Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  Once, in between sightings, I asked Sibley why he painted birds at all when you could so easily just take super-detailed digital pictures of what he saw in the lenses. He explained that a picture is a specific bird, and each bird is slightly different from the essential bird of that species.

  Each oriole is different in the way that every person is different, yet there are certain qualities that capture the very essence of orioleness. And the way the brain works, he said, makes it crucial to paint. If we see the quintessential oriole, our brains can typically pick out all the variations and make that call. Sibley doesn’t paint any one oriole but (and this is part of what he’s looking for when he glues the binoculars to his eyes) a stylized oriole all of us can see.

  Every time he lifts his binoculars, he is looking for tiny elements—secondary feathers, some tuft, a unique shape to the tail—that essentially capture the bird in view. What does a platonic seagull look like? And that’s why he can get lost with every winged creature that flaps within view. It’s a bird, to Sibley, but one that may yield one more detail, moving his understanding that much closer to the platonic bird of that species. There’s always time for one more look at some impish blue jay or pudgy owl. That’s why Sibley’s explanation of the Luneau video ended the argument for a lot of birders. They know that almost no one on the earth can see a bird the way that Sibley can. They know what I know. He may not be a credentialed ornithologist, but he is among the best bird spotters alive. Yet Sibley’s paper was careful. He didn’t say the ivory-bill didn’t exist. He carefully said that the Luneau video was not the proof.

  Still, plenty of birders refused to believe Sibley’s evidence. And forget about wingbeats and de-interlacing, what about the seven ornithologists who saw the bird personally? And the sound tapes? There was still plenty of hope. And just before this latest challenge emerged, the hopeful convened in Brinkley, Arkansas, for what was headlined as the first annual ivory-billed woodpecker festival. I was offered a free tour of the swamp to try my hand at seeing the bird myself, so I booked a plane ticket.

  VIII. Got Pecker?

  First day out, I spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker.

  Or at least I can now add my name to the list of those who make that claim. It was a mild February in the swamp when I visited the bayou with Bill Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cell phone, we found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a canoe, and a big desire. “I’m game,” he said in his slow, deep twang. So we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of Arkansas’ most famous bottomland swamp.

  Even though I grew up among South Carolina’s cypress swamps, I had never seen cypress trees this huge and haunting. Towering beside them was the ancient tupelo, like some Devonian Period beta version of “tree.” These thousand-year-old senator trees are large enough at the base to garage a car, and then they suddenly narrow like a wine bottle before shooting up into a regular tree. Tippit and I spent the day paddling into swampy cul-de-sacs and just hanging there, strictly quiet, for half an hour at a stretch.

  “You can’t find the bird,” Tippit said in his most casual Zen. “The bird has to find you.” By late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush hour of swallows and sweeps. At times, the dimming forest could be as chatty as a crowded cocktail party, filled with the call of the pileated woodpecker.

  Then: “Ivory-bill!” Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a large, dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of the swamp.

  I knew the drill. To confirm the sighting, I asked Tippit to report to me precisely what he had seen. As with any witness, it was important to set the interview down on paper as soon as possible. Tippit called out: “Two white panels on the back of the wings! It lit on that tree. It was large. Also saw it flying away from me with flashes of white.” He called it in on his cell phone. And since that winter evening, I have been able to say, “I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker.”

  And yet I have not said it. Later that night, during the festival, when people would make conversation, they’d ask, “Did you go out today?” And I’d say yes and move on to marveling at the size of the cypress trees. I just didn’t have it in me to make the boast, and it felt especially odd because “ivory-bills” were everywhere.

  The little town of Brinkley (formerly Lick Skillet, Arkansas) had really gussied itself up for the Call of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Celebration. I fully expected to see a parade led by Robert Preston sporting an ivory-bill haircut (available at Penny’s Hair Care for $25). A modest motel had been renamed the Ivory-Billed Inn. Gene’s Restaurant and Barbecue offered an ivory-bill cheeseburger. There was even ivory-bill “blue”: I bought a T-shirt that read GOT PECKER?

