The Thing with Feathers
Pursuing an extinct woodpecker through Southern swamplands
This edition is best read in your browser — it will get cut off if viewed as an email
Newsletter facts: active ingredients include Buzzcut Reports (a comment on some subject of interest…4,072 words) and Something You Should Know (a sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver…15 words). Uses: temporarily inspires enthusiasm for esoteric subjects. Warning: this edition contains accounts of humans irreversibly damaging the natural world. Stop reading and consult an experienced ornithologist if you experience the urge to buy a ghillie suit, Mossy Oak waders, binoculars, and a ticket to the Big Woods of Arkansas. If you’re reading this, you’ve been prescribed a monthly dose of Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and avian addict Zander Abranowicz.
Buzzcut Reports
A comment on some subject of interest
The Thing with Feathers
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -— Emily Dickinson, 1891
Picture a bird. In size he is somewhere between a common crow and a red-tailed hawk. He faces away with wings folded, plumed in a stark constructivist palette, each color dialed to peak saturation: midnight, blood, snow. Black dominates, but most striking is the red crest rising to a fine curving point at the crown of his head. Down his long neck cascade two columns of white. They flare out at the shoulders and meet below where the wingtips touch, forming a curious diamond shape on his back. He turns to face us and raises his wings, as if drying after a rainstorm. The trailing edges of each are unbroken white. Alert yellow eyes create an impression of wily intelligence. His impressive features all seem to channel toward the straight pale beak for which he is named.
Americans have seen the ivory-billed woodpecker — the largest in North America — from many angles, from the embodiment of our decadence to the promise of our redemption. The American Indian saw its bill as a valuable good for trading, its feathers as ritual objects, and its skin as a medicine bag. The colonist saw its distinctive head as a curio. The early naturalist and collector saw it down the barrel of a musket, as did the pioneer and the poor, for whom it was a source of nutrition. The pious American saw it soar by and forgot the third commandment, hence its nickname: “The Lord God Bird.” The modernist saw it as a narrative device to summon a pre-Columbian American Eden on the page. The ornithologist saw it as a national treasure, the logger as a pest. Today, we see it very seldom: the last confirmed sighting was 78 years ago.
Let us return to our imaginary woodpecker. Some spring afternoon after the species’ final revelation in 1944, he is hitched to the side of a tree in one of the last groves of old-growth forest in the American South. He hears sawmills grinding in the distance. Their sound is disquieting, but it is spring, so he sings, sounding two nasal notes like a tin trumpet or clarinet mouthpiece. He pauses, listens for a reply, and repeats, this time releasing a longer, single call. The saws drone on. He needs something louder, something that will travel over this inhospitable terrain. So he winds his head back and drums his mighty bill against the trunk of the tree. He strikes with quick double-taps, one loud, one quiet, as if echoing himself. And he waits.
Writing in The Spectator in 1711, the Irish commentator Richard Steele noted that, "in Countries of the greatest Plenty there is the poorest Living." Economists and political scientists have since studied a phenomenon called “the resource curse,” or the tendency of places with abundant natural resources to be unequal, unstable, and undemocratic. Consider Haiti with its coffee, Iraq with its oil, and Appalachia with its coal. While useful for understanding the fate of nations, this concept ignores the fate of another population condemned by proximity to natural plenty: avifauna. The ivory-bill’s niche within a literal tinderbox made it uniquely vulnerable to the follies of human history, which engulfed its entire viable habitat in just a few centuries.
The earthly kingdom of the Lord God Bird once stretched from eastern Texas through the Mississippi Delta, down the Florida peninsula, and up to North Carolina, stopping roughly where the Spanish moss stops growing. For thousands of years they thrived in this primeval wilderness of upland pine forest and hardwood bottomland. Then, a series of commercial crops like tobacco, indigo, and rice started nibbling away at lands recently seized from their indigenous stewards. These were soon eclipsed by the most profitable — and land-intensive — plant of all. The first cotton seeds were sown in Florida in 1556, and by 1616, English colonists were cultivating it along the James River in Virginia. By the 1790s, innovations in textile manufacturing had created a voracious hunger for the product in the global market, and it was our young nation that stepped in to feed the world. All along the southern flank of the American frontier, particularly in the alluvial plain of the Mississippi river (home to the most fertile soil on earth), planters directed legions of African slaves to raze forests, drain swamps, and free up acres. Cotton was king, making the ivory-bill a refugee in its old dominion.
