North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  The most notable birds and those which most interested me were the great Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Of these I saw three, all of them in groves of giant cypress; their brilliant white bills contrasted finely with the black of their general plumage. They were noisy but wary, and they seemed to me to set off the wildness of the swamp as much as any of the beasts of the chase.

  But the approach of World War II witnessed the decimation of the last tracts of old-growth hardwood forest in the Tensas, as well as the destruction of the last Ivory-bills by hunters who could not resist taking a shot at a big black-white-and-red woodpecker. Subsequently, commodity booms over the past half-century have led to the conversion of much of the remaining bottomland forest to monoculture cropland, and thus today the Tensas basin is a far cry from what Roosevelt saw when he toured this southern wilderness. The good news, though, is that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has actively reforested a large section of the Tensas, and a number of the fertile river bends that once held Ivory-bills now support mature hardwood forest that grows grander every decade. The Ivory-bill is gone, but the Black Bears are back, and hundreds of other species prosper here, including some of my quest birds.

  This wooded swampland supports ridge and swale hardwoods, growing on fine, dark sediments produced by wet-season flooding of the Tensas River, which is surprisingly small and unprepossessing. Hidden in the tall hardwoods, this river flows muddy in spring, with high mud banks on either side. It is not surprising, however, that the Tensas’s grand forests arose in bottomlands distant from the main flow of the Mississippi. Along the Tensas, conditions favor timber growth without the catastrophic disturbance produced by the big river’s major floods. The Tensas floods just enough to fertilize everything without regularly tearing it all down (and, of course, the Tensas is not leveed). I had seen the same thing in the jungles of New Guinea, where the finest stands of timber lie distant from the great river channels.

  The Tensas River sinuously bends its way southward from the Tensas Bayou, just west of the town of Transylvania, a few miles from the Arkansas border. South of the Tensas National Wildlife Refuge, the river winds south until it meets the Black and Ouachita (pronounced “WOSH-i-taw”) rivers, east of the town of Vidalia. The Tensas bottomlands include Louisiana’s most famous hunting grounds for Wild Turkey and White-tailed Deer, and it was the height of turkey season as I tooled around the gravel and orange clay roads, dodging big, muddy potholes. Given how impressive the forests I saw there are, I could only try to imagine what they had been like before the big timber was cut in the 1930s. Giant swamp hardwoods must have darkened the sky with their broad, leafy canopies.

  At the spiffy headquarters and visitor center of the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge, I found I was standing on the river’s Greenlea Bend, which in 1937 was home to a nesting pair of Ivory-bills that Tanner studied. I was impressed by the majestic second-growth forest of Nuttall Oak and Sweetgum. I met with Kelly Purkey and Tina Whitney, two refuge staffers, peppering them with all sorts of questions about the location of the best patches of big forest accessible by kayak. We formulated a plan that would allow me to see the best of this refuge’s resurgent forests.

  The next morning, armed with their annotated maps, I headed into the Tensas for some first-hand exploration. Dodging luxuriant tangles of Poison Ivy, I dropped my kayak into the café-au-lait waters of Big Lake, a widening of the Fool River, which flows ever so slowly into the Tensas at the head of McGill Bend. In the adjacent bottomland woods, the oak canopy showed dark, leafy greenery, and by the sounds emanating from the trees, it was clear that this was woodpecker heaven. Within a few short minutes I heard the strident notes of various Pileateds and Red-bellieds, a Hairy, and a Flicker. At one point farther along the river, three different Pileateds called out from three different directions, while a fourth one drummed. Prothonotary Warblers and Northern Parulas sang from the forest canopy, along with innumerable Carolina Wrens, those champion southern songsters. No wonder the Ivory-bill had loved it here.

