cars. In all, about twenty thousand prisoners of war journeyed to Louisiana, where they were then sent to one of four main camps. On August 14, 1943, the first three hundred Afrika Korps prisoners, still tanned from the African sun, marched into Camp Ruston, a prison camp about forty miles from Tallulah.

  The next month, the War Department announced that the POWs would be available to Louisiana planters and other companies that needed laborers. Employers would have to pay them a small salary, transport them between their prison camps and the work sites, provide guards, and feed them. The Tallulah fairground was wrapped in barbed wire for 505 German prisoners, who promptly set up their own kitchen, bakery, and library.

  Chicago Mill was one of the first companies to snap up the cheap labor, sending trucks to pick up the POWs at the camp and drive them out to the Singer Tract each morning. And that was why Bobby Fought, standing on a red dirt road near Tallulah, Louisiana, found himself on the other end of a candy bar offered by a Nazi soldier.

  Some of the German prisoners picked up crosscut saws and took on the hard work usually done only by black workers. Others chopped logs or loaded freight cars or worked on the railroad. Those with professional training became mechanics and engineers. None of them had ever seen forests anything like the thick, tangled woods of the South. One complained, “When we Germans hear the word ‘forest’ we think of the beauty of our homeland … [Here] a thicket of thorns blocks the way to the trees. You have to hack your way in.” And they hated the insects. Wrote another, “Who does not know these little red stitches … itching and biting like hundreds of ants? … There seems to be no medicine against the bite of a spider like a point of a needle.”

  THE ENEMY AMONG US

  About 375,000 German prisoners worked and lived in forty-four states between 1943 and 1946. They labored in canneries, foundries, quarries, forests, mills, and mines. They picked cotton, dug potatoes, and harvested corn.

  They marched into camps as hardened Nazis, but most became less and less militant as the months wore on. They were fed well and quickly gained weight. They seemed to like outdoor work and were glad not to be in prison. Guiltily, local teams played against them in football and soccer. Prison officials, at first nervous, relaxed their guard and let them supervise their own men at work. The POWs baked good bread, which they sold at prison stores. Americans stood in line to buy the things they carved. In Louisiana, one prisoner carved a fine chess set. At Tallulah, a German made a fine violin from scrap. At Camp Livingston, one man made a collapsible model house. Few tried to escape, and many returned to the United States to live after the war.

  The Germans were like a gift from heaven to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. Now it could make money three ways in one project: it could clear the Singer Tract with workers who were practically free; it could sell as many boxes as it could make to the ravenous War Department; and it could sell the cutover land to rural families who wanted cheap farmland. Chicago Mill didn’t even have to clean up the mess it had made. “The waste, you couldn’t believe it,” recalls Gene Laird. “If you stood at a cut-down tree and it didn’t measure three feet around, they’d just leave it on the ground.”

  German prisoners of war cut trees in the South

  With new muscle from the prisoners, the 45-foot-long conveyor belt that delivered logs to a giant toothed blade at the Tallulah sawmill ran twenty-four hours a day. Log by log, two hundred years of southern history was ground into yellow dust. The mysterious, howling Tensas swamp forest, nightmare of planter families, was tamed by a single machine. From time to time the blade jammed on balls of shot from the Civil War still buried in the logs coming through. When that happened, the log was tossed aside, a switch was flicked, and the blade ground on.

  Against those whirring teeth the last great
Ivory-bill forest collapsed day by day—and with it went Chicago Mill’s interest in saving even a single tree.

  “WE ARE JUST MONEY GRUBBERS”

  At noon on Wednesday, December 8, 1943, a group of men stomped in from the Chicago winter, squirmed out of their overcoats, placed their hats on racks, and shuffled into Chicago Mill’s downtown boardroom. Seated around the table were important representatives from the federal government, the southern states, the Audubon Society, and the Singer company. After introductions, the group quickly settled down to business. Audubon president John Baker’s report tells what happened next: “[Chicago Mill] refused to cooperate in any way, and said that it would not enter into any deal unless forced to. The Chairman said, among other things, ‘We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.’ They would not help in any way with the creation of a park or refuge ‘unless forced to do so.’”