  There were lots of T-shirts and tours, and www.ivorybilledexpeditions.com offered the cheapest rate at $325 per person. The deluxe was $2300 and your guide was Gene Sparling, the kayaker who first spotted the bird.

  Soon enough there were limited reproductions of Audubon’s famous ivory-bill drawing from 1829, issued by “Discovery Editions.” Governor Mike Huckabee issued ivory-bill stamps. On a television set one might see a public service announcement asking for funds, which piped:

  “Emily Dickinson said, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas would like to add that hope also has an ivory-colored beak and eats wood grubs.”

  Ivory-bills were everywhere, and yet talk of seeing the bird was conscientiously absent. It’s hard to describe, but it was like saying you’d walked on the moon or been anointed by the Dalai Lama. It was a boast of immense magnitude, exalting to claim.

  For instance, I went to a talk given by Sharon Stiteler, a perky, witty, smiling blonde who is the host of birdchick.com. Everyone knew that she had been invited by Cornell to spend a few weeks in the swamp. This very fact gave her an air of privilege and her talk a sense of potent authority—and she was discussing bird feeders. During the Q and A period afterward, she pointed at me for a question. So I asked: “Have you seen an ivory-billed woodpecker?” It was as if I’d dropped a glass on the floor. The room went weirdly silent. The smile on Stiteler’s face flickered away, quick as a chickadee. “I am not allowed to comment on that,” she said. “I was out with Cornell in December and had to sign a lot of confidentiality agreements.”

  The act of birding, ultimately, is a very stylized form of storytelling. For instance, if someone said to you, “I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree,” even the least experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don’t have yellow wingtips and don’t cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural history, and this is what I picked up with Sibley: The story gets told in a vivid but almost private language of color, wing shape, body design, habitat, bill size, movement, flying style, and perching habits. The more you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this tale.

  Claiming to have seen a rare bird requires an even more delicate form of storytelling and implies a connoisseur’s depth of knowledge. Saying “I saw an ivory-bill’s long black neck and white trailing feathers” requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay.

  If you don’t pull it off, then superior birders diss you. It’s all about cred. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your skills—to trust you, to believe you. So just who gets to tell the story of seeing an ivory-bill? I spent the entire festival trying to find that out. Cornell claims that seven members of their search team saw the bird, but they weren’t gabbing in the halls about it ei
ther.

  That intimidating institutional demand for silence was everywhere. There was a great ivory-bill story, but this, too, was very carefully stage-managed, coordinated, and controlled. I picked up the festival guide and saw the schedule. Cornell was holding it back—the telling of the most famous ivory-bill sighting. This was the dual sighting by the editor of Living Bird magazine, Tim Gallagher, and his good friend Bobby Harrison. These two men saw the bird together, and for this festival they were going to tell all about it. The story itself was the central event of the entire festival—an evening affair, after dinner, standing room only.

  IX. In the Beginning

  The fantastic story of the bird’s rediscovery begins with its Genesis tale. Every great find has one and the ivory-bill is no different. It’s the story of the first confirmed sighting and the written version can be found in Tim Gallagher’s book The Grail Bird, a history of the search for the ivory-bill and the book that was rushed into print with the rediscovery. Gallagher intended to interview every living person who had claimed an ivory-bill sighting. It turns out that there’s a whole subcategory of bird aficionados known as ghost-bird chasers, who look for birds presumed to be extinct. Gallagher himself was one, and over his years of searching, he met Bobby Harrison, a photography professor at Oakwood College in Alabama, who was also in this game.

  The two men were made for the Chautauqua circuit and the kind of postprandial entertainment promised in Brinkley. Gallagher is a tall middle-aged man with white hair and a pleasantly restrained Yankee demeanor. In Arkansas he amiably confessed that he’d always thought the South was weird and that he considered Harrison his “interpreter and guide.” Harrison, a fun good ol’ boy with a head like a mortar shell, had his own schtick, like saying that he didn’t know “damn Yankee” was two words until he was twenty years old. The audience laughed wildly at their tale, which was, like the best sightings, a great adventure story full of snakes, mayhem, mud, bugs, and a bird.