  A frog that I did not recognize gave a rapid monotone trill. Several alligators retreated and submerged themselves as I paddled down to meet the Tensas at McGill Bend, where the river is perhaps seventy-five feet wide and great for kayaking. That day the water was high, which meant I didn’t have to deal with fallen trees and snags, all now safely submerged. The kayak made not a sound, and I heard only birds and frogs and toads—a superb natural morning chorus free of cars or jets or construction or ringing telephones. Here one can feel a bit of what Tanner must have felt when he searched these big woods for Ivory-bills in the late 1930s.

  After four hours on the water, I was back in the car to wander the muddy, unpaved forest roads and extricate myself from the confines of the Tensas bottoms. I came upon Crystal Road, which did not even show up in the big red Delorme Atlas that sat open in my lap. One of several backroads that cuts through the grandest of the Tensas’s forests, it is a heaven-sent transect through the wilderness. Here all the familiar songbirds declared their territories: Northern Cardinal, Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, Prothonotary Warbler, and White-eyed Vireo.

  Then I heard a bird I had been anxiously listening for—the elusive but vocal Swainson’s Warbler, a denizen of these swamp forests, and another of my quest birds on its breeding territory. I was, in fact, now in prime Swainson’s country. One of the plainest of wood warblers, the Swainson’s looks a bit like a Worm-eating Warbler but lacks the black crown stripe. Instead, it features a dark eye-line, a chestnut cap, a buff-olive back, a pale breast with a slight yellow wash, and a white undertail. It makes up for its dowdy plumage with its powerful musical song, which rings through the swampy forest—Seeyu-seeyu-sa-see-sa-yu! This singing male had perhaps recently arrived from its winter haunts in Cuba or the Yucatán. This is a species that nests on the ground in thickets of cane within openings in mature swampy forest, and I had managed to find one of these prime patches of habitat. This was the only Swainson’s Warbler I was to encounter on my travels except for the handheld bird shown to me by Keegan Tranquillo in Louisiana.

  A big, fat Canebrake Rattlesnake coiled at the edge of the road. Its presence, and that of occasional Cottonmouths, had kept my kayak expedition a prudent one and would make any hikes in the woods a risky proposition. I had left my tall rubber boots back at camp, so my feet and legs were unprotected should I tread on a venomous snake while bushwhacking. A bit farther down the road, I came upon a handsome—and nonvenomous—Black Rat Snake as well as butterflies galore: Spicebush and Tiger Swallowtails, Red-spotted Purple, and Red Admiral, all wavering about on this spring day in the woods.

  At midday, returning from the Tensas bottoms, I wandered through the impoverished neighborhoods of Tallulah, the nearest town, in search of a place to eat lunch. It turned out to be Louann’s, on the town’s outskirts, with a couple of tables of good ol’ boys enjoying local delicacies: mustard greens, fried okra, hushpuppies, and frog legs. With my notebook and field guide, I probably looked out of place, but everybody was friendly, and the tasty food was well fried.

  On the following morning, I was back in the Tensas to tour the forest interior of McGill Bend with refuge staffer Nathan Renick. We ATVed the seven miles around the curve of the river to get deep into the bend’s forest, a mind-blowing ride—Renick jumped six-inch logs, traversed standing water three feet deep (which sloshed into the open cab), got partially stuck in deep mud, cut right through palmetto thickets, and did things I did not know could be done in a motorized vehicle. Renick, a bear of a man, carried a twelve-gauge shotgun for Wild Boar, a feral species that does serious damage to the forest’s low vegetation. We parked in an understory of Saw Palmetto and bushwhacked for a couple of hours in search of wilderness goodies, Renick pointing out interesting features of the landscape and telling me one story after another about the Tensas.

