Bunch of Amateurs (15 page)

This repetitive quality to the stories, with so many of the same features—the experts, the fuzzy image, the pleas for belief and the collapse of the evidence, the Yankee intellectual and the Southern woodsman, the ultimate quest for land protection—meant that the search for the ivory-bill wasn’t merely a Freudian story of childhood dreams. This was American mythology.

One afternoon while I was ivory-bill hunting, I stopped into the Gene’s BBQ there on the main drag in Brinkley to catch an ivorybill
cheeseburger. Bobby Harrison was there, and a couple of locals started talking to us about the bottomland swamps. Talk like this in the South usually means you’re going to be discussing special places to hunt—where to find the good turkeys, where the mallards feed. But at one point, one of the old guys referred to one spot as particularly hard to navigate since the growth had really come back after “all that cutting.” When I asked when that happened—the cut—he said, “Oh, more than a century ago.” This is one aspect of my native South that I have always admired: People carry around knowledge of long-ago events as if they just happened.

Most people couldn’t tell you what happened on their own land a year before they bought it, but a century ago? Yet these guys talked repeatedly of the “logging” as if they were referring to 9/11. In terms of terrorism, the comparison is almost appropriate.

The swampy areas in the South are “hardwood bottomlands,” and upland areas tend to have favored a longleaf pine forest. A century or so ago, these two interwoven, interconnected ecosystems had a wide range. During a lecture at the festival by a Nature Conservancy guy, he posted a slide showing the range of these ecosystems and the range of the ivory-billed woodpecker that used to flourish in them. It hit me like a slap in the face.

The longleaf pine system, for instance, ran down the East Coast from Virginia to Florida’s panhandle and then ran west as far as Texas, covering ninety million acres, and was said to be the largest single-species ecosystem in the world. And when you set over that the range of the ivory-bill, which is a slightly smaller version of that image, and then step back, you realize you are looking at an ecosystem that already has a name.

Dixie. How coincidental was it that the world of this bird and this larger ecosystem roughly bracketed the world we would come to call the Old South?

Many early naturalists visiting the South looked upon the longleaf ecosystem in awe. It was not the deep dark forest as most of us
come to understand it. Almost
no
thickets grew in this forest. It was open, cathedral-like, populated largely by tall longleaf pine poles, which grew straight and true. A longleaf forest looks orderly and tidy and endless. Horseback riders could gallop through it effortlessly for hours. This ecosystem was also called the “fire forest” because it would naturally burn every year. The longleaf pines dropped their luxurious needles, some as long as eighteen inches, throughout the year. Coated in a highly flammable resin, they stacked up slowly, and by the really hot months of July and August, a lightning strike would catch them on fire. The fire was unavoidable, and so combustible are these needles, there are accounts of the forest burning even in a rainstorm. But it’s a ground fire, more than a smoldering fire, not an all-consuming
forest
fire. It’s just enough for the longleaf, which can survive a ground fire, to burn back its competitors—the oak tree, the gum, the hickory, etc. It’s one impressive adaptation.

Even the animals that live in a fire forest have adapted to it, almost like some kind of Disney movie. In the southernmost portion of the fire forest, the gopher tortoise, a fairly large creature that grows a little bigger than a dinner plate, digs a burrow some thirty feet in length. During the fires, the burrow becomes a kind of air raid shelter for all kinds of insects, snakes, birds, mice, everybody. Biologists who’ve studied this arrangement have determined that some three hundred different species make temporary use of the gopher tortoise hole when the fires hit. Meanwhile, all their competitors flee. Evolution, doing its thing.

So a fire forest, when it is not burning, is distinguished by its open, sunny quality. The earliest settlers for instance found these woods so repetitive in appearance that it was easy to get lost in them. You would not enter them without taking a local guide. In Savannah, Georgia, the town fired a cannon at the day’s end, so that men in the woods could follow the sound home. There were special laws governing widows whose husbands wandered off into the forest and never came back.

It was a place where, according to ivory-bill expert Lester Short,
the ivory-bill could dine all day and where the bird preferred to live. “The habitat in the United States is usually cited as being deep, tall swamp forest,” Short wrote in his classic
Woodpeckers of the World
. “However, it is my view that the species originally inhabited the virgin pine forests of southeastern North America. These pines were cut over rather early, because of their accessibility, probably restricting the Ivorybill to less optimal swamp hardwood forests.”

The story of that cut-over is one of the hidden histories of the South, surviving mostly in the anecdotal remarks of men sitting around barbeque joints. It’s the largely unknown story of what happened in the cruel decades after the Civil War when the survivors in the South, black and white, had no economy and struggled to find a way to make ends meet.

Beginning in roughly 1880, speculators saw the easiest business opportunity in the history of the world: ninety million acres of the most beautiful pine on earth and, living right on top of it, a desperate, starving labor force.