As John Earl Martin documents in his 2013 essay on the ivory-bill, the rush to rebuild after the Chicago Fire of 1871 caused a logging frenzy around the Great Lakes. At the going rate, it was estimated the northern states had a ten-year stock left. But in 1877, just as demand was outpacing supply up north, Reconstruction was coming to an end down south. Southern politicians eager to relax restrictions on extraction and desperate civilians eager to profit from land and lumber found keen buyers in northern firms. For the ivory-bill, boom spelled doom, and by 1891, the species had disappeared from North Carolina and Mississippi, abandoning its upland haunts and retreating to the last corridors of undisturbed swampland in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama.
In 1917, three years after archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, the American war machine kicked into motion to “make the world safe for democracy.” The defense industry needed lumber, and lots of it. Contractors responded, stripping our remaining old-growth forests of their mightiest specimens: thousand-year-old water oak, sweet gum, and cypress trees with trunks “as big around as the arm spans of five men.” The military industrial complex had been born, and it set the destruction of the bird’s territory into overdrive.
Another phenomenon thinned out ivory-bill populations in parallel with land clearance. Since the earliest settlement of our country, hunger was a constant reality for the poor, aggravated in the South by the boom-and-bust cycles of the cotton market and devastation wrought by the Civil War, fought almost exclusively on the southern homefront. To these struggling families, the ivory-bill meant meager but welcome nutrition. And it was not just starved hunters who shot the birds: naturalists from John Lawson to John James Audubon to William Brewster hoarded their skins and bills, as did amateur collectors and American Indians before them. Audubon wrote in Birds of America, his iconic 1827 volume: “I have seen entire belts of Indian chiefs closely ornamented with the tufts and bills of this species.” Though less systemic than deforestation, direct killing played its part in the bird’s decline.
By the interwar years the ivory-bill was a ghost. In 1924, Dr. Arthur Augustus Allen, founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, spotted a breeding pair in Florida, but they were shot just days after by local collectors. Nearly a decade passed without a confirmed sighting. Then one day a lawyer in Madison Parish, Louisiana slapped a fresh ivory-bill carcass on the desk of a stunned administrator from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. It came from the nearby Singer Tract, an 80,000-acre holding of the popular sewing machine company, purchased in 1913. The company had since kept the forest in a rare state of conservation to protect its source of gum timber, used in the construction of wooden cabinets to contain Singer’s signature product. The lawyer, however brash, sought to convince suspicious officials the species still survived in the bayou, and it worked: his fateful shot began a hallowed chapter in our story.
Word of the morbid sighting reached the desk of Dr. Allen, who was still troubled by the memory of those two ill-fated ivory-bills he’d seen in Florida years earlier. While on sabbatical in 1935, he mustered a legendary multiyear expedition to document disappearing birds around the country, including the ivory-bill. The Singer Tract would be ground zero for their search. Just eight years after the first “talking films” delighted audiences, Allen’s troops waded into the swampland armed with state-of-the-art cameras and recording devices — 1,500 pounds of equipment in total, ferried into the wild by mule-drawn wagon. They succeeded in locating a nest. Nearby, they erected Camp Ephilus, a play on the ivory-bill’s Latin name, Campephilus principalis. The less-aerodynamically named Brand-Cornell University-American Museum of Natural History Ornithological Expedition spent five days filming, photographing, and recording a nesting pair before packing out and moving on. They carried in their impedimenta living proof of the Lord God Bird, in flesh and feather, clinging to a fragile corner of Louisiana. It was the first — and to date, final — accepted footage of the ivory-bill.
One young member of the expedition was James Tanner, who returned to the Singer Tract in 1937 to conduct what is still our most comprehensive study of the species. He stayed two years in the swamp, during which time he managed to band the only ivory-bill ever: Sonny Boy, a male juvenile who’d fallen from his nest. (Scientists affix metal tags, or “bands,” on birds’ legs to keep track of their movements). After leaving the swamp, Tanner ventured by Model A Ford, train, boat, foot, and horse through the Mobile Delta of Alabama, Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge in Georgia, Royal Palm Park in Florida, and countless points between. Still, Singer had the only ivory-bills he could find. And Singer faced a new threat: with the drums of World War II echoing through the trees, loggers were accelerating their harvest to an unprecedented pace.
