Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  My friend at the Nature Conservancy called back that day to assure me that this woodpecker tale was a high-octane story. This was not merely the most sought-after animal in our mutual phylum—I was being let in on an expedition that would inevitably get headlined environmental story of the century. This was a lead with real players: the Nature Conservancy, the Department of the Interior, the state of Arkansas, and the prestigious Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Several rich tycoons had been smuggled in to see it. Private jets, my friend told me, were clandestinely dipping in and out of the Arkansas bayou on a regular basis. The bird had its own Secret Service–style moniker: “Elvis.” The president of Citibank as well as the President of the United States had been briefed. Arrangements were under way to have Laura Bush make the announcement at the ranch. Oh, man. I would do this. I was pumped.

  The next day, April 29, 2005, the story leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers. EXTINCT? AFTER 60 YEARS, WOODPECKER BEGS TO DIFFER declared the Washington Post. The head of the Nature Conservancy intoned, “This bird has materialized miraculously out of the past but is also a symbol of the future.” The eminent director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said, “This is dead solid confirmed.”

  II. Resurrection Accomplished

  I awoke that morning to a National Public Radio reporter tromping through the bayous of Arkansas. “These swamps are like flooded cathedrals with thousand-year cypress trees rising like columns out of the water,” said Christopher Joyce. I am always riveted by those radio pieces that take you to some exotic location—the crunching of the sticks, the trickling of the water—and create the place on the soundstage of your head lying on a pillow. In this case, though, I enjoyed it while simultaneously feeling like Wile E. Coyote after a misfired boulder lands on his chest.

  Knowing that Christopher Joyce had probably received the same phone call I got drove me to manically consume these accounts as they broke in magazines, radio, television, and websites. I knew the punch line already and I knew that it had all been orchestrated. I knew the main characters and that they had been prepped. I knew the background. I had done the homework. Once I quickly worked through the usual Kübler-Ross stages of reporter despair—denial, anger, jealousy, I hate everybody—I watched something I had never seen before.

  I observed a massive new truth stand up in American culture. Right away, the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird. The Lord God Bird signaled to America that maybe all that news of environmental destruction was overstated. The Bush administration seized upon this story—and the Department of the Interior’s Secretary Gale Norton took command of it—for precisely this reason.

  It wasn’t quite as if Galileo had called a press conference to announce that the earth revolved around the sun or as if Darwin summoned the scriveners of Grub Street to explain for the first time how changes in species can occur through natural selection. But it was a small-picture version of something like that, where a brand-new understanding totally at odds with accepted opinion becomes fact in one fell swoop.

  The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a case study of how professionals in our time can deploy new tools and media to proclaim a new truth. But it is also about how outsiders, many of them amateurs, can swarm this new fact with questions and contradictions to uncover an even more intriguing reality. An absolutely opposing reality. The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.

  All fortresses get declared by a flag, and the ivory-bill was no different. That press conference on a bright spring day in Washington, DC, was magnificent in an Andrew Lloyd Webber way, an impressive display of contemporary institutional theater. The Department of Agriculture was there. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology was in full force. Secretary Norton headed up a full-on Capitol press event. Standing on a stage backgrounded by the snapping flags of proud departments and bureaus, Norton stepped up to the podium as giddy as an Oscar-winning supporting actress. It was as if the emperor’s legions had returned from a campaign in Africa and had brought to the seven hills the exotic spoils of the jungle—the brawny gorilla, the stealthy panther, the subdued rhinoceros. The masses were assembled and invited to gawk not so much at the bird, which wasn’t there, as at the grand power of the state and the institutions that had found this bird.

  “This is a rare second chance to preserve through cooperative conservation what was once thought lost forever,” declared Norton.

