Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  Let me explain.

  Even while more and more birders were tuning in to the skeptics’ arguments, and as they were becoming more and more convinced that the declaration of the IBWO was a perfect storm of misunderstanding, the alternate reality of the flourishing ivory-bill was enjoying glamorous balls on Park Avenue. Not long after I returned from the swamps of Arkansas, I got invited to the Explorers Club annual gala. Among the highlights on the bill that night was the Harrison and Gallagher show with kayaker Gene Sparling, too.

  The Explorers Club is a grown-up version of the Boy Scouts, minus the solemnity of tying knots. In the Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom, the evening required a tuxedo to join thousands for a sit-down dinner. More than a few of the members literally paraded about in pith helmets, and these members often favored entertainingly baroque mustaches, as well. The entertainment was exotic, of the old-school aristocratic style. For instance, there was a visit, in the ballroom, from a llama. A real-life march of the penguins occurred on stage. At one point, a massive raptor hawk was released from the balcony and swooped, on cue, above our dinner tables to the podium. It eyeballed the crowd with stern accipitrine judgment and then flew back. The ivory-bill trio mingled among the crowd, looking fairly uncomfortable, especially Harrison, whose camouflage ghillie suits fit him better than black tie. Tonight they would be honored with the coveted President’s Award for Conservation. Their sighting story was the early party chatter, as we all hung around a banquet table loaded with those braised bull penises with sweet and sour testicles, as well as “Kangaroo Balls Bourguignon.”

  I have long kept my genitalia consumption restricted to the metaphorical realm, and my tradition survived the evening. I did try the Spanish goat and the weird fish. Otherwise, the presentation that night by the ivory-bill performers was their usual tale of derring-do, of initial disbelief, of high emotion, of sighting the bird and the Oprah moment of sobs that followed. The audience of thousands loved it. And even if anyone in the room had read the blogs or Sibley, the explorers appeared to think of the ivory-bill the way children think of Tinker Bell, and they clapped the fading specter back to life with insistent and thunderous applause. Here I witnessed what I had come to see in other realms. There are two phyla of media consumers—high-information voters versus low-information voters. The high-information voter knows the details, the facts, and the ambiguities—that the full story is “complicated.” The low-information voter knows the surface contours of the story and just enough details to shake an affirming head when someone says that life, in fact, is “just that simple.” And so it was at the Explorers Club. The chatter beneath the pith helmets was about the thrill of the ivory-bill’s rediscovery. Reports of Sibley’s critique were out there, yet here one heard not a peep of dissent near the “Mealworms with Durian Paste, on Toastettes.”

  XII. Ivory-Bills and Weapons of Mass Destruction

  As the evidence crumbled, though, there almost seemed to be a battle afoot to see which metaphorical conceit could possibly capture the tragedy here. Was this a Bigfoot story, or was it more ominous? Some bloggers—furious that Cornell would not admit that it might have made a mistake—argued that persistence in a known mistake amounts to a kind of fraud and compared the ivory-bill to notorious hoaxes, the Piltdown Man (“fossil” of transitional early human dug up in England) and the Cardiff Giant (“bones” of a ten-foot petrified man found in New York State). Or was this more like Bush’s invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction?

  “The Arkansas ivory-bill is the WMD of ornithology,” Prum told me at one point. Or was Jackson’s “faith-based ornithology” spot-on from the beginning with all that talk of “these woods are my church” and the nearly Calvinist insistence that not everybody is chosen to “see” the bird.

  With all this metaphor-mongering, what was plainly evident was that something much deeper than bird-watching was tugging at this story. News storms like this one are no different than really great novels or blockbuster movies—the themes and the details manage to somehow gather up strands of wayward anxiety and pluck complex chords that resonate in ways far beyond the facts (or lack of them).