Despite intercession by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the pleas of a consortium of governors from Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, and impassioned appeals to purchase the land at a reasonable rate by the National Audubon Society, the company that owned logging rights to the Singer gave the ivory-bill no quarter. In fact, evidence suggests they sped up their harvest during negotiations. When the Singer company refused to step in, the ornithological community knew the end was near, sending researchers in to document the last stand of the ivory-billed woodpecker. In 1944, Don Eckelberry made the final observation and sketches of the species in the United States. He was 23.
There is a strange coda to the Singer Tract saga. With their regular workforce overseas fighting Nazis, the logging company brought in German prisoners-of-war to fell the timber. Eckleberry watched them work: “[They] were incredulous at the waste — only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.” When James Tanner visited the Singer Tract in 1986, it was barely recognizable from the green cathedral where he’d made his name as a scientist in the 1930s. Cornell ornithologist Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird, also visited the site in 2004. He labeled it a “ghost forest.” The landscape was a far cry from the descriptions provided by Tanner, Allen, and others who spent time there, including President Theodore Roosvelt, who, after hunting bear in the region in 1907, wrote of its cypress: “In stature, in towering majesty, they are unsurpassed by any trees of our eastern forest, lordlier kings of the green-leaved world are not to be found until we reach the sequoias and redwoods of the Sierras.” Gone were the cypress, deer, turkey, wolf, bear, panther, alligator, frog, and turtle. Gone was Sonny Boy and his kind, here and everywhere, forever. Or so the story goes.
The swampy bottomlands of the primeval South were prone to fire, flood, and fungus. This suited the ivory-billed woodpecker. Disruption furnished their food in the form of insects and the larvae they laid in dead trees like the sweetgum and Nuttall oak, which also happened to be the most sought-after by loggers. Longhorn, jewel, and click beetles were particularly appetizing, but smaller varieties like the southern pine beetle would do as well. To access these delicacies, the birds utilized their signature keratin bills to strip away bark. Only rarely did they hammer ahead in the manner of their lookalike and closest surviving relative, the pileated woodpecker. When beetles were scarce, ivory-bills scoured pine forests for acorn, hickory, pecan, magnolia, poison ivy, grape, persimmon, and hackberry. They were intelligent, resourceful, social hunter-gatherers: 11 were once seen together, four feasting from the same tree.
Resident, nonmigratory, and monogamous, a single mating pair occupied an estimated six square miles of forestland. And while they harvested their range efficiently, they were not merely consumers. By creating cavities in dead and dying trees, ivory-bills invited insects to burrow within, further weakening their fibers and accelerating decomposition. When these leafy giants fell, it opened passageways for sunlight to penetrate the forest floor and nourish new growth in the form of saplings. To anthropomorphize, the ivory-bill was a skilled forester, marking at-risk trees for removal to create space for new life. There is a tragic irony to the fact that a species so reliant on natural disruption succumbed to unnatural disruption: shocks too profound for the regenerative cycle to continue. The starry-eyed among us might say they died a poet’s death.
Even long before its decline, imaginative observers saw deeper meaning in this stately creature. John James Audubon clocked dozens during his travels, and shot plenty in order to draw them, interring a trio of two females and one male on the magisterial Plate 66 of Birds of America. He also wrote florid prose about the species, which to him bore an aesthetic resemblance to the subjects of a certain Flemish master: “I have always imagined, that in the plumage of the beautiful ivory-billed woodpecker, there is something very closely allied to the style of colouring of the great VANDYKE. The broad extent of its dark glossy body and tail, the large and well-defined white markings of its wings, neck, and bill, relieved by the rich carmine of the pendent crest of the male, and the brilliant yellow of its eye, have never failed to remind me of some of the boldest and noblest productions of that inimitable artist's pencil.”