  Here, too, was a new and thoroughly contemporary character in the drama. America got to meet the modern environmentalist: John Fitzpatrick, that morning, was a man in full. In his early fifties, Fitzpatrick was ruggedly handsome enough that if it had been a few decades earlier, he’d have been recruited for a Marlboro ad. He sported a whitening brush of a mustache and just enough pink in his face to suggest a career in the woody outdoors, schooling himself in the nuances of Nature. He was a really friendly guy. His friends called him “Fitz.” And now it seemed impossible for a nation not to join them.

  “The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Fitz told us. He said they had also recorded the bird’s distinctive sounds and that seven professional ornithologists had personally spotted the bird in flight. The basic story was an adventure yarn. A kayaker named Gene Sparling had spotted the bird and blogged about it. Then, a bird journalist named Tim Gallagher read the post. With another enthusiast named Bobby Harrison, they slipped into the swamp and, in an emotional encounter, saw the bird. Gallagher returned to tell Fitz, who was convinced of the details and who launched a massive, yearlong cover operation to confirm the bird story of the century.

  For the next twenty-four hours that story was inescapable. There were three hundred thousand searches for it on Google; birding sites crashed. Cornell rushed into publication (on the Science Express website operated by the scholarly journal Science) the necessary peer-reviewed article to give the story the empirical imprimatur of High Truth. The scientific paper boasted seventeen acclaimed authors. In it, Cornell detailed the seven confirmed sightings of the bird by trained Cornell ornithologists. They had the video “clearly showing an ivorybill” performing its signature move—bursting off a tree in a flare of white light and flying away. There were hidden devices recording its distinctive cry, and numerous photographs of scalings—the signature marks an ivory-bill makes when it strips bark from dead trees to get at beetle larvae.

  Despite the story having leaked, Cornell managed to flood the media zone. There were 174 television programs and 43 radio shows featuring segments on the bird. Cornell launched www.ivory-bill.com, and the marketing department fired off electronic press releases to one thousand members of the media. Cornell’s press office beefed up its Washington presence. One of the authors on the scholarly article had also prepared a popular book. Tim Gallagher, the editor of Cornell’s bird periodical, had written The Grail Bird, now rushed into print. The only medium neglected in those first weeks was, paradoxically, opera.

  But it didn’t stop there. Add to all this effort the stunning fact that the ivory-bill was blessed by a miraculous sense of timing and coincidence. The area of Arkansas where the sightings had occurred was known, like something out of a child’s tale, as the “Big Woods.” It was spring, too, and the announcement of the bird’s resurrection came within days of Easter. And its nicknames are the Grail Bird and the Lord God Bird?

  Irresistible. Interior Secretary Norton declared that work toward habitat restoration and protection of the ivory-bill would receive $10.2 million in federal money, an astoundingly massive sum for a single species. Norton announced that the area in Arkansas where the bird was spotted would now be known as the Corridor of Hope.

  When the technical paper appeared, Science’s editor in chief, Donald Kennedy, wrote an editorial that quivered with excitem
ent, an unusual public display of affection for a sober, technical journal. His mash note ended solemnly, though, casting over the entire spectacle a patriarchal prayer. Kennedy wrote: “An appropriate salutation would be the ancient Hebrew blessing: ‘Baruch Mechayei haMetim: Blessed is the one who gives life to the dead.’ ”

  III. A Single Spear Hits the Fortress Wall

  Like any professional group, highly credentialed ornithologists comprise a cozy ecosystem of people all pursuing the same subject. That is the essence of any such group. They meet annually as, say, the American Ornithologists’ Union and give the most eminent member the keynote address. In this small world, they may not know one another personally, but they know of one another. So they all simply know that, say, a professor named Jerome Jackson has always been the go-to guy for the ivory-bill or that Fitz himself made his name studying the Florida scrub-jay. And in this micro-climate of specialized professionals, the Darwinian competition among species is fairly intense and arguments about scientific evidence can often get distorted, if not collapse entirely, into battles of ego and pride. Which is why Mark Robbins, an ornithologist at the University of Kansas, at first kept his stirring concerns to himself.