  My first real hint of this came when I went out with Harrison to look for the bird. It was a chilly morning in Arkansas when Harrison and I drove just outside of Brinkley to visit with a Fish and Wildlife clerk named Karen, sporting ivory-bill earrings. She winked at Harrison as I got my permit, and she told us she’d been hearing something coming out of an area called the George Tract. The ground there was not exactly swamp—just wet, full of sinks and little bogs—but some had reported a few trees with scalings that might be indicative of the ivory-bill. We were grateful since her telling us this was like a competitive angler betraying a prime fishing hole. As our truck rattled down the road, I asked Harrison if he could remember when he first got bit by Ivory-bill Fever.

  “Oh, sure,” he said without pausing. “It was after reading Don Moser’s article in Life magazine in 1972. I was seventeen years old.”

  I had been hearing about this article—an account of a search for the ivory-bill—since the festival. Gallagher had mentioned it in his talk, and I noticed how often it came up in lunchtime chats with visiting birders. “I remember reading that Life magazine article,” Fitzpatrick later told me. So I ordered the old magazine. From paragraph to paragraph, Moser’s story quivers with melancholy and wistful longing, and, as is typically found in Yankee writing about the South, the author’s prose goes all damp as he contemplates a landscape of things lost and, at twilight, almost found.

  “If the question of its existence remains unanswered it will continue to range the back country of the mind,” Moser trembled, “and those who wish to trail it there can find it in their visions.” The article speaks reverentially of the earlier two Cornell expeditions, the first one by the director, Arthur Allen, that resulted in the famous films and recordings in 1935 and the return in 1937 by Cornell graduate student James Tanner, who spent two years studying the birds.

  “It’s a funny thing about that magazine,” Harrison said. “I cannot tell you how many people I stumble upon out here in the woods, and when we get to talking, I find out that they were inspired by the exact same article.” The editor of Science, too, went on in his own pages about how a magazine article on the ivory-bill changed his life.

  When I went back to read up on those original expeditions into the Singer Tract in Louisiana, I discovered that each time there was the indispensable local who knew the land, understood the ways of wildlife, and happily agreed to tell funny stories while leading the academics into the woods. In 1935, Allen made his way in the swamp working on a tip from a colorful local guy named Mason Spencer.

  Two years later, Tanner was accompanied by another folksy local yokel, named J. J. Kuhn. The more I read up on these two expeditions, the more I found myself concerned less with the bird than with the characters.

  Every time, these expeditions seemed to be remakes of the exact same buddy flick. The courtly intellectual from the Yankee Ivy League college gets taken into the woods by the joshing redneck who knows the ground instinctively. It was The Gallagher and Harrison Show each time—these two iconic characters partnering up to enter the woods, as if they were required to give the claim some kind of deeper credibility. Read about enough of these ivory-bill sightings, and they have the same eerie quality of those group pictures in the movie The Shining—the same people turning up in the picture, no matter what year it was taken.

  In his editorial on the rediscovery, Science’s editor gushed over the authenticity of the local who “guided two members of the Cornell team into the right area.” Kennedy added: “It is fortunate for science that it attracts people who may lack special training or higher degrees but have found the knowledge and confidence to know that they can do real science.”

  Despite all the press mentions that Fitz’s sightings were the first in “sixty years,” it turns out that there have been regular, notable sightings (la
ter dismissed) every few years or so since Tanner left the woods with the last verifiable pictures of the bird: In 1950, Chipola River, Florida. In 1955, Homosassa, Florida. In 1958, Altamaha River, Georgia. In 1959, Aucilla River, Florida. In 1966, Big Thicket, Texas. In 1967, Green Swamp, Florida. In 1971, Atchafalaya Basin, Louisiana. In 1975, near Baton Rouge. In 1978, DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi. In 1982, Pascagoula River, Mississippi. In 1985, Loxahatchee River, Florida. In 1987, Yazoo River, Mississippi. In 1988, Ojito de Agua, Cuba. In 1999, Pearl River, Louisiana. Each sighting has mythic tones, and not just because the iconic bird could never be definitively seen. There was often that repetition of plot that marks the cultural myth—the Mutt and Jeff characters, the almost-confirmed sighting, the fuzzy image.