Flying ahead to 1935, the bird’s disappearance was widely known when William Faulkner published the earliest iteration of his famous hunting tale, “The Bear,” in Harper’s Magazine. Set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha county, “The Bear” tells the story of ten-year-old Isaac (“Ike”) McCaslin, who forges out to the edges of nineteenth century Mississippi in search of an elusive mammal that even in the twilight of the 1800s represented “an anachronism, indomitable and invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant.” Ike is accompanied on the bear hunt by an African American with indigenous heritage named Sam Fathers, his father, some hounds, and a rifle too heavy for him to lift alone. Early in the story, he is left alone in a canebrake. Enter the ivory-bill: “invisible, a bird — the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by Negroes — clattered at a dead limb.” Soon after, the narrator describes Ike’s setting as a “loneliness through which human beings had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark, no scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam Fathers’ Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about, club or stone ax or bone arrow drawn and poised.” Narratively, the ivory-bill serves as a signal that the boy has passed into a land out of time, defined by a harsh, primordial atmosphere. When the ivory-bill pauses its work, it sends an unmistakable message: “He heard only the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off and knew that the bear was looking at him.”
Written after “The Bear” but set in an earlier Mississippi, Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom is a southern fairytale that thunders up, down, and around the mythic Natchez Trace, an ancient path running between Nashville, Tennessee and Natchez, Mississippi. It is a farcical romp peopled by natives, pioneers, planters, and highwaymen who use the wilderness as a smokescreen for their crimes. The forests always threaten to swallow the plantations, presented as lonely outposts of civilization in savage country, and as in “The Bear,” Welty introduces an ivory-bill as an instrument to make those forests feel real, isolated, and old: “On and on she went, deeper and deeper into the forest, and its sound was all around. She heard something behind her, but it was only a woodpecker pecking with his ivory bill.”
In another classic Welty yarn, “A Still Moment,” also set on the Trace but decades later, a fictionalized John James Audubon appears as a distracted deus-ex-machina, wandering out of the woods just in time to stop the bandit James Murrell from killing evangelist Lorenzo Dow (both historical characters from nineteenth-century Mississippi). As he approaches the men, standing tense under a live oak tree, Audubon hears the drumming of an ivory-bill, transcribing the “soft pet” in his journal, and whispering to himself: “always: remember.”
It makes sense that some of our finest creative minds selected this peculiar bird as a symbol of prelapsarian America. We love our underdogs, and considering its downfall, the ivory-bill is a natural representation for all the “others” sacrificed to progress: the Indian, the religious minority, the yeoman farmer, the slave, the Okie, the tenement dweller, the immigrant. Even the brightest scientists and ablest politicians of the twentieth century could not save the species, but artists like John James Audubon, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty succeeded, in their way, in saving this feathered martyr for eternity.
To watch the black-and-white films of the nesting pair recorded by the 1935 Cornell expedition is to experience an aching, haunting thrill. We see what is over the horizon. They do not. All who have encountered this footage, from backyard birders to professional ornithologists, have dreamt of seeing an ivory-bill in the wild. But for those who have actually claimed to see one since 1944, the aftermath has sometimes been a nightmare. Sightings by locals who live, fish, hunt, and dwell in potential ivory-bill habitats have been dismissed as cases of mistaken identity: what you thought was an ivory-bill was really a pileated. Experienced birders have also had their reports discounted. Even respected ornithological experts like George Lowery of Louisiana State University and the respected birder John Dennis suffered ridicule for asserting the species might still be around.
Chronicling every report and retort since 1944 would be tedious. Suffice to say that until 2004, belief in the bird’s resurrection was in short supply. The famous 2004 sighting followed a now-familiar cycle in the search for the ivory-bill. First, a bird is spotted by a local and word reaches someone at a major research institution. In 2004, Gene Sparling made a cryptic reference to seeing an ivory-bill on an obscure canoeing forum. It caught the eye of Tim Gallagher, editor-in-chief of Living Bird magazine, who, along with his friend Bobby Harrison, followed Sparling into the Big Woods, a 550,000-acre bottomland hardwood forest in Monroe County, Arkansas. Extraordinarily, they actually glimpsed an ivory-bill, which flew over their canoes before disappearing. Second, an expedition goes in to verify. From 2006 to 2010, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy sent waves of experts into the Big Woods (and likely habitats in seven other states) to confirm the claim. Third and finally, everyone leaves dispirited. The Cornell team surveyed more than 523,000 acres throughout the South and reported sightings, but were ultimately unsuccessful in documenting anything for assessment by the wider scientific community. Gallagher published his lively and indispensable account of this episode, The Grail Bird, in 2005.