  There is nary a pine in the Tensas basin; instead McGill Bend and the contiguous refuge forest constitute a core preserve of about eight thousand acres of hard
woods—a big chunk of mature and roadless bottomland forest nestled within the larger refuge boundaries. The forest of McGill Bend is even-aged, all about seventy-five years old. We saw not a single giant tree here, except an old cypress down in the waters of the Tensas, but the forest was tall and impressive, made up of five species of oak: Overcup, Cherrybark, Water, Nuttall, and Willow. American and Cedarbark Elm, Sweet and Bitter Pecan, Sweetgum, Green Ash, Sassafras, Southern Hackberry, Honey and Black Locust, and Persimmon filled in the woods. There is no remnant old-growth forest here—the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company got it all, down to the last big timber tree—but, even though it is not very old, this is rich bottomland forest, where Ivory-bills lived a few generations back. We saw none of them, of course, but we did see bear tracks and photographed a Copperhead snake, listening to forest song dominated by Carolina Wrens, Summer Tanagers, Great Crested Flycatchers, Tufted Titmice, and Prothonotary Warblers.

  As I drove back to the campground on graveled Mill Road, an amazing profusion of butterflies greeted me, including thousands of Eastern Commas and Snout Butterflies. I had never seen such an aggregation before. Was this some sort of seasonal emergence? Farther on, in the back country, the GPS instructed me to make a left turn where there was nothing but regenerating forest; a formerly extant road must have been abandoned here where the refuge carried out large-scale reforestation to expand its bottomland forest. This was rewilding in action. Renick had told me the reforestation plantings included all seventeen dominant canopy tree species known from the area, and I wished I could return to see this forest seventy-five years hence.

  Three decades after Roosevelt hunted bear in the Tensas, Arthur Allen journeyed here to photograph and record the last of the Ivory-bills, and his student James Tanner spent much of the following several years visiting the great forests of the Tensas to document the lives of the woodpeckers. Tanner’s was the only field study ever conducted of this wonderful and tragic species; although he undertook fieldwork throughout the Southeast, he found Ivory-bills only here. During the latter part of his study, the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company was taking down the Tensas’s great virgin stands of hardwood. In spite of the efforts of many parties, both state and national, to preserve the forest for the remnant population of Ivory-bills, the last of the big trees were removed by 1944. That year, artist Donald Eckelberry observed a lone female Ivory-bill in the forest—the last one that was ever seen in the Tensas.

  A public announcement was made at a press conference on April 28, 2005, that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker had been rediscovered in southern Arkansas, a couple of hours’ drive north of the Tensas. At that point, a brief video clip shot of a bird in flight near Bayou De View was the only evidence for the continued existence of the species. High-tech field surveys followed, undertaken by Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology in partnership with the state and federal government, the National Audubon Society, and the Nature Conservancy, meant to generate information about the status of this rediscovered species. But time passed, and no additional evidence was obtained. Various independent scientists publicly expressed doubt about whether the original video even depicted an Ivory-bill. Perhaps it showed the widespread Pileated Woodpecker. People interested in the story then sorted themselves into “believers” and “doubters.” More than a decade after that exciting press conference, there is no evidence that a population of this great woodpecker remains alive in Arkansas or any place else on earth. The ornithological world has moved on, a bit saddened, and most of us now relegate the Ivory-bill to the realm of the extinct. That said, I am confident that, with advances in molecular genetic techniques, a facsimile of an Ivory-bill could be engineered in a laboratory via technology that is probably one or two decades off. Whether people in white lab coats can re-create the Ivory-bill or instead will create a bird much akin to it, with many Ivory-bill genes, is not clear. One day, those manufactured birds could be reintroduced into some of the oldest and wildest bottomland forests of the Deep South. Suffice it to say, I am perfectly OK with a lab-constructed Ivory-bill being brought back to the Tensas and allowed to recolonize the forest that is now protected as a national wildlife refuge.

  BOTTOMLAND WOOD WARBLERS AND FOREST LOSS

  Mid- to late April in northeastern Louisiana is wood warbler paradise. A diverse mix of passage migrants and nesters were here, for the delta forests offer rich and productive breeding habitat for these diminutive insect-eaters. The breeders, in most cases, arrive first, before the passage migrants that are headed farther north. Logic might argue that the birds with farther to travel should depart earlier, since their trip will take longer. But what matters most is whether the breeding habitat is ready to receive the birds. At this time, it was still snowing in northern Ontario, where many of the passage migrants nest.

