John's Bayou 70 years later

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In January 2007, I visited the Tensas region in northeast Louisiana near Tallulah.

This photo was taken from Sharkey Road looking northeast towards John's Bayou. As you can see a lot has changed since the late 1930s. The area where the Cornell expedition of 1935 found the nesting ivorybills and Tanner did as well—all three years of his research—is now completely treeless, an agricultural field.

Soybeans or cotton are planted here during spring. This tract is in private ownership; it borders the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge.

The trees in the distance grow along the winding bayou itself.

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Jonathan Rosen

"Looking for an ivory-bill…takes the mediating nature of birdwatching to an even higher level, because in this case the quarry is a kind of ghost bird, a creature that does and does not exist."

I used this quote from Jonathan Rosen's wonderful book to begin my own. It seemed like the perfect way to sum up all that has become the mythos of the ivory-bill.

To say Rosen’s “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature” is a book about birding is like saying the Queen Mary was a boat. Well yes it was, or is, but it is so much more.

At its core is the author’s newfound love of birding, which the New Yorker practices in Central Park. It’s a spiritual connection to birds and nature or as he cites famed biologist E.O. Wilson, a “biophilia,” the love of life.

Through the book’s series of connected essays, Rosen also manages to trace the history of our relationship to birds through the writings and lives of literary and historic figures: Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, Wallace, Dickinson, Whitman, Faulkner, Theodore Roosevelt, to name a few.

But to balance these spiritually uplifting sentiments, Rosen weaves in a cloud of melancholy. The book begins and ends with the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that he points out “does and does not exist.” Is it extinct or not? And if it is extinct, what does that say about us?

“The Life of the Skies” is a positive title, but his darker subhead “Birding at the End of Nature” is the real crux of his work or his woes. As anyone who loves birds already knows, species are disappearing all over the world. The author uses a line from poet Robert Frost to bring this point home: “What to make of a diminished thing.” Indeed. What do we make of a truly diminished natural world? The America of Audubon is gone. In the closing day's of Jim Tanner's search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, he too realized that their world—large tracts of old forested swamps in the South—were also almost gone.

How SHOULD we feel, loving a thing that does and does not exist?

Excellent book.

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Smithsonian specimens

In 1963, Paul Hahn published a report titled “Where is that Vanished Bird?” He had located 413 ivory-bill skins and mounts and five skeletons in worldwide museums.

Some of these specimens are at the Smithsonian in Washington. In May 2005, I visited the Museum of Natural History: Division of Birds with Paul James, executive director of Ijams Nature Center.

Collections Manager James Dean led us down into the basement archives to where seventeen dead ivory-billed woodpeckers were neatly arranged in two groups: nine males and eight females, all lined up like ears of corn in separate wooden trays. Each had a paper label attached to a leg with a handwritten notation of when and where it had been collected, most seemed to date from the late 1800s. Families that were dispersing “grandfather’s” collection donated many of the specimens to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Between the Civil War and the conservation movement of the early 1900s, there was an all out frenzy of bird and egg collecting by people other than at the museums and universities. Before stamp and coin collecting became popular pastimes, as one century gave way to another, it seemed that everyone wanted something precious and feathered to hold onto. Paul and I stared in utter disbelief at the seventeen lifeless ivory-bills lying before us. We were speechless, too lost in our own thoughts to soil the moment with mere words.



Author with male ivory-bill specimen.



Paul James, executive director at Ijams Nature Center, with a specimen of a imperial woodpecker.
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