Something about the latest sighting feels different. A team from the National Aviary in Pittsburgh recently braved the harsh light of public scrutiny by publishing a report titled “Multiple lines of evidence indicate survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Louisiana.” The paper’s introduction promises: “Here we draw on 10 years of search effort and provide multiple lines of evidence for the repeated though intermittent presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers at our study site in Louisiana.” Not only does the team claim more than a dozen sightings, they also captured a trove of images and recordings of the birds using drones and mounted trail cameras. Around the world, birders hold their breath while waiting for the study to be peer-reviewed, and writers wrestle with whether to refer to the bird in the past or present tense.
If it does indeed hang on, time is working against the ivory-bill, and countless other endangered species. We live in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of earth, and birds are faring particularly badly: in the United States and Canada, bird populations have declined by three billion — a whopping 29 percent — over the past half-century. Of course, it’s not unheard of for lost creatures to be found again. There are presently more than 350 species in the so-called “Lazarus taxon,” a supergroup of flora and fauna thought extinct, only to reappear again. They include the Omura’s whale, Coelacanth fish, and New Zealand storm petrel (or Takahikare-raro in Maori), a gorgeous seabird that vanished for more than 150 years before reappearing in 2005 off the coast of New Zealand. The ivory-bill, for comparison, has been absent for roughly half as long.
That these magnificent creatures might still be roaming our forests is one of countless reasons to protect what remains of our wildlands. One of the most at-risk ecosystems in the United States at present are the high prairie “leks,” or breeding grounds of the sage grouse, diminished from 450,000 square miles to 250,000 from ranching, development, drilling, and mining. The impact of this habitat loss is stunning: the U.S. Geological Survey released a report last year that shows 80 percent fewer males displaying for mates on the leks than in 1965, with half of that loss taking place in the last 17 years. Only urgent, coordinated action across the public-private divide can stop this strange and beautiful bird from going the way of the ivory-bill.
Even if unsuccessful, the fight to save this woodpecker — like that to save the peregrine falcon in the 1960s and 70s — has had important ripple effects. Richard Pough was a conservationist closely involved in the National Audubon Society’s fight to save the Singer Tract in the mid-1940s. Radicalized by the logging industry’s intransigence, he ascended to the leadership of a group called Ecologists Union. Changing its name to The Nature Conservancy, he steered the organization toward a singular focus: saving land. (The first they acquired was a 60-acre portion of the Mianus River gorge in Bedford, New York.) Today, land conservation is increasingly transcending party lines: Tennessee and The Nature Conservancy recently announced the preservation of 43,000 acres to protect songbirds, elk, and other wildlife — “the state’s largest conservation deal ever” — and in 2021, Governor Ron DeSantis, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, allocated $400 million to prevent habitat fragmentation in The Florida Wildlife Corridor Act. It passed 40-0 in the state senate, and 115-0 in the house.
Picture a bird. Her crest is black as coal. She rests on the branch of a bald cypress that stands more than one hundred feet high, lording over a remote section of southern swampland. A river otter courses through the murky water far below. The sun is high, casting an almost purple tint across her feathers. The sawmills she often hears in the distance have quieted for the day, and the songs of the forest have emerged. Suddenly, she hears something familiar through the groves. Pumping her wings, she propels herself toward its origin. She flies in steady, graceful swoops above the canopy, flapping continuously. Finally she reaches the source of the sound, circling once, then twice, before settling on a perch beside a bird just like her but with a brilliant red crest. He ceases his drumming and they eye one another, tilting their heads with curiosity. Hesitantly, he hops toward her and begins preening her feathers. She does the same to him. After some time, they press their pale bills together, holding close in a long, ritual embrace. The hum of an engine interrupts their communion and a small boat appears winding through the trees. It bears seated figures in muddy clothing. One rests a rifle across his lap. The two spy the vessel warily. Silently, they lift off, disappearing into the forest. They have a nest to build.
Sources and further reading
The Second Coming of the Lord God Bird — Margaret Renkl (The New York Times)
Is the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Still Around? — Matthew Wills (JSTOR Daily)
Ghost Bird — Michael K. Steinberg (Wilson Quarterly)
A Close Encounter With the Rarest Bird — Stephen Lyn Bales (Smithsonian Magazine)
Is It Really Time to Write the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s Epitaph? — Tim Gallagher (Audubon)
An elegy for the ivory-billed woodpecker — Mel White (National Geographic)
See 8 animal species that came back from the dead — Caitlin Etherton (National Geographic)
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
Spanish moss was historically used for insulating homes and stuffing mattresses, seats, and other furniture