Heavy hearted after Nancy Tanner passes

 

I first met Nancy Tanner in the early 1990s. We were both members of the local bird club: the Knoxville Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society. She was also a regular at Ijams Nature Center where I work. 

In time, I became an invited guest for lunches at her home in South Knoxville. Nancy had a nimble mind and needed to exercise it. A race horse has to run. She loved to converse, tell stories, jokes, unleash a sharp repartee. We'd talk birds, books, magazine articles recently read, current events and sports. And, of course, her Jim.

It was at one of those lunches in October of 2005 that a topic for a book came up. I was just finishing the manuscript for my first book "Natural Histories" published by the University of Tennessee Press. We were talking, as we often did, about her late husband Jim and his Cornell fieldwork in the 1930s on the ivory-billed woodpecker, when I said, "Someone needs to write a book." And after a short pause, I said, "That someone should be me." 

Thus a project was born.

Nancy was the last living person to have a universally accepted sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker. That happened in December 1941. She was with her late husband Jim (James T. Tanner) in the Singer Tract in northeast Louisiana.

Over the past six years, Nancy and I became good friends. For most of that time, I would see or at least talk to her almost weekly.

The first three years: 2006-09, we met to discuss and assembly the piles of reference I needed to copy, absorb. Over time, I assembled three-ring binders of material, not knowing exacting what I would need when I actually sat down to write. Pulling together a book is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle except all the pieces do not come in one box. They are scattered helter-skelter. But, in time, the pieces just slowly fall into place.

Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941 was published by UT in the fall of 2010. It was followed by an article in Smithsonian magazine about our research which I penned. 

For the next two years Nancy and I worked to promote the book locally, doing numerous talks and book signings. We developed a playful banter, because she loved to laugh and make me laugh.

She called me her "young friend" and never wanted to talk about health, aches and pains or even aging in general. Those topics were for old people. When you were with Nancy, you were in a match of playful minds. And she used wit the way a fencer uses a foil. En garde. Prêt. Allez. Oh, yes. So true. Touché. Or the way Oscar Wilde used a well turned phrase like a craving knife: "Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them more." At times we both were laughing so hard, all conversation ceased. I always left her feeling better than before I arrived, her vitality and good humor were so contagious.

Her beloved Jim passed away 22 years ago. She couldn't understand divorce because losing her husband had been so painful. Nancy once told me that for five years after he died, she wanted to die too, but when she didn't, she decided she might as well go on living. 

That she did, to the fullest, ten decades of indomitable determination to live each day as a quest. Like the Energizer bunny, she just kept going and going and going.

A week ago, I visited her in a local hospice facility. Her frail body was betraying her strong will. After my lunchtime visit—our last—as I got up to leave, I reached out. She took my hand and clasping it with both of hers, looked deep into my eyes. And with a tone as tender as the moment deemed due, she said, "Good bye love." 

We both knew it was just that. Good bye.

To paraphrase the Belle of Amherst, "Because she did not stop for death, it kindly stopped for her, the carriage held but the two, and immortality." 

After a short illness, Nancy died last Sunday, June 30 just sixteen days after her 96th birthday. 

As a writer, you're taught to avoid clichés, nothing slows down a narrative like a worn out phrase. It's like the gritty build-up on the bottom of a snow ski. But in this case, I hope you forgive me. When God made Nancy, he broke the mold. 

I will miss, miss, miss her dearly.

Nancy Tanner celebrates birthday at Ijams

Photos by Vickie Henderson

Nancy Tanner celebrated her 96th birthday a few days early at last evening's meeting of the Knoxville Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society. The meeting was held at Ijams Nature Center.

Nancy is the widow of Jim Tanner. She last saw an ivory-billed woodpecker in December 1941 while with her late husband on a trip to the Singer Track.

Happy Birthday, Nancy!

