Wilson's encounter with ivory-bills, swamps

Perhaps the most infamous encounter with an ivory-bill before the 1900s was recorded by Alexander Wilson in February 1809. (I eluded to it in Ghost Birds but didn't have room to flesh it out.)

Wilson was in North Carolina at the time looking for birds to shoot and draw. He was working on his American Ornithology, a visual account of all the birds in this country and a precursor to Audubon's The Birds of America.

Wilson encountered three ivory-bills, shot at them killing two but only wounded the third. He promptly retrieved the disabled woodpecker, wrapped it in a cloth and rode to Wilmington where he booked a room for him and his squalling "baby." Inside the inn the feisty bird commenced to almost destroy the room, but Wilson did manage to draw the poor thing.

Wilson was not fond of the South, mainly its people who he described as "ignorant, debased and indolent." (Wilson himself once did time in jail for extortion so who was he to cast dispersions?)

Quoting here from Under a Wild Sky, Wilson added "White women stayed out of sight and white men stayed drunk on a vile apple brandy that they began drinking the moment they got out of bed each morning."

Wilson's description of the Carolina swamps was a little more hospitable, "Enormous cypress swamps, which, to a stranger, have a striking, desolate, and ruinous appearance. Picture yourself a forest of prodigious trees, rising, as thick as they can grow, from a vast flat and impenetrable morass, covered for ten feet from the ground with reeds. 

Alexander Wilson

"The leafless limbs of the cypresses are clothed with an extraordinary kind of moss, from two to 10 feet long, in such quantities that 50 men might conceal themselves in one tree."*

*From Under a Wild Sky by William Souder.

For Wilson's own account of the wounded ivory-bill go to: feisty baby.

Ivorybill pair find 'forever home' at Ijams

"Two stuffed and mounted ivory-billed woodpeckers (one a male and one a female) finally found a forever home as a part of Ijams Nature Center's lost species exhibit.

The amazing story of how they came to be donated involves a beautiful old picture frame, a lifelong friendship between two men who grew up together in Worcester County, Mass., two friends in a Knoxville book club, and a letter written by Ijams Director Paul James."

For the rest of the story, go the Birdlife column by Marcia Davis at ivory-bills' journey.


- Photo by Stephen Lyn Bales

Phillip Hoose spoke at Ijams Nature Center

Oddly, when you write a book, one of the first things you have to decide is when to begin the story.

Tradition would have it that I should start with Jim Tanner in his youth, his background and why he went to Cornell.

Instead, I chose to jump into the Tanner/ivorybill story quickly, opening with Mason Spencer's shooting a Ghost Bird in 1932, thus proving it was not an apparition. I had a big story to tell and precious little space to waste. My contract called for a 300-page manuscript, no more but it could be less.

Originally, I decided to cover Tanner's early years as a flashback somewhere later in the book until I realized that Phillip Hoose had already done a good job of recording Jim's childhood in his wonderful book, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird.

In September 2006, I met Hoose when he spoke at Ijams Nature Center where I work. At the time, Nancy and I were beginning to pull together the initial research on my book. UT Press had just given me the go ahead to begin.

I did travel to Homer, New York and locate Tanner's childhood home to get a true sense of his roots but it turned out to be more for me than you the reader.

Pictured above: Nancy Tanner, author Phillip Hoose and myself.

Arthur Allen's early views on vanishing species

"It is interesting to contemplate whence each of our birds has come and whither it is heading—whether to conquer the earth with its progeny or to sink before long into oblivion.

"The processes which are going on today are the same as those that have been transpiring for millions of years. So incomplete are the records and so small our vision that it is exceeding difficult to interpret even what is going on before our eyes.

"The Great Auk, the Labrador Duck, the Passenger Pigeon have joined the great army of Archaeopteryx; and the Heath Hen, the Eskimo Curlew, the Whooping Crane, the Trumpeter Swan, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker likewise will soon follow them in spite of all we can do to protect them.

"The most we can hope for is that an intensive study of each of these vanishing species will be made before it is too late, perhaps such studies as will give us some inkling of the natural laws that have made and destroyed thousands of species of birds during the last two hundred million years."

Dr. Arthur Allen wrote in his book The Book of Bird Life: A Study of Birds in Their Native Haunts published in 1930. It shows that Doc Allen was already thinking that an in-depth study of each vanishing species needed to be undertaken to help save the bird. Of course, Tanner's three year field research of the ivorybill was the first to be carried out.

For those that know, to quote the late Paul Harvey, "the rest of the story," the heath hen did go extinct. The last was seen on Martha's Vineyard in 1932. The Eskimo curlew is probably extinct while the whooping crane and trumpeter swan have been saved.

And the natural processes that once pushed numerous species into extinction have now been augmented by human-related activities such as habitat destruction.

We all need a place to live; without it we would vanish too.

Albert Brand's story a tragic one

Albert Brand’s story is tragic. A self-made man, he was able to retire from his first career as a stockbroker when he was only 39-years-old and begin a second career as an ornithologist. As a student at Cornell he developed an interest in the fledgling science of recording birdsong, which led him to publish two pioneering books, Songs of Wild Birds, published in 1934 which included two small 78-rpm phonograph disks and, in 1936, More Songs of Wild Birds, containing three disks and 43 bird songs. (I have a copy of the second.)

Cornell's Arthur Allen writes in the foreword, "In this volume of bird songs another step has been made in overcoming the limitations of the phonograph disk in reducing the high frequencies of bird voices, and the improvement of these records over those which first appeared in Songs of Wild Birds is most encouraging."

"It is Mr. Brand's plan to continue recording the songs and calls of North American birds, and I am sure the nature lovers the country over will look forward with keen anticipation to the appearance of each new volume and each set of records."

Because Brand had money, he helped plan and finance the 1935 Cornell Expedition and would have accompanied Allen, Kellogg and Tanner all the way but his health collapsed. That must have been heartbreaking, to be on the threshold of such a great adventure, and not be able to go. Brand’s name perhaps would have become synonymous with recorded birdsong, he was already on the forefront with two books published and a third on the way. But he did not live to complete any other projects; his health never improved and he died of kidney disease on March 28, 1940. He was only 51-years-old.