  Harrison is the kind of guy who loves his outdoor gear. When I first met him, he showed me his canoe draped in shredded camouflage material. He could climb in beneath this small bunker of camo, smear gobs of multicolored camouflage greasepaint all over his face, and float through the swamp—looking like nothing more than a drifting pile of leaves (or some whacked-out survivalist hiding deep in a bayou). By contrast, Gallagher is a restrained gentleman whose posture and courtesies make it easy to believe that he’s spent a great deal of his life at a desk on an Ivy League campus.

  Their story was why everyone had gathered in Arkansas. And, it began in early 2004 when Gallagher was alerted to an online posting by another Southerner, the kayaker Gene Sparling, who reported that he’d seen an unusual woodpecker in the Bayou de View. Gallagher and Harrison each interviewed him and were convinced that Sparling had seen the bird. They rushed to Arkansas and entered swamp in canoes. The second day they were there—February 27, 2004—the two saw something burst into the sunshine. “Look at all the white on its wings,” Gallagher shouted. “Ivory-bill!” they both screamed. And it was gone. They wrote down their notes and drew sketches. Gallagher had a new ending for his book. Bobby got on the phone to his wife, Norma, and sobbed.

  The audience was laughing one minute and stunned into teary solemnity the next. These were the two emotions of the night. We might be carrying on at Harrison’s schtick as a good ol’ boy making fun of the straight-man Gallagher or listening to the Yankee talk about how wacky it was to be in the swamp with Bobby and all that rednecky camouflage. Then the story might grow solemn as they took us into just enough detail to relate how emotional it all was: how they shouted when they saw the bird, how they flipped out as it flew by, and how they cried like babies as they wrote down their descriptions.

  If you read the Science article, it’s clear that the other academic sightings aren’t nearly as entertaining as this Billy Yank and Johnny Reb rendition. So the Cornell rollout carefully controlled this crucial part of the narrative. Only the official speakers—the courtly intellectual Gallagher and the hilarious swamp rat Harrison—did the talking.

  As they explained, after they had their emotional sighting, Gallagher flew back to Ithaca, New York, and back to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, headed by John Fitzpatrick.

  As with any convincing rare-bird narrative, Fitz listened carefully and then, based on his judgment, he believed. So Fitzpatrick decided to throw the lab’s prestige and best resources into the search. Right away, Fitz learned that the Nature Conservancy had heard about the same Gene Sparling sighting that had attracted Gallagher to Arkansas.

  “A few days after February 27, Fitzpatrick called me,” said Scott Simon, the state director of the Nature Conservancy, “and we danced around trying to find out what the other knew.” When they discovered that they knew the same thing, Simon became a partner and agreed to supply aerial photographs.

  “Fitz emphasized the need to keep it quiet,” Simon went on to tell me. “They wanted to get in one full year of research uninterrupted and focused. For fourteen months we did that. We called it the Inventory Project, and we talked about it in code.” IBWO became the preferred shorthand for “ivory-billed woodpecker.” Cornell’s swamp operation moved swiftly into place in Arkansas in the spring of 2004 and kept thirty-six people on the ground at any one time. “Twenty-two paid staff; fourteen volunteers,” field supervisor Elliott Swarthout told me. Scattered throughout the forest, time-lapse cameras were mounted on trees. The ornithologists had also drawn up grids and transects and were systematically moving through the area with human eyes to conduct regular bird counts and spot roost holes.

  There were twenty-four autonomous recording units, or ARUs, stationed at strategic flyways in the swamp. Hundreds of hours of audio recordings were clandestinely flown back to Cornell, where they were computer-searched for the patterns of the ivory-bill’s two most famous sounds. There is the “kent” call, a funny bweep that sounds like a kid’s toy horn. And there is the double knock—two heavy bill blows into a tree, so close together they almost register as one sound.