  My field guide maps showed that these low-country forests were breeding habitat for ten species of wood warblers. Virtually every patch of forest rang out with the territorial songs of at least one or two species. That said, most are habitat specialists, and I had to work hard to find any of them. The density of these birds on territory was quite low—perhaps due to the annual mortality during the long wintering period.

  The passage migrants that stop over in the forests of the Tensas probably exceed twenty species, yet in my several days in the Tensas, I recorded only a handful. Tennessee and Myrtle Warblers were common, but I found few other species: only the migrant Magnolia, Chestnut-sided, and Yellow Warblers. When there are eighty thousand acres of forest, passage migrants tend to get lost in the woods. Only a few were singing at this stage, which made them even more difficult to locate. What is bad news for the birdwatcher is good news for the birds, though. The Tensas has abundant habitat for wood warblers—both those staying to breed and those on the way through—in spite of large-scale loss of forest in the Mississippi Delta over the past century.

  Nonetheless, anyone who has driven the back roads of the delta region of Louisiana and Mississippi can see how much forest has vanished from this fertile agricultural region. In April, one encounters vast planar fields entirely bare of vegetation, waiting for their spring crops of cotton, milo, corn, and soybeans. Tall forest stands in the distance are usually in wet bottoms that can’t support agriculture because of the annual inundation from spring floodwaters.

  Farming has been prominent in the delta for nearly two centuries, and the Mound-Building Native American cultures who lived here prior to colonial settlement probably cultivated extensive areas as well, given the fertility of the region’s deep, black, loamy soils. In fact, there probably have been repeated cycles of deforestation and regeneration, but it is safe to assume that this last pulse of clearance has been the broadest, in part because of the evolution of agricultural practices and the size of modern business operations. To maximize scale, agribusinesses have sought to generate wall-to-wall row crops. Hedgerows and bordering tree lines have been removed, and edge vegetation that can support bird populations of many kinds has been much reduced.

  A look at this area using Google Maps in satellite mode shows a large lens of prime agricultural delta land extending from southern Louisiana north-northeast to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi. This large deforested area includes central Louisiana, eastern Arkansas, western Mississippi, southeastern Missouri, and eastern Tennessee. This is low country that was periodically an inland seaway, and it is flat and alluvial because of the absence of hard-rock outcrops that could impinge the flow of the great river. The giant lens of fertile silt was created over time by the relentless back-and-forth movement of the Mississippi as it swept across the landscape while in flood, razing forests, moving sediments, and building floodplains.

  A glance at the satellite imagery also reveals linear swathes of forest lands in a number of river bottoms, including that of the Mississippi. These serve as important forest reserves for millions of migrating and nesting Neotropical songbirds. One also notices that to the west and east of the lens of agricultural land are extensi
ve hilly areas cloaked in a mix of hardwoods and pinelands. These, too, offer habitat for migrating and breeding songbirds. So the news is mixed: some good, and some bad. Certainly, the documented songbird declines are troubling, but perhaps the pendulum of loss has slowed; time will tell. Needless to say, we need to encourage state and federal agencies and private landowners to restore more forests on devegetated lands, and we need to encourage farmers and agribusinesses to adopt more forest- and hedgerow-friendly practices. Regreening bare land is also essential if we hope to address the long-term threat of climate change.

  Actually, ornithologists are not the only ones who appreciate the presence of extensive bottomland forest in the Deep South. Our closest allies are people who are, like Nathan Renick, avid sport hunters of Wild Turkey and White-tailed Deer: they, too, want to preserve and regreen forest lands. Aside from fishing and rooting for a favorite SEC football team, heading into springtime or autumn woods to hunt is a favorite pastime in the low country of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Hunters’ enthusiasm reaches a religious pitch with respect to turkey, one of the most challenging quarries known. In addition, hunting makes a substantial seasonal contribution to the rural economies of many small towns in these parts.