French journal Alauda reviews Ghost Birds

Vol. 81, #1, 2013

Alauda is the journal of the Ornithological Society of France. Here's an excerpt:

"Cet ouvrage est écrit dans un style très vivant.  Il relate avec moult détails la vic? quotidienne et la quête scientifique d'un ornithologue conscient des le début de son entreprise que l'espèce charismatique qu'il a choisi de connaitre est vouée a disparaitre sous ses yeux.
Ses efforts pour alerter les autorities et tenter de sauver l'espèce n'ont pu aboutir dans le contexte difficile de la second querre mondiale et a un moment ou il etuit sans doute déjà trop tard.  Voila un récit a lire et méditer sur l'itinéraire d'un ornithologue de XX siècle captive pur une espèce dont lu disparition récente témoigne de la brutalité avec laquelle notre propre espèce truite la nature." - Jean-Marc Pons

Karen Sue translates, "This book is written in a lively style.
The author recounts in great detail the everyday and scientific pursuit of a conscious ornithologist from the beginning of his adventure as the cherished species he has chosen to study is doomed to disappear before his eyes. His efforts to alert authorities and try to save the species were not successful in the difficult context of the second world war and at a time when it was probably already too late. Here is a story to read and meditate on the route of an ornithologist in the twentieth century and the inability of one man to save this species. The Ivory-billed's recent disappearance reflects the brutality with which our own species treats nature."

 

Bird Life of Louisiana 1938

The Bird Life of Louisiana, Bulletin 28, produced by the Department of Conservation of the State of Louisiana in 1938 obviously had copies of Tanner's photographs. An unknown artist used them as reference for the cover illustration. 

Inside, the text reads, "Few birds in Louisiana have had so much attention during the past few years as has the Ivory-billed Woodpecker...It formally occupied the bottomland forests of all the southern states, extending then as far north as southern Indiana and North Carolina, but at the present time its numbers have been so greatly reduced that it is confined to a few restricted areas in the wilder parts of a few of the southern states. It is a bird of heavy bottomland forests, and is not so frequently seen on the uplands. Owing to its retiring habits, and the fact that it is dependent on the deep forests for a home, it naturally disappears from areas when the forests are cleared or otherwise destroyed. This accounts for the great contraction of its range during the past 100 years."

The frontispiece for the book was the same illustration by
George Misch Sutton that Jim Tanner used in his book.

Well written account of another tragic disaster

You’ve authored another wonderful book. I thoroughly enjoyed Ghost Birds—a well written account of another tragic disaster thanks to our lovely myopic species. I have never read Tanner’s notes or journals but as I read your book I wondered if he wrote with such an engaging style.

Thank you for writing this book and I eagerly await your next one.

Sam Moore

(Thank you Sam! And I am currently working on the "next one.")

It made me cry at the end of the Afterward.

Ghost Birds, a review

I did a post recently on this amazing book. I had only begun reading it at that time. At its conclusion I have to tell you, it is a fascinating and enjoyable way to spend your reading time! I learned so much about the Ivory-bill but also about other birds and I was swept away by the discovery aspect of Jim Tanner's quest. 

Each trip into swamps and deep forested areas of Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and elsewhere kept me on edge about the possibilities of finding the ghost birds. I was saddened by the widespread deforestation and the lack of understanding that fashion isn't the driving force in our planet! I was saddened by all the specimens that were collected even by experts.  

But, there was so much more to the story, and I loved every page of this well-written and beautiful account! Overall, it was an uplifting and hopeful rendering of an important education and conservation effort told by a wonderful writer and written about a man with a deep understanding and love of birds and of scientific knowledge. It was about a time in our history just prior to WWII when we were becoming more informed and aware of our natural world. I recommend this book to everyone who loves nature!

I just want to tell you how much the book means to me!  It made me cry at the end of the Afterward.  I felt my heart breaking over the "Trees for Tea" and other aspects of the Ivory-bill's death-knell.  And yet there were those glimmers of beautiful hope.  Sightings that may or may not be really true.  And I do believe with all my heart that we NEED that hope as human beings.  It allows all the negative things we have ever done as a race to the plants and animals that surround us to receive a shadow of possible absolution.  

Your writing is wonderful...I can't tell you that enough.  You did indeed have much more of a story to tell than just things about "a woodpecker."  I came to love Jim Tanner.  I would have been so proud to have been one of his students.  Please tell Nancy how much I respect him as a person and as a scientist, and how much I respect her for the person that she is as well

Marie from Tucson (Click here for her blog)

The ivory-bill remains regally beautiful

Since Jim Tanner last saw a living ivory-bill, over 70 years ago, the bird has remained "regally beautiful" either dead or alive.

Yesterday, in an editorial titled "Science and Truth: We’re All in It Together" for The New York Times, Jack Hitt writes:

"THE greatest bird news of our lifetime occurred at the height of the George W. Bush administration. In April 2005, amid a pageant of flags and cabinet ministers in Washington, John Fitzpatrick, the director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, announced that an ivory-billed woodpecker had been spotted for the first time in more than half a century in an Arkansas swamp. 

