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.
"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."*
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| Alexander Wilson |
*From Under a Wild Sky by William Souder.
For Wilson's own account of the wounded ivory-bill go to: feisty baby.
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