  The Singer company’s position was the same. It no longer cared about the trees on its property—what happened to them was up to Chicago Mill. Singer wasn’t even making sewing machines during the war—its manufacturing equipment was now cranking out gun sights and triggers.

  The bad news didn’t stop there. Richard Pough, the man Baker had sent to Louisiana to find Ivory-bills, telegrammed that after three weeks of searching he hadn’t been able to find a single bird. What he had seen turned his stomach. “It is sickening to see what a waste a lumber company can make of what was a beautiful forest,” Pough wrote to Baker. “I watched them cutting the last stand of the finest sweet gum on Monday. One log was six feet in diameter at the butt.”

  But three weeks later, as freezing rain popped onto the forest floor and spread a fine glaze of ice over the bare limbs above, Pough’s luck changed. From a logging road at John’s Bayou, he heard at last the “kent, kent” cry he had been awaiting for so long. Hopping over tractor gashes, he chased the sound through a wasteland of mashed limbs to an ash tree in a small section of the forest still not cut. He raised his eyes and finally found his trophy—a female Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Her well-used roost tree was riddled with six large holes. Though it was well into January, she still had no mate.

  Pough sadly watched the bird feed for a while, then hiked into Tallulah to telegram Baker in New York. “I have been able to locate only a single female and feel reasonably sure there are no other birds here,” he dictated. He soon followed it with another message: “I really fear the area will be cut any day.”

  Baker kept trying to stop the logging and save the land. He wrote letters to magazine writers and politicians, hoping to put pressure on Chicago Mill. Even if the Ivory-bills were almost gone, he argued, wouldn’t a scrap of the last virgin forest left in the Mississippi River delta still be worth saving? Didn’t we owe that to future generations of southerners, at least? But the nation could hear only war. Chicago Mill’s saw whined on without pause as more and more boxcars, sometimes fifty at a time, lined up for the wood. The War Department needed plywood cut from sweet gums to make gasoline tanks for jet fighters. They wanted boxes to hold shells. Even the British army had a special need for the last Ivory-bill forest. A history of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company says, “The Tallulah plant was so busy making tea chests for supplying the English army with its tea that they had a regular production line which ended in three box cars sitting side by side on the railroad siding tracks.”

  Several members of the Audubon Society’s New York City staff journeyed to John’s Bayou as if they were saying farewell to a friend with a terminal illness. Baker himself went to see the bird, as did Roger Tory Peterson. Don Eckelberry, who illustrated Audubon field guides, bundled up his outdoor clothes and sketch pads and boarded a southbound train as soon as he read Richard Pough’s disastrous news. Eckelberry was determined to sketch and paint the last Ivory-bill before it died.

  Eckelberry arrived in Louisiana in April 1944. He was welcomed by Jesse Laird, a local warden who had helped Jim Tanner in the final year of his study. One late afternoon, Laird and Eckelberry reached the ash tree where the female Ivory-bill had been roosting every night. The men sat silently on a log and waited as sunlight slipped away. At 6:25 they heard her rap on a tree in the distance. There was no answer. She called for about twenty minutes more, as if beckoning a mate. Finally, wrote Eckelberry, “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.”

  With too little light left to sketch, Eckelberry just watched, awestruck, until dark. He felt like he was staring at eternity. This single unmated female was all that remained of the Lord God bird that had commanded America’s great swamp forests for thousands of years. She was the sole known remainder of a life-form that had predated Columbus, or Christ, or even Native Americans. The arrow-like flight, the two-note whacks that echoed through gloomy forests, the ability to peel entire trees—all that was left of these ancient behaviors was now right before his eyes.