  He had just returned from an overseas trip to discover America in the full grip of ivory-bill fever. The first person he spoke to was Tim Barksdale, who is a world-renown photographer of birds—“tenacious in getting the shot,” Robbins said.

  “I said, ‘Tim, did you get this on film?’ And he goes, ‘No.’ And I asked him, ‘How much time did you spend there?’ He said, ‘I spent over two hundred days, over twenty-three hundred hours.’ And I’m thinking to myself, something is wrong here. That was my first red flag.” The next day, Robbins met with some graduate students who were very excited about the rediscovery and wanted Robbins to share in the pleasure of seeing the bird on film. To the delight of birders everywhere, Cornell Lab had posted the brief movie on their ivory-bill rediscovery website for anyone to watch.

  Almost every birder has seen a pileated woodpecker, which shares many of the ivory-bill’s traits—white panels of feathers on a different part of the wings—but its beak is nearly black and it’s somewhat smaller and it’s very, very common. “I wanted to see the film,” Robbins said, “so one guy downloads it onto his computer. I look at it and now I’m feeling sick. I’m almost at the point where I’m going to vomit on the floor because I realized that it’s a pileated woodpecker.”

  The video itself is now legendary, possibly the most studied four seconds of moving images since Abraham Zapruder filmed his home movie in Dealey Plaza. The cameraman was a computer programming professor and ivory-bill enthusiast named David Luneau. He kept a camera mounted on a central post in his canoe. And when he visited the swamp, he kept it running all the time, just in case. As it happened, his brother-in-law Robert was in the front of the canoe on this day, and the automatic focus gives us a very clear image of him. Off to one side of him, in the blurry distance, a bird startles and flies away. A non-birder would not be able to tell you if it was a woodpecker or an eagle. It’s a tiny blur of white and black, and after being blown up, it’s an even blurrier blur.

  But to a professional, the bird’s white panels permit an interpretation. To Robbins, good science requires that you make the most likely interpretation: “The proportion of white to black on this bird can’t be the dorsal of the ivory-bill,” Robbins told his grad students that day. “We pulled our specimen,” he said, “and sure enough it didn’t fit and everybody is going, ‘Holy shit.’ ”

  Robbins kept this skepticism to himself but only for a day, at which point his old officemate Rick Prum called. Prum had since moved on to Yale (and he’s a neighbor of mine now), but he and Robbins maintained their old water-cooler chats by phone. And without so much as a howdy-do about Robbins’s overseas trip, “Rick was right off the bat with ‘What do you think about this ivory-billed proof?’ ”

  Turns out Prum had seen what Robbins saw—a pileated. Still, it seemed crazy to question it since there was so much other proof—the numerous sightings by professionals, the telltale bark scalings, and other evidence. Yet by the end of the conversation, Robbins and Prum felt compelled to make the scientific case, especially about the ambiguity of the video. They would prepare a paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal, in this case, Public Library of Science Biology.

  This was how we are all taught science is supposed to work. Data and conclusions get set down, then presented to other people in the field to review (or duplicate), and then those peer reviewers give the paper a thumbs-up or -down to publication. This idea of peer review is what makes science different from other forms of truth construction. Originally, the scientific method might have been an effort to keep the language of miracles and faith and Scriptural Authority out of observations and conclusions. But now we understand that it’s also meant to scrub secular flaws as well—logical holes, rhetorical leaps, insistence based on seniority or ego.

  As he and Robbins wrote the paper and finished it, I got a call from Prum. He was asking me for advice about how to get the word out about his paper. I immediately told him of my own failed involvement in the story so far and, frankly, was excited to hear that there was a controversy. Again, my magazine deadlines would not be fast enough, and it hardly mattered. Just before they were set to publish, Prum and Robbins received a call from an acquaintance inside the Cornell lab who had heard about their upcoming article. She warned them that Cornell had put audio machines throughout the woods and were still analyzing the numerous calls and knocks picked up on the tapes, but that the sound prints looked like the rock-solid evidence everyone wanted. And yet, in the paper, Cornell refused to say anything about the sounds other than that they were “suggestive but not proof.” Prum and Robbins were permitted to hear the audio and compare it to the soundtrack of the only film of ivory-bills made in 1935, shot by a legendary ornithologist named Arthur Allen, then also the director of the Cornell lab.