  Eventually, when all the necessary groups were brought in, the Inventory Project had a sixteen-person management board. “And it was really fun,” Simon said. “These people met on a conference call every Tuesday night at eight thirty P.M., Central Time.”

  The ivory-billed woodpecker—aka IBWO—became the subject of the greatest super-secret mission in the history of ornithology.

  By the end of the first year of searching, Cornell had many sightings but decided to put forward only seven of the best ones in the Science paper.

  But those very sightings would eventually become their own controversy. Originally, Fitz sent down several people who were well known for being able to identify birds. But those specialists did not see the bird. That was the red flag Mark Robbins mentioned. How could Tim Barksdale, who almost never failed to get the shot, spend twenty-three hundred hours in the woods and return without a single decent frame?

  It was only after these skilled birders failed that other researchers—who happened to be in the employ of Fitz and also inside this bubble of emotional secrecy—went down to Arkansas. All of them had, essentially, the same sighting. The bird never stopped and perched. It was always flying by. Of all the field marks that one might see—the famous white bill, for instance, so noticeably different from the pileated’s black bill—well, no one saw those field marks. Every one of them saw the burst of white trailing feathers—the one field mark most likely to be confused with a pileated.

  And in each case, the sighting occurred in a surge of emotion. “As soon as Ron’s canoe rounded the bend, I began shaking all over and feeling as if I would cry,” wrote Melanie Driscoll of the day she made her sighting.

  Could this be a case of group hysteria? That would ultimately become the claim from a lot of outsiders. When I first heard this charge, I thought that Cornell probably had seen the bird. I mean, “group hysteria”? Wasn’t that one of those TV diagnoses, like “amnesia” or �
�catatonia,” that show up as some kind of lame excuse in our pop culture rather than an actual reality. But, well, no. Actually, it turns out, such hysterias do happen. A lot. In the introductory book Sibley’s Birding Basics (published long before these sightings), Sibley warned against “the overexcited birder” and “group hysteria.” He cited “one very well documented case in California” in which “the first state record of the Sky Lark (a Eurasian species) was misidentified for days, and by hundreds of people, as the state’s first Smith’s Longspur.” Turns out, hysteria is practically a common problem among birders, ghost birders especially.

  “There is a long list of well-studied effects,” Sibley told me. “There is peer pressure, the expectation of what they were there to do, as well as the authority effect of finding what the boss wants you to find.” Most of the Cornell sightings occurred in the surge of emotion immediately following Gallagher’s return to Cornell. Shortly after the sizzle of that emotion faded away, so did all the sightings.

  It’s this emotion that almost every birder has described and has described at greater length, often, than the sighting of the bird.

  I know what this emotion is like.

  A few weeks after Tippit and I saw our bird, I went back into the swamp with none other than Bobby Harrison, the ivory-bill rock star. If you’re going to spend a day in a swamp, there is no one better to spend it with than Harrison. He had a nearly silent trolling motor, so we were able to penetrate the darkness of the swamp this time without a peep, except when we were beating off cottonmouth snakes with our paddles or portaging the whole rig over frustrating logjams. After three miles we came into an area called Blue Hole, and we had puttered up the way just past a visible ARU when suddenly: bam-bam. “Did you hear that?” Harrison said. I had. No question. We pulled the canoe onto a mud bank and stepped out. Visibility was becoming limited, not because of light but because the forest was in early bud. Leaves were growing bigger, it seemed, by the hour, making the distant vistas close right up around us. As Harrison and I stood there, a large black-and-white bird came from behind us and soared into the green. “Did you see that?” he said. I did. We both looked at each other. My face was a blank because, the truth is, I am a birder with greenhorn skills. Was that a woodpecker or a duck? Had I seen white on the trailing feathers? Honestly, I didn’t know. The moment was brief, and when it passed, Harrison’s eyes tightened with disappointment. “I couldn’t tell,” he said.