Bunch of Amateurs (8 page)

ne morning I got a call from a friend inside the Nature Conservancy who asked me, first off, if I could keep an incredibly huge secret. We all know the answer to that question.

Breathlessly, he told me that his organization was sitting on one of the most amazing stories in history and would I be interested? I’m not sure I even got to answer that one. He immediately told me that a team was on the ground in a primeval cypress swamp in Arkansas and that they had found the ivory-billed woodpecker. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the critter other than that the very name, like the yellow-bellied sapsucker’s, was cartoon shorthand for bird nut.

I typically avoid daily journalism, especially announcement stories (New Asian Weasel Discovered!), because I’ve spent most of my life in weekly or monthly magazines and breaking news was always tantalizingly
out of reach. But this one was different; there was time. So I asked him to let me check it out and immediately sped off to learn that, yes, this was North America’s largest woodpecker, but it also came with a backstory so bizarre, epic, covert, and overwrought that if we included birds among mythic Americans, the ivory-bill would keep company with Charles Foster Kane and Jay Gatsby.

Rumors among ornithologists and hunters that the bird still existed floated out of Southern swamps from time to time, and so the bird had become a kind of rural legend. No one had confidently seen it in more than sixty years. No doubt, it was the most sought-after bird in the world.

Native Americans long ago prized those white bills as emblems of power. John James Audubon marveled at their remote swampy habitats, the “favorite resort of the ivory billed wood pecker” with “the dismal croaking of innumerable frogs, the hissing of serpents, or the bellowing of alligators!” Early colonial hunters were stunned by the bird whose mostly black plumage at rest unfurled into a glitzy burst of white trailing feathers beneath a nearly three-foot wingspan. There was something aesthetic at work here, something unutterable, something semiotic. Its shape and style beguiled people, like the stride of a panther, the eyes of a koala, the sway back of a rhinoceros, the rolling shoulders of a gorilla.

The adult ivory-bill is a large bird and is exquisitely colored. Its yellow eyes, red crest, ivory bill, black feathers, and (when perched) the white lightning bolt marking on its neck—the mark of Zorro, the forehead of Harry Potter—give the whole bird a garish charisma. Connecticut’s state ornithologist Margaret Rubega wrote: “This is the Dennis Rodman of woodpeckers.”

In rare 1930s moving footage of the ivory-bill, it hops around the side of a tree with a cocky certainty, glancing about, seemingly aware of its ostentation. Back in the days when they were plentiful, the sight of them startling away from a tree in an explosion of white
light was said to provoke blasphemous cries from the virtuous. The “Lord God Bird” is what the profane helplessly nicknamed it on their way to Hell.

I liked the idea of pursuing this story because I have a lucky streak with woodpeckers. I spent a week once with Beau Turner, Ted Turner’s son, in northern Florida as he explained to me how he was gardening an entire thousand-acre wood of longleaf pine with an eye toward its most fragile and reclusive tenant, the red-cockaded woodpecker. Standing amid the cathedral pines that afternoon, I instantly spotted one making a ruckus in the canopy. Another time, I was reporting a story in Tierra del Fuego. I wandered off in the woods trying to get as close as I could to the tiptoe of the Americas, as one is inclined to do down there. On an otherwise lonely path, an enraged Magellanic woodpecker, another Goliath of the clan, swooped in and landed for a face-to-face. This particular specimen wasn’t too pleased with me being near her nest, I guess, and she stood directly in my path, flapping her wings and making a racket. This was a really big woodpecker. But it was still a woodpecker. Maybe a foot tall, stretching it. But I’m city enough to know my Hitchcock movies, so I gave ground.

My friend at the Nature Conservancy called back that day to assure me that this woodpecker tale was a high-octane story. This was not merely the most sought-after animal in our mutual phylum—I was being let in on an expedition that would inevitably get headlined environmental story of the century. This was a lead with real players: the Nature Conservancy, the Department of the Interior, the state of Arkansas, and the prestigious Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Several rich tycoons had been smuggled in to see it. Private jets, my friend told me, were clandestinely dipping in and out of the Arkansas bayou on a regular basis. The bird had its own Secret Service–style moniker: “Elvis.” The president of Citibank as well as the President of the United States had been briefed. Arrangements were under way to have Laura Bush make the announcement at the ranch. Oh, man. I would do this. I was pumped.

The next day, April 29, 2005, the story leaked and blazed across the front pages of 459 newspapers.
EXTINCT? AFTER 60 YEARS, WOODPECKER BEGS TO DIFFER
declared the
Washington Post
. The head of the Nature Conservancy intoned, “This bird has materialized miraculously out of the past but is also a symbol of the future.” The eminent director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in an ironical choice of metaphor, said, “This is dead solid confirmed.”

I awoke that morning to a National Public Radio reporter tromping through the bayous of Arkansas. “These swamps are like flooded cathedrals with thousand-year cypress trees rising like columns out of the water,” said Christopher Joyce. I am always riveted by those radio pieces that take you to some exotic location—the crunching of the sticks, the trickling of the water—and create the place on the soundstage of your head lying on a pillow. In this case, though, I enjoyed it while simultaneously feeling like Wile E. Coyote after a misfired boulder lands on his chest.