President Bush pledged millions for habitat restoration. This and hundreds of other papers heralded the news... 

"The weirdest part of the ivory-bill’s resurrection is that if you look back through the past four decades, it turns out the bird has come back to life many times before. The ivory-bill seems to rise like a phoenix at times of environmental anxiety. And each time the sighting has been debunked, and then afterward some great section of wilderness has been declared protected and everyone feels better for a while.

After a 1966 disputed sighting in Texas, 84,550 acres became the Big Thicket National Preserve. When the ivory-bill was sighted/not sighted in a South Carolina swamp in 1971, the outcome was the creation of Congaree National Park. Alex Sanders, who as a member of South Carolina’s House of Representatives fought to preserve the land, told me that when people ask him where the ivory-bill is, he says, “I don’t know where he is now, but I know where he was when we needed him.”

In short, "the ivory-bill is charismatic megafauna, regally beautiful and a natural mascot for fund-raising." Wherever it appears, habitat gets bought and protected. Perhaps remaining a ghost is the Ghost Bird's greatest legacy.

For the rest of the editorial, go to: Science and Truth. 

Thanks, Gene.

Article highlights Tanner's career post-ivorybill

Bridging the Sciences

Jim Tanner: birdman with a mind for math

Young James T. Tanner arrived at East Tennessee State College (today: University) in September 1940. Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians with Buffalo and Cherokee mountains to the south, Tanner must have felt at home on the wooded campus, it looked all the world like his homeland: western New York State. The new biology professor had just finished his PhD in ornithology at Cornell University and was ready for a new challenge. 

Dr. Tanner had also just completed a three year, ground-breaking study and follow-up dissertation on the ivory-billed woodpecker, the famed “Ghost Bird” of the Southern swamps. It was the first such detailed field study of a single species on the verge of extinction; and the first research fellowship funded by the National Audubon Society. With it Tanner set the gold-standard for others to follow.

           

Shortly after arriving on the Johnson City campus, Tanner met a new assistant professor at the college, fellow New Yorker and Harvard-educated Nancy Sheedy. The two became inseparable, soon fell in love and were married in August one year later. Except for his four year stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Jim and Nancy Tanner lived the rest of their lives together in the Volunteer State. 

            

In January 1947, Tanner joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, becoming an assistant professor of zoology. At UT, Tanner’s fieldwork continued. One significant early study was a comparison of black-capped and Carolina chickadees, two closely related species that coexist in the Southern Appalachians. His findings were published in The Auk in 1952. In 1953, Tanner was promoted to associate professor at the university and full professor in 1963. After a visit to Mexico with his son David, Tanner published a report the following year in The Auk on the decline and status of the imperial woodpecker, native to the Sierra Madre from northern Sonora to northern Michoacán...

For he rest of my article look in the March/April 2012 issue of The Tennessee Conservationist.  

Ghost Birds nominated for Deep South Book Prize

Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935 - 1941 has been nominated for the Deep South Book Prize presented by the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama.

Ghost Birds is available in the gift shop at Ijams Nature Center or online at sites listed on the right.

Two Ghost Birds talks scheduled for next week

I'll be doing two Ghost Birds talks next week about Jim Tanner's search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in the 1930s.

     1) Tuesday, January 10: 7 PM 
          Knoxville Chapter of the Sierra Club

     2) Friday, January 13: 1 PM 
          Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge.

Stop by and say hello.

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.

sketches for sale

While working on the illustration that became the cover for my book Ghost Birds I produced several sketches of a male ivory-bill. There's really no need for me to keep all of them, so if you'd like to buy one please contact me.
These are not color copies but real pen and ink drawings. I did a series of rough drafts in order to capture just the right Campephilus principalis expression. Intense and statuesque. Not an easy thing to do since I have never seen a live one.

Have you driven a Ford lately?

•
While working on Ghost Birds, one of my greatest thrills was getting to drive a Ford Model A roadster very much like the one Tanner drove.
Television producer/writer Steve Dean and his crew were producing an hour-long Heartland Series program about the Ijams Family for Knoxville's WBIR-Channel 10. They needed the car for one of the scenes and found one locally.
Tanner bought his used Model A in August 1936 for $175 and ultimately sold it in December 1939 for $45. Today, they're worth a good deal more.