  The recordings convinced Prum and Robbins that while they might be right about the video specifically, perhaps they were being too impetuous about the general claim. So they did what scientists are supposed to do. Faced by better evidence, they held their article. Given the fame of the bird by now, Prum and Robbins’s retraction itself became national news.

  I remember Prum called me the day this happened. I was on my cell and stood in my driveway. Prum talks fast to begin with, but he was a flywheel that afternoon. The words zipped by. He said he was pulling his paper because that is what good scientific method mandated. But he was also saying that he still didn’t believe the video. It was an important distinction but one I felt helpless telling him would never survive the blunt instrument that is our national media. Indeed, within hours, the whole story became a parable about a failed attempt to bring down Cornell. But it was much weirder than that. For the time being, the bird existed in the most bizarre way. Prum and Robbins believed the video showed nothing, while Cornell said it showed an ivory-bill. And Cornell pooh-poohed its own sound recordings as “suggestive,” while the other ornithologists considered them compelling.

  IV. Fitz in Glory

  When John Fitzpatrick ascended to the podium at the annual meeting to the American Ornithologists’ Union, it was as if Perry had returned from the North Pole or Armstrong from the moon. All honor and glory would be showered upon Fitz.

  In his career, he was known as the scrub-jay guy, but he’d also become famous as a packager of birds. At various organizations in his career, he had shown that he could unite conservation mascots—photogenic birds, for instance—with money from mega-donors and the sweat equity of well-intentioned environmental groups to create massive partnerships. The work on the ground was carried out by the do-gooders, while the backers were welcome to proclaim their public virtue and the two “synergized” to get the hard work done. His most famous achievement—a bird program called Partners in Flight—says it all in the title.

  The stage for the annual meeting
was massive, with a huge dropdown screen, and was set perfectly for the arrival of the great man. Sure, there had been a peep of controversy with Prum and Robbins, but that was over now. Fitz was prepping himself for the history books. You know that scientists are thinking about history books when they dare to use religious metaphors—as Stephen Hawking did in the last line of his A Brief History of Time, about how science will “know the mind of God.”

  Fitz’s own words were solemnly quoted as if he’d already ascended to the great canopy and sitteth on the right hand of John James Audubon: “These woods are my church,” he prayed.

  From the beginning of his presentation, he spoke rapturously of nature. The first few minutes were about big old trees and haunting romantic landscapes and the loss, long ago, of virgin forests. He spoke achingly of earlier folks like Allen who got to walk in woods we can only imagine or see in mournful photographs.

  It’s in this context that the discovery of the bird became the birth of another cute-animal mascot. Koala bears, baby-faced marsupials, charming fuzzy critters? This is how Fitz presented the ivory-bill, as the new animal that would launch a decade of fund-raisers. The larger mission was, in fact, so huge—reviving entire deltas and massive swaths of land, the Big Woods—that it made accepting the rediscovery of the bird seem minor. Fitz was in Hawking mode, sure, but it was not history he was reaching for really. It was a new partnership.

  By the time he got to the evidence, he cheerfully encouraged the audience not to be troubled by the flicker of a speck of an image. In the video, the bird is no bigger than the brother-in-law’s thumb, and as it flies off it only gets smaller. Fitz says it’s crucial to get “the whole gestalt” of the bird coming off the tree. Yet it’s not as if the nuanced differences between ivory-bill and pileated perch-departing gestalts were then common knowledge. If anything, that very odd word permitted the audience to fill in the gaps of what was not seen. If you’re looking for a gestalt—instead of clear identifiable proof—then you’ll see the gestalt and be convinced. Fitz’s audience in Santa Barbara that day saw it and cooed.