  Some of these sightings led to vicious disagreements. The 1966 sighting by a very respected birder, John Dennis, was dismissed by none other than the godfather of ivory-bills, James Tanner: “Dennis wants to believe he saw something,” Tanner said. “But he didn’t.” In 1971, George Lowery came forward with a story that he had befriended a knowledgeable local, a local Indian who trained his dogs in the swamp. Lowery refused to identify the Indian or the location of the sighting. But the Indian had given him two fuzzy Kodak instamatic pictures of an ivory-bill on two different trees.

  After critics had a little time with the two pictures, they noticed that the ivory-bill had the exact same body posture in both pictures. The conclusion was that the bird was stuffed and put up in the tree. Lowery stood by his Indian friend, never revealing his identity, until his death. He died a disgraced birder.

  The burden of the ivory-bill history runs from Tanner’s beautiful book to Lowery’s ignominious exile from ornithology. “Am I worried?” Fitzpatrick mused to me when I asked him where in that spectrum this sighting fell. “That if the ivory-bill is never seen again, that people will look back and say Fitzpatrick laid an egg? No, I did the right thing to jump on the story and put resources on the ground. We continue to focus on this as a conservation story whether or not the bird decorates the treetops.” As always with Fitz, the bird is a decoration, a badge—on the large suit of forest restoration.

  In South Carolina in 1968, a disputed sighting petered out when the professionals entered the woods with one of the most colorful men the state has ever produced: Alex Sanders. (Alex is an acquaintance of mine.) The hubbub around the possible sighting eventually led to the protection of the Congaree Swamp. That seems to be another mythic quality to the story: The result of a flawed sighting is the protection of vast forests, a desperate effort to reclaim some part of the past that is, well, past. After the 1971 disputed sighting in Texas, 84,550 acres would become the Big Thicket National Preserve. The Nature Conservancy says that it will simply carry on the work of expanding the Big Woods Conservation Area.

  This repetitive quality to the stories, with so many of the same features—the experts, the fuzzy image, the pleas for belief and the collapse of the evidence, the Yankee intellectual and the Southern woodsman, the ultimate quest for land protection—meant that the search for the ivory-bill wasn’t merely a Freudian story of childhood dreams. This was American mythology.

  One afternoon while I was ivory-bill hunting, I stopped into the Gene’s BBQ there on the main drag in Brinkley to catch an ivorybill cheeseburger. Bobby Harrison was there, and a couple of locals started talking to us about the bottomland swamps. Talk like this in the South usually means you’re going to be discussing special places to hunt—where to find the good turkeys, where the mallards feed. But at one point, one of the old guys referred to one spot as particularly hard to navigate since the growth had really come back after “all that cutting.” When I asked when that happened—the cut—he said, “Oh, more than a century ago.” This is one aspect of my native South that I have always admired: People carry around knowledge of long-ago events as if they just happened.

  Most people couldn’t tell you what happened on their own land a year before they bought it, but a century ago? Yet these guys talked repeatedly of the “logging” as if they were referring to 9/11. In terms of terrorism, the comparison is almost appropriate.

  The swampy areas in the South are “hardwood bottomlands,” and upland areas tend to have favored a longleaf pine forest. A century or so ago, these two interwoven, interconnected ecosystems had a wide range. During a lecture at the festival by a Nature Conservancy guy, he posted a slide showing the range of these ecosystems and the range of the ivory-billed woodpecker that used to flourish in them. It hit me like a slap in the face.

  The longleaf pine system, for instance, ran down the East Coast from Virginia to Florida’s panhandle and then ran west as far as Texas, covering ninety million acres, and was said to be the largest single-species ecosystem in the world. And when you set over that the range of the ivory-bill, which is a slightly smaller version of that image, and then step back, you realize you are looking at an ecosystem that already has a name.

  Dixie. How coincidental was it that the world of this bird and this larger ecosystem roughly bracketed the world we would come to call the Old South?