I found the Model A remarkably easy to drive. No thrills. Just two pedals: clutch on left, brake on right. The accelerator was a silver button, reachable by your right foot. There were only three gauges to look at: odometer, temperature and voltage. At the top of the austere dashboard was a little peep hole where the driver could actually see the level of gasoline in the tank in front of him. Did you catch that? The gas tank is located between the driver and the engine.
I grew up in a Ford family. Learned to drive in a old Fairlane, owned several Mustangs and still have my late father's Crown Vic. The one thing I noticed with the Model A was the lack of amenities, i.e. creature comforts, or comfort in general. In the 1930s, automotive amenities had not been invented yet. It was the height of the Great Depression, there were few amenities of any kind.
There was very little room. I felt like one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, nestled inside my capsule. It was a lot of fun to take out on an afternoon drive, but I found myself wondering: How could Tanner take this for 40,000 miles? And many of those were on bumpy, unimproved roads.

I have no idea the color of Tanner's Ford Model A. But they did come in a wide variety of pleasing shades unlike the Ford Model T, which was only available in basic black. What was the saying back then, "You can have any color you want as long as it is black."

The Model A was a different story although most of the time, Jim's was mud-colored.

Tanner often ate with the swampers

March 10, 1937:

In Florida near Cross City and the California Swamp that borders the Gulf Coast west of Gainesville.

After Tanner visited with Jim Cannon, an old bird hunter who claimed to have killed several ivory-bills in his day, he spent some time with an old-timer named John Butler who had lived about ten miles from Cross City for 75 years. Butler knew the swamps well and hadn’t seen an ivory-bill recently. He also told Jim that he had seen his last Carolina parakeet about 15 years after the Civil War. After wards, Tanner had lunch—corned-beef hash, rutabagas, bacon, cornbread, coffee—with Willie Hodge and his 96-year-old mother. Jim noted that she was blind and lit up her pipe after the meal.

Tanner often ate with the swampers he encountered along the way. They were generally very gracious with the young grad student, sharing their knowledge of the swamps and their sparse food.

Cornell trio hosted by soon-to-be author Niedrach

While Allen, Kellogg and Tanner were in the Denver area recording birds in 1935, they were hosted by Dr. Robert J. Niedrach.

Niedrach and Robert B. Rockwell coauthored Birds of Denver and Mountain Parks in 1939.

The Denver Museum of Natural History (later changed to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) employed Niedrach from 1913 until his retirement in 1970. He was a field naturalist who became the museum’s curator of birds. Niedrach was also a collector, taxidermist and preparator. He worked closely with Alfred M. Bailey, the museum's director from 1936 to 1969.

Bailey was a pioneering bird photographer and cinematographer noted for his fieldwork. Bailey and Niedrach worked on several projects together. In 1951, they coauthored Stepping Stones across the Pacific, in 1953, The Red Crossbills of Colorado, in 1965, the two-volume Birds of Colorado and in 1967, they published Pictorial Checklist of Colorado Birds: with brief notes on the status of each species in neighboring states of Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

The limits of science in the 1930s

Author and history professor (Virginia Tech) Mark Barrow writes in his wonderful book Nature's Ghosts:

"The 1920s and 1930s marked a watershed in the evolution of policies and scientific practices related to endangered species in the United States. While naturalists had long shown a keen interest in the plight of vanishing wildlife, for the first time they possessed the training, conceptual tools, techniques, financial backing, and desire to begin more thorough investigations of those species in the field. The three studies chronicled in this chapter [Alfred O. Gross: heath hen, James T. Tanner: ivory-billed woodpecker and Carl Koford: California condor] were born of a optimistic belief that if enough could be learned about the life history, behavior, and ecology of vanishing animals, they might be snatched from the jaws of extinction.”

“In the cases of Tanner and Koford, the single most important proposal was to restrict human access to and modifications of areas known to be prime ivorybill and condor habitat. Yet, given the larger political, social, and economic climate of the time, even those modest recommendations faced stiff resistance from individuals who had prior claims on the landscapes on which these species depended to survive.”

“While Koford and his colleagues overcame much of that resistance, [indeed, the California condor unquestionably still flies today] the National Audubon Society failed to stop logging on the Singer Tract. Clearly, science alone could achieve only so much without a larger change in values.”

- From Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, by Mark V. Barrow, Jr.