Sonny Boy negatives found

For me, a postscript to this story came on Friday, July 3, 2009. Books such as Ghost Birds are assembled from thousands of shards and pieces, like an explosion in reverse. I had gotten a phone call from Nancy Tanner two days earlier. She had located an envelope of old ivory-bill prints and negatives she did not know she still had in her home. Jim had donated almost all of the original material to Cornell or the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge—those items are now archived at L.S.U.—in the late 1980s. Nancy and I agreed to one of our customary lunches, which she prepared for me.

With a Wimbledon semifinal match on in the background (American Andy Roddick beat Britain’s own Andy Murray, 6-4, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6), we discussed a wide range of topics. (If there’s anything Nancy loves more than discussing a wide range of topics, it’s tennis.) Afterwards, we cleared the dining-room table and I began to sort through the material. I soon came across the first precious slice of history, one of the original negatives of J.J. Kuhn and the young ivory-bill, and then another and another. My heart began to pound. The exact whereabouts of the original negatives had been a mystery.

“Goodness, Nancy do you know what these are?”

By the time I worked my way through the stack of material, we learned that Jim had actually taken at least fourteen photos that day. Yes, fourteen! I said to Nancy, “Does anyone in the world know this?” And at that moment, we both realized that perhaps we were the only two people who did.

On his 24th birthday: March 6, 1938, after he calmed his jitters and “buck fever,” Jim had been able to reel off over a dozen black-and-white photos, some of the most memorable photographs in the annuals of natural history; a series of indelible images that show the frenzied nestling close up, outside the safety of its nest hole. An excited young male Campephilus principalis that in a matter of minutes had climbed all over woodsmen Kuhn, like a hyper cat on a scratching post. Be still my beating heart!

For my article about this day that appeared in the September issue of Smithsonian go to: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/A-Close-Encounter-With-the-Rarest-Bird.html.

Jim Tanner's childhood

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James T. Tanner was born in this house on North Main Street in Homer, New York on March 6, 1914. I visited Homer in August 2007.


His father C.J. owned a dry goods store in the center of town.

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James T. Tanner, ecologist

Ecology.

In the 1930s it was a fledging new science, an offshoot of biology. German biologist Ernst Haeckel created the term ecology or “oekologoe” in 1866, defining it as “the relationship of the organism to its environment.” By the 1960s the field burst forth into the mainstream, becoming a hot topic of research. It’s also a discipline that would grow to dominant Tanner’s thought processes in his later years.

Thirty years after his days in the Singer Tract, watching the affect of habitat loss on a single species, Jim Tanner turned his attention to the science of ecology. At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, he organized the graduate level program of ecology, serving as the its director from 1970 to ‘74, eventually writing one of the field’s early textbooks, Guide to the Study of Animal Populations, published in 1978 by UT Press. One anonymous reviewer noted, “The style is readable. In fact it is one of the few understandable texts in mathematical ecology.”

Tanner writes in his preface,

“The study of animal populations has taken two directions. One is the theoretical or mathematical study of population dynamics, beginning with the works of Verhulst (1838), Lotka (1925), and Voterra (1926). A second is the study of the means of manipulating populations for practical and economic goals. This is illustrated in Leopold’s classic book on game management (1933), in which he makes the subject of population characteristics the central theme of the book. Other examples of the management of animal populations are in fisheries, the control of pest insects, and the preservation of rare species. Both the theoretical and practical aspects depend upon an understanding of population characteristics and upon the ability to measure these.

“My purpose here is to describe the characteristics of animal populations, the methods of their measurement, and their interactions. These characteristics can be classed into those describing the population as it exists at some instant (e.g., density and composition) and those measuring the ways in which it is changing (e.g., birth and death rates). And example of an interaction is the effect of age composition on the birth rate. I have intended to review the important aspects of the subject and to describe the research methods most useful in animal populations studies, emphasizing those methods most amenable to statistical analysis.

“Whenever reasonable, I have used the concepts and terms of demography, a better-established science than that of animal populations. Good introductions to demography are by Keyfitz (1968) and Spiegelman (1968). This approach is limited, however, because data on animal populations cannot be obtained as in demography; most animals will not stand still and be counted, and individuals have no official identity, no birth certificate.”

Tennessee Ornithological Society

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Jim Tanner joined the Tennessee Ornithological Society (TOS) in the late 1940s while teaching in Johnson City at Tennessee State Teachers College, known today as East Tennessee State University.

After accepting a job at the University of Tennessee, he transferred his membership to the Knoxville Chapter of TOS. The above group photo was taken in 1952 at the annual Spring Field Day at the home of H.P. and Alice Ijams. Their original home site is now part of Ijams Nature Center.

Jim Tanner is sitting in the center, wearing a kwiki shirt. H.P. is wearing a brown sweater, standing to the left of Tanner and Alice Ijams is wearing the black dress to the right of Tanner. Noted Tennessee ornithologist Albert Ganier is sitting in front of Tanner to the left

Joe Howell, who spent time with the 1935 Cornell Expedition while they were in Florida, also taught at UT. Howell is the tall man standing on the far right.

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but where were the roads?

Figuring out just how Tanner got from town to town, swamp to swamp proved to be an early challenge, that is until I realized I needed road maps from the late 1930s.

Using the wonderful world of on-line auctions, i.e. eBay, I soon assembled a collection of vintage maps that not only told where the pre-interstate roads were, but their condition. And a lot of them were classified as "unimproved." People had only been buying cars for about 20 years and the nations road systems were lagging far behind.

Sharkey Road wasn't the only muddy thoroughfare he had to manage.

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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