  Many early naturalists visiting the South looked upon the longleaf ecosystem in awe. It was not the deep dark forest as most of us come to understand it. Almost no thickets grew in this forest. It was open, cathedral-like, populated largely by tall longleaf pine poles, which grew straight and true. A longleaf forest looks orderly and tidy and endless. Horseback riders could gallop through it effortlessly for hours. This ecosystem was also called the “fire forest” because it would naturally burn every year. The longleaf pines dropped their luxurious needles, some as long as eighteen inches, throughout the year. Coated in a highly flammable resin, they stacked up slowly, and by the really hot months of July and August, a lightning strike would catch them on fire. The fire was unavoidable, and so combustible are these needles, there are accounts of the forest burning even in a rainstorm. But it’s a ground fire, more than a smoldering fire, not an all-consuming forest fire. It’s just enough for the longleaf, which can survive a ground fire, to burn back its competitors—the oak tree, the gum, the hickory, etc. It’s one impressive adaptation.

  Even the animals that live in a fire forest have adapted to it, almost like some kind of Disney movie. In the southernmost portion of the fire forest, the gopher tortoise, a fairly large creature that grows a little bigger than a dinner plate, digs a burrow some thirty feet in length. During the fires, the burrow becomes a kind of air raid shelter for all kinds of insects, snakes, birds, mice, everybody. Biologists who’ve studied this arrangement have determined that some three hundred different species make temporary use of the gopher tortoise hole when the fires hit. Meanwhile, all their competitors flee. Evolution, doing its thing.

  So a fire forest, when it is not burning, is distinguished by its open, sunny quality. The earliest settlers for instance found these woods so repetitive in appearance that it was easy to get lost in them. You would not enter them without taking a local guide. In Savannah, Georgia, the town fired a cannon at the day’s end, so that men in the woods could follow the sound home. There were special laws governing widows whose husbands wandered off into the forest and never came back.

  It was a place where, according to ivory-bill expert Lester Short, the ivory-bill could dine all day and where the bird preferred to live. “The habitat in the United States is usually cited as being deep, tall swamp forest,” Short wrote in his classic Woodpeckers of the World. “However, it is my view that the species originally inhabited the virgin pine forests of southeastern North America. These pines were cut over rather early, because of their accessibility, probably restricting the Ivorybill to less optimal swamp hardwood forests.”

  The story of that cut-over is one of the hidden histories of the South, surviving mostly in the anecdotal remarks of men sitting around barbeque joints. It’s the largely unknown story of what happened in the cruel decades after the Civil War when the survivors in the South, black and white, had no economy and strugg
led to find a way to make ends meet.

  Beginning in roughly 1880, speculators saw the easiest business opportunity in the history of the world: ninety million acres of the most beautiful pine on earth and, living right on top of it, a desperate, starving labor force.

  There was even a book published in 1880 called How to Get Rich in the South, written by W. H. Harrison Jr., who was either the grandson of the President by that name, or a man who never corrected the assumption. I bought an original copy off the Internet, and it is a breathtaking read.

  The chapters have names like “Cattle” and “Duck,” breaking the South down into every exploitable commodity no matter how small. There are chapters on “Beans, Snap” and “Cabbages, Early.” And on down it runs until the last chapter on timber. It encourages speculators to hurry because “the lumbermen of the North are buying up large tracts of valuable timber lands and putting in saw-mills.” Land in the South, the author tells his eager readers, that “is now for sale at $1 to $3 an acre will bring $50 to $100 within twenty years, for its timber. Southern timber land is an absolute certainty as a profitable investment.”

  And the speculators descended, and the timber companies also came, buying up land in 100,000-acre dollops. One can argue about the dates, but, effectively, between 1880 and 1920 the eleven states of the Old South were clear-cut into a confederacy of muddy stumps. Railroads were temporarily erected into even the most inaccessible areas. When Bobby Harrison and I fought our way three miles back into the Blue Hole area of the swamp, we came across the rotting remains of a raised railroad line, a century old.