Knowing that Christopher Joyce had probably received the same phone call I got drove me to manically consume these accounts as they broke in magazines, radio, television, and websites. I knew the punch line already and I knew that it had all been orchestrated. I knew the main characters and that they had been prepped. I knew the background. I had done the homework. Once I quickly worked through the usual Kübler-Ross stages of reporter despair—denial, anger, jealousy, I hate everybody—I watched something I had never seen before.

I observed a massive new truth stand up in American culture. Right away, the ivory-bill came to represent issues much bigger than a single bird. The Lord God Bird signaled to America that maybe all that news of environmental destruction was overstated. The Bush administration seized upon this story—and the Department of the Interior’s Secretary Gale Norton took command of it—for precisely this reason.

It wasn’t quite as if Galileo had called a press conference to announce that the earth revolved around the sun or as if Darwin summoned the scriveners of Grub Street to explain for the first time how changes in species can occur through natural selection. But it was a small-picture version of something like that, where a brand-new understanding totally at odds with accepted opinion becomes fact in one fell swoop.

The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a case study of how professionals in our time can deploy new tools and media to proclaim a new truth. But it is also about how outsiders, many of them amateurs, can swarm this new fact with questions and contradictions to uncover an even more intriguing reality. An absolutely opposing reality. The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a tale of professionals erecting a citadel of expert opinion around a new truth, with a sequel about a messy band of amateurs assaulting that fortress and tearing it brick by brick to the ground.

All fortresses get declared by a flag, and the ivory-bill was no different. That press conference on a bright spring day in Washington, DC, was magnificent in an Andrew Lloyd Webber way, an impressive display of contemporary institutional theater. The Department of Agriculture was there. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology was in full force. Secretary Norton headed up a full-on Capitol press event. Standing on a stage backgrounded by the snapping flags of proud departments and bureaus, Norton stepped up to the podium as giddy as an Oscar-winning supporting actress. It was as if the emperor’s legions had returned from a campaign in Africa and had brought to
the seven hills the exotic spoils of the jungle—the brawny gorilla, the stealthy panther, the subdued rhinoceros. The masses were assembled and invited to gawk not so much at the bird, which wasn’t there, as at the grand power of the state and the institutions that had found this bird.

“This is a rare second chance to preserve through cooperative conservation what was once thought lost forever,” declared Norton.

Here, too, was a new and thoroughly contemporary character in the drama. America got to meet the modern environmentalist: John Fitzpatrick, that morning, was a man in full. In his early fifties, Fitzpatrick was ruggedly handsome enough that if it had been a few decades earlier, he’d have been recruited for a Marlboro ad. He sported a whitening brush of a mustache and just enough pink in his face to suggest a career in the woody outdoors, schooling himself in the nuances of Nature. He was a really friendly guy. His friends called him “Fitz.” And now it seemed impossible for a nation not to join them.

“The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Fitz told us. He said they had also recorded the bird’s distinctive sounds and that seven professional ornithologists had personally spotted the bird in flight. The basic story was an adventure yarn. A kayaker named Gene Sparling had spotted the bird and blogged about it. Then, a bird journalist named Tim Gallagher read the post. With another enthusiast named Bobby Harrison, they slipped into the swamp and, in an emotional encounter, saw the bird. Gallagher returned to tell Fitz, who was convinced of the details and who launched a massive, yearlong cover operation to confirm the bird story of the century.

For the next twenty-four hours that story was inescapable. There were three hundred thousand searches for it on Google; birding sites crashed. Cornell rushed into publication (on the Science Express website operated by the scholarly journal
Science
) the necessary peer-reviewed article to give the story the empirical imprimatur of High Truth. The scientific paper boasted seventeen acclaimed authors. In it,
Cornell detailed the seven confirmed sightings of the bird by trained Cornell ornithologists. They had the video “clearly showing an ivorybill” performing its signature move—bursting off a tree in a flare of white light and flying away. There were hidden devices recording its distinctive cry, and numerous photographs of scalings—the signature marks an ivory-bill makes when it strips bark from dead trees to get at beetle larvae.

Despite the story having leaked, Cornell managed to flood the media zone. There were 174 television programs and 43 radio shows featuring segments on the bird. Cornell launched
www.ivory-bill.com
, and the marketing department fired off electronic press releases to one thousand members of the media. Cornell’s press office beefed up its Washington presence. One of the authors on the scholarly article had also prepared a popular book. Tim Gallagher, the editor of Cornell’s bird periodical, had written
The Grail Bird
, now rushed into print. The only medium neglected in those first weeks was, paradoxically, opera.

But it didn’t stop there. Add to all this effort the stunning fact that the ivory-bill was blessed by a miraculous sense of timing and coincidence. The area of Arkansas where the sightings had occurred was known, like something out of a child’s tale, as the “Big Woods.” It was spring, too, and the announcement of the bird’s resurrection came within days of Easter. And its nicknames are the Grail Bird and the Lord God Bird?

Irresistible. Interior Secretary Norton declared that work toward habitat restoration and protection of the ivory-bill would receive $10.2 million in federal money, an astoundingly massive sum for a single species. Norton announced that the area in Arkansas where the bird was spotted would now be known as the Corridor of Hope.