Bunch of Amateurs (12 page)

The fantastic story of the bird’s rediscovery begins with its Genesis tale. Every great find has one and the ivory-bill is no different. It’s the story of the first confirmed sighting and the written version can be found in Tim Gallagher’s book
The Grail Bird
, a history of the search for the ivory-bill and the book that was rushed into print with the rediscovery. Gallagher intended to interview every living person who had claimed an ivory-bill sighting. It turns out that there’s a whole subcategory of bird aficionados known as ghost-bird chasers, who look for birds presumed to be extinct. Gallagher himself was one, and over his years of searching, he met Bobby Harrison, a photography professor at Oakwood College in Alabama, who was also in this game.

The two men were made for the Chautauqua circuit and the kind of postprandial entertainment promised in Brinkley. Gallagher is a tall middle-aged man with white hair and a pleasantly restrained Yankee demeanor. In Arkansas he amiably confessed that he’d always thought the South was weird and that he considered Harrison his “interpreter and guide.” Harrison, a fun good ol’ boy with a head like a mortar shell, had his own schtick, like saying that he didn’t know “damn Yankee” was two words until he was twenty years old. The audience laughed wildly at their tale, which was, like the best sightings, a great adventure story full of snakes, mayhem, mud, bugs, and a bird.

Harrison is the kind of guy who loves his outdoor gear. When I first met him, he showed me his canoe draped in shredded camouflage material. He could climb in beneath this small bunker of camo, smear gobs of multicolored camouflage greasepaint all over his face,
and float through the swamp—looking like nothing more than a drifting pile of leaves (or some whacked-out survivalist hiding deep in a bayou). By contrast, Gallagher is a restrained gentleman whose posture and courtesies make it easy to believe that he’s spent a great deal of his life at a desk on an Ivy League campus.

Their story was why everyone had gathered in Arkansas. And, it began in early 2004 when Gallagher was alerted to an online posting by another Southerner, the kayaker Gene Sparling, who reported that he’d seen an unusual woodpecker in the Bayou de View. Gallagher and Harrison each interviewed him and were convinced that Sparling had seen
the
bird. They rushed to Arkansas and entered swamp in canoes. The second day they were there—February 27, 2004—the two saw something burst into the sunshine. “Look at all the white on its wings,” Gallagher shouted. “Ivory-bill!” they both screamed. And it was gone. They wrote down their notes and drew sketches. Gallagher had a new ending for his book. Bobby got on the phone to his wife, Norma, and sobbed.

The audience was laughing one minute and stunned into teary solemnity the next. These were the two emotions of the night. We might be carrying on at Harrison’s schtick as a good ol’ boy making fun of the straight-man Gallagher or listening to the Yankee talk about how wacky it was to be in the swamp with Bobby and all that rednecky camouflage. Then the story might grow solemn as they took us into just enough detail to relate how emotional it all was: how they shouted when they saw the bird, how they flipped out as it flew by, and how they cried like babies as they wrote down their descriptions.

If you read the
Science
article, it’s clear that the other academic sightings aren’t nearly as entertaining as this Billy Yank and Johnny Reb rendition. So the Cornell rollout carefully controlled this crucial part of the narrative. Only the official speakers—the courtly intellectual Gallagher and the hilarious swamp rat Harrison—did the talking.

As they explained, after they had their emotional sighting, Gallagher
flew back to Ithaca, New York, and back to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, headed by John Fitzpatrick.

As with any convincing rare-bird narrative, Fitz listened carefully and then, based on his judgment, he believed. So Fitzpatrick decided to throw the lab’s prestige and best resources into the search. Right away, Fitz learned that the Nature Conservancy had heard about the same Gene Sparling sighting that had attracted Gallagher to Arkansas.

“A few days after February 27, Fitzpatrick called me,” said Scott Simon, the state director of the Nature Conservancy, “and we danced around trying to find out what the other knew.” When they discovered that they knew the same thing, Simon became a partner and agreed to supply aerial photographs.

