The Woodpecker in All of Us
Published in The New York Times on
May 3, 2005.
I have a hard time imagining many people actually calling the ivory-billed
woodpecker "the Lord God bird" - the name doesn't even make it onto
the list of more than 20 common names recorded by the bird's intrepid
chronicler, James T. Tanner, in 1942. But it makes a terrific headline for a
bird reported last week to have been rediscovered after 61 years of official
extinction (better than, say, "King woodchuck," one of its other
nicknames). It somehow suggests that we have found more than just a missing
bird and that God, whom we invoked when we conquered the wilderness, is also
present in our effort to get it back.
"Second chances to save wildlife once thought to be extinct are
rare," said Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. Of course, chances to
save birds not yet believed extinct are common, if sadly less appealing. But
who doesn't love the idea of a second act, especially in America, where we are
far more fixated on resurrection and new beginnings than on death and dying?
The searchers have given us back a magnificent creature. Some 20 inches
long, boldly patterned with black and white, the bird is so beautiful that
Audubon likened it to a Van Dyck painting. I may never see it - though I
certainly hope to - but it has new life for me and will live for other people
who may never have even heard of the bird. They will want to protect its
habitat and in doing so will, without even knowing it, protect the habitat of
many other animals as well. All this is a great gift. Likening the bird, as
Audubon did, to a work of art while it still haunted the forests of the South
is charming; imagining that the bird is nothing but a work of art is
overwhelmingly depressing. As Goethe said, art is long and life is short.
The discovery certainly brings with it a measure of hope - for the bird, of
course, but also for us. Though it is unclear if a breeding pair exists, we
have suddenly been acquitted of murder, even if we still face a lesser charge
of reckless endangerment for having logged the old-growth trees right out from
under the bird. Before last week, the last official sighting of an ivory bill
came in 1944 in an area near the Tensas River in Louisiana known as the Singer
Tract because it was owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Despite protests
from conservationists warning of the bird's extinction, the Singer Company
leased the land to a logging company in 1938. At times using German P.O.W.'s
for labor, the company went on to raze the forest.
All birds live between worlds, but the ivory-billed woodpecker is like
Persephone in Greek mythology, the goddess who spent half her time in the
underworld and half on earth. This is not even the first time the bird has come
back from the grave. Never abundant, the ivory bill was considered gone for good
as far back as the 1920's, when a nesting pair was found in Florida in 1924.
That pair was shot and stuffed by hunters. In 1932 an ivory bill was shot in
the Singer Tract, which led to the discovery of a tiny population that survived
until 1944. The bird's disappearances gave it a ghostly life that it now
carries with it back into the world.
To a bird watcher, every bird has a kind of double existence. It is the bird
you struggle to see and identify and gather into the scientific world of
Linnaean nomenclature; and it is the wild, mysterious creature that lives
beyond our ability to ever name or truly know it. The trick with birding is to
see both things at once - the bird in the guidebook and the bird that lives
beyond books. To see the Van Dyck painting as a bird that is also, as its lowly
Latin name Campephilus principalis tells us, "principally, an eater of
grubs."
The ivory bill has a third identity as well, one that grows out of our need
for the natural world to play a symbolic role in our lives. Tanner, in his
study, observed that the most common explanation given for the bird's
disappearance was that it "could not stand the presence of mankind or
association with advancing civilization." In other words it was a lot like
us as we sometimes idealized ourselves. Huckleberry Finn lights out for new
territory because the Widow Douglas wants to adopt and "sivilize"
him. The paradox is that the thing that seemed to link us to the wild world,
our ferocious independence and unrestrained freedom, was the very impulse that
endangered the wild places nourishing our national soul.