  Eckelberry returned to the tree most days for the next two weeks, riding to the Sharkey plantation in Jesse Laird’s jeep and then hiking half a mile into the forest with his paper, brushes, paint, pencils, sketch pads, and binoculars. He sketched at dawn and dusk, when the bird was at her roost tree, because he couldn’t begin to keep up with her as she flew over the forest. He liked to think he was “waking up with her” and “putting her to bed.” Sometimes he lost track of time until he realized he was sitting in darkness. Then he hoped the moon would come up bright so he could find his way home.

  On one of those days, Billy and Bobby Fought were skipping stones off the bridge at the Sharkey plantation road with two other boys when Mr. Laird’s jeep drove up. The door opened and a stranger got out, carrying a huge sketch pad and a box of pencils. He was slender and dignified-looking, and he walked with a limp. The boys clustered around. He introduced himself as Don Eckelberry and said he was hiking to a tree to sketch the last Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Did they want to go with him? Mr. Laird said they should, it was their chance to see a great bird maybe no one would ever see again. “You’ll have to be quiet,” Mr. Laird said. The Fought brothers quickly stepped forward as the other boys turned back to throwing rocks. “Will it be okay with your parents?” the stranger asked. “Yessir,” replied Billy Fought. “We don’t have to ask when to go into the woods.”

  So the two boys and Eckelberry waded and splashed to the gnarled ash tree and sat down on a log, a boy on either side of the artist. He sketched everything in sight as they waited. He drew the ash tree, a wolf, the flowers, the birds, even Bobby Fought. He couldn’t seem to stop, and they had never seen anyone who could draw so fast or so well. And then, around suppertime, the air seemed to stand still as the Ivory-bill winged in. She rapped on the tree with her gleaming beak, hopped up, went into the hole, stuck her head back out as if to say good night, and then disappeared. The artist told the brothers that he hoped they could understand how special this moment was and that he hoped somehow they would remember it always, even though they were young. He drew as he spoke, and the great bird seemed to come to life on his pad. “I’ve never been quite the same since,” says Billy Fought, now in his seventies. “I’ll never forget Mr. Eckelberry, or that bird, or that day, as long as I live.”

  A WINDSTORM

  After finishing his sketches, Don Eckelberry made one final visit to the ash tree. He probably wished he hadn’t. Overnight, the portable railroad had moved the German prisoners much closer to the roost tree. He observed their work for a while and then turned away. Later, he wrote, “I watched as one tree came screaming down and cared to see no more.”

  Twelve-year-old Gene Laird may have been the last person to spot an Ivory-bill in the United States

  It has been written that Don Eckelberry had the last “
authenticated” sighting—that is, by an expert—of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the United States. That may be true, but he wasn’t the last person to see it at the Singer Tract. Gene Laird, the twelve-year-old son of Jesse, helped his family by driving their cattle on horseback through the grand old trees. The trees at Singer were so big that their wide crowns drew together to form a leafy shield at the top, blocking sunlight from reaching the ground. Because young trees couldn’t grow in the shade, spaces on the ground between the giants were wide enough for Gene to drive cattle through, giving them exercise and letting them graze on switch cane that grew beneath the trees.

  There was only one small detour in his daily route. His father, having worked with Tanner and having grown to love the Ivory-billed Woodpecker himself, had Gene ride past the old ash tree and check in on the last female Ivory-bill every day. Gene did it for about a week after Don Eckelberry left, sometimes stopping to keep the bird company for a while. Since Chicago Mill was cutting only sweet gum and oak trees, they had passed over the ash tree and moved on. The female was still there, rapping and calling for a mate that was no more. And then, as Gene Laird remembered many years later, “one day I went by there and the ash had blown down in a windstorm. She was gone. And I never saw an Ivory-billed Woodpecker again.”

  Ivory-bill country in eastern Cuba

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CARPINTERO REAL: BETWEEN SCIENCE AND MAGIC

  The Ivory-bill is a messenger of the old days from the great forest that covered our land.

  It is a link between the people of North America and Cuba. It lives between science and magic.

  —Giraldo Alayón, Cuban biologist who has seen the Ivory-bill