“Fitz emphasized the need to keep it quiet,” Simon went on to tell me. “They wanted to get in one full year of research uninterrupted and focused. For fourteen months we did that. We called it the Inventory Project, and we talked about it in code.” IBWO became the preferred shorthand for “ivory-billed woodpecker.” Cornell’s swamp operation moved swiftly into place in Arkansas in the spring of 2004 and kept thirty-six people on the ground at any one time. “Twenty-two paid staff; fourteen volunteers,” field supervisor Elliott Swarthout told me. Scattered throughout the forest, time-lapse cameras were mounted on trees. The ornithologists had also drawn up grids and transects and were systematically moving through the area with human eyes to conduct regular bird counts and spot roost holes.

There were twenty-four autonomous recording units, or ARUs, stationed at strategic flyways in the swamp. Hundreds of hours of audio recordings were clandestinely flown back to Cornell, where they were computer-searched for the patterns of the ivory-bill’s two most famous sounds. There is the “kent” call, a funny
bweep
that sounds like a kid’s toy horn. And there is the double knock—two heavy bill blows into a tree, so close together they almost register as one sound.

Eventually, when all the necessary groups were brought in, the Inventory Project had a sixteen-person management board. “And it was really fun,” Simon said. “These people met on a conference call every Tuesday night at eight thirty
P.M
., Central Time.”

The ivory-billed woodpecker—aka IBWO—became the subject of the greatest super-secret mission in the history of ornithology.

By the end of the first year of searching, Cornell had many sightings but decided to put forward only seven of the best ones in the
Science
paper.

But those very sightings would eventually become their own controversy. Originally, Fitz sent down several people who were well known for being able to identify birds. But those specialists did
not
see the bird. That was the red flag Mark Robbins mentioned. How could Tim Barksdale, who almost never failed to get the shot, spend twenty-three hundred hours in the woods and return without a single decent frame?

It was only after these skilled birders failed that
other
researchers—who happened to be in the employ of Fitz and also inside this bubble of emotional secrecy—went down to Arkansas. All of them had, essentially, the same sighting. The bird never stopped and perched. It was always flying by. Of all the field marks that one might see—the famous white bill, for instance, so noticeably different from the pileated’s black bill—well, no one saw those field marks. Every one of them saw the burst of white trailing feathers—the one field mark most likely to be confused with a pileated.

And in each case, the sighting occurred in a surge of emotion. “As soon as Ron’s canoe rounded the bend, I began shaking all over and feeling as if I would cry,” wrote Melanie Driscoll of the day she made her sighting.

Could this be a case of group hysteria? That would ultimately become the claim from a lot of outsiders. When I first heard this charge, I thought that Cornell probably had seen the bird. I mean, “group hysteria”? Wasn’t that one of those TV diagnoses, like “amnesia” or
“catatonia,” that show up as some kind of lame excuse in our pop culture rather than an actual reality. But, well, no. Actually, it turns out, such hysterias do happen. A lot. In the introductory book
Sibley’s Birding Basics
(published long before these sightings), Sibley warned against “the overexcited birder” and “group hysteria.” He cited “one very well documented case in California” in which “the first state record of the Sky Lark (a Eurasian species) was misidentified for days, and by hundreds of people, as the state’s first Smith’s Longspur.” Turns out, hysteria is practically a common problem among birders, ghost birders especially.

“There is a long list of well-studied effects,” Sibley told me. “There is peer pressure, the expectation of what they were there to do, as well as the authority effect of finding what the boss wants you to find.” Most of the Cornell sightings occurred in the surge of emotion immediately following Gallagher’s return to Cornell. Shortly after the sizzle of that emotion faded away, so did all the sightings.

It’s this emotion that almost every birder has described and has described at greater length, often, than the sighting of the bird.

I know what this emotion is like.

A few weeks after Tippit and I saw our bird, I went back into the swamp with none other than Bobby Harrison, the ivory-bill rock star. If you’re going to spend a day in a swamp, there is no one better to spend it with than Harrison. He had a nearly silent trolling motor, so we were able to penetrate the darkness of the swamp this time without a peep, except when we were beating off cottonmouth snakes with our paddles or portaging the whole rig over frustrating logjams. After three miles we came into an area called Blue Hole, and we had puttered up the way just past a visible ARU when suddenly:
bam-bam
. “Did you hear that?” Harrison said. I had. No question. We pulled the canoe onto a mud bank and stepped out. Visibility was becoming limited, not because of light but because the forest was in early bud. Leaves were growing bigger, it seemed, by the hour, making the distant vistas close right up around us. As Harrison and
I stood there, a large black-and-white bird came from behind us and soared into the green. “Did you see that?” he said. I did. We both looked at each other. My face was a blank because, the truth is, I am a birder with greenhorn skills. Was that a woodpecker or a duck? Had I seen white on the trailing feathers? Honestly, I didn’t know. The moment was brief, and when it passed, Harrison’s eyes tightened with disappointment. “I couldn’t tell,” he said.

Had I declared that I had seen a panel of white, what might have happened? Would Harrison have then asked me: Was it on the trailing feathers? Well, maybe so. Was the bird large? Yes it was. Did it have a long neck? Yes, I think it did. And what if my editor, the day before, had told me that it would be a good story if I went out with Harrison but a cover story if I saw the bird with him? What if I knew that a confirmed sighting by a
New York Times Magazine
writer would land me on a half dozen prime-time news shows as the man who confirmed Cornell’s sightings after long absence? Maybe I’d get that interview with the secretary of the interior?

Instead, I shrugged because I didn’t see anything I felt comfortable confirming. And then we paddled on. But the adrenaline moment was right there. Had I given in—I could feel the tug, too—had we talked it out, the sighting would have been as real as if I had seen something. In short order, it would have been another sighting, pillowed as they all were by powerful emotions so that, recollected in tranquility, the details could be recalled with absolute certainty. Such emotions cushion every sighting.

The first sentence of Gallagher’s book reads, “I think I’ve always been the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests, most of which seem to involve birds.” This sentiment of deep longing grips all those from Cornell.

“It’s been a fixation since early childhood,” Fitzpatrick told me. In many ways, Gallagher’s book can be read not as a birder’s adventure of discovery but as a fanatic’s confession of self-delusion.

Gallagher admits he’s prone to “quixotic quests.” And in his own
book, he notes that ivory-bill skeptics have long said things like “If you want to see an ivory-bill bad enough, a crow flying past with sunlight flashing on its wings can look pretty good.” The code name used for the bird during the Inventory Project was “Elvis.” As a Southerner, I immediately wondered if Cornell understood the joke. Elvis is, how you say, extinct. Only menopausal fans and postmodern ironists believe that bumper sticker:
ELVIS LIVES
.

If you read Gallagher’s book closely, you see that he provides that pedigree of sightings that led to his own. He had heard about the location in Arkansas from Sparling, the kayaker. But Gallagher also tells the story of how Sparling came to kayak in the Bayou de View. It involves a ghost-chaser named Mary Scott, who told Sparling that she had seen an ivory-bill in the Big Woods of Arkansas the year before.

Scott was a lawyer who in midlife abandoned her profession and decided to live in a yurt near her parents’ house in Long Beach, California. On one birding expedition, Scott took along a friend who knew a “woodpecker whisperer.” Mary called the clairvoyant on her cell phone from the swamp and learned that the bird wanted to be seen but was troubled by the group’s “energy.” Scott eventually wandered off by herself and, she says, saw the bird. In fact, Scott sees the bird quite a lot when she’s alone, and she’s also never able to get her camera out of the backpack in time.