There was even a book published in 1880 called
How to Get Rich in the South
, written by W. H. Harrison Jr., who was either the grandson of the President by that name, or a man who never corrected the assumption. I bought an original copy off the Internet, and it is a breathtaking read.

The chapters have names like “Cattle” and “Duck,” breaking the South down into every exploitable commodity no matter how small. There are chapters on “Beans, Snap” and “Cabbages, Early.” And on down it runs until the last chapter on timber. It encourages speculators to hurry because “the lumbermen of the North are buying up large tracts of valuable timber lands and putting in saw-mills.” Land in the South, the author tells his eager readers, that “is now for sale at $1 to $3 an acre will bring $50 to $100 within twenty years, for its timber. Southern timber land is an absolute certainty as a profitable investment.”

And the speculators descended, and the timber companies also came, buying up land in 100,000-acre dollops. One can argue about
the dates, but, effectively, between 1880 and 1920 the eleven states of the Old South were clear-cut into a confederacy of muddy stumps. Railroads were temporarily erected into even the most inaccessible areas. When Bobby Harrison and I fought our way three miles back into the Blue Hole area of the swamp, we came across the rotting remains of a raised railroad line, a century old.

These loggers were sloppy, wasteful, and reckless. In the slang of the day, they “cut out and got out.” Rivers churned with what looked like and was the melting sludge of hills dissolving into plains. Ghost towns appeared after an area was “sawed out.” The mountains of sawdust left behind often would catch fire from lightning and smoke for years. Visitors to the South in this time would comment on how no amount of travel could get a tourist away from smoke coming from somewhere.

The devastation was so extensive that state revenues dropped as taxable forest property had to be reclassified as nontaxable wasteland, thus extending the economic crisis of 1865 into an eighty-year catastrophe.

Other economies eventually arrived in the mid-twentieth century, such as planting over the old longleaf soils with loblolly and slash pine to feed the paper mills. Historians have written about the paradox of this timber era. It was a culture that was so remote and brutal, it left no songs or slang, no famous workers or evil foreman and barely any written accounts. Almost effortlessly, the shame of this massive clear-cut receded into history, largely without leaving one.

So the wild primeval swamps and the cathedral stretches of pine forest in the South were sheared into flat farmland by the time Allen and his party headed south. In fact their destination, an 81,000-acre stand of virgin forest, was known as the Singer Tract because the sewing machine company owned it to cut wood to make the cabinets for their sewing machines. It was the last, large section of Dixie’s original forest.

It’s hard to imagine that it’s a coincidence that the story of the ivory-bill so often involves a re-creation of the outsider coming down and hooking up with a local guide for an expedition into the endless forest. The penitent Northern scientist coming South to find a smart-alecky
good old boy from Dogpatch—these two light out for the swamp and find the elusive bird with mythic regularity.

The ivory-bill’s habitat is the South’s Eden, the haunting swamps, the majestic pine forest. The names of the areas where it’s been sighted—the Big Woods of Arkansas, the Big Thicket of Texas—suggest the very landscape it needs to survive: a large and wild habitat, crowded with patriarchal trees and brimming with wildlife. To see an ivory-bill is to confirm that we haven’t destroyed what feels like the very origin of life. The swamp’s ivory-bill is Noah’s dove, surviving improbably long after a catastrophe we’d rather not remember, to tell us we are pardoned. Lord God Bird, forgive us our trespasses.

After Tanner returned from his famous 1937 study, a massive effort was launched to save the ivory-bill and its last known address, the Singer Tract. By then, in the middle of World War II, this last and biggest stretch of wilderness was leased by Chicago Mill and Lumber. The company wanted to sell the land, since there was no labor to cut the wood at the beginning of the war. A man named Richard Pough recognized its value and arranged to buy it as a way to conserve it. He would later found the Nature Conservancy. He had four governors sign on to this project, as well as President Roosevelt. He traveled to Chicago to ink the deal. When the president of Chicago Mill entered the room, he apologized and said the deal was off. “We are just money-grubbers,” he explained. He went on to say that they had found some labor. The Chicago Mill learned that German soldiers were being held in Mississippi POW camps and could be used to cut down trees practically for free. The meetings ended, and, despite the intervention of four governors, the last large stand of virgin forest in the Old South was clear-cut by Nazis.

The ivory-bill is a bird we’ll be seeing again and again. The story tugs at too much history and too many emotions to be resolved in some neat and tidy way, like a child’s story, happily ever after. Here’s how powerful a tale it is. Almost immediately after the Cornell announcement and as the certainty of their proof began to falter, the bird flew to the northern panhandle of Florida. There, an Auburn professor and ornithologist named Geoff Hill went to the Choctawhatchee River and the satisfaction came quickly. His assistant Brian Rolek, whom Hill describes as a “novice birder,” was the only one to spot the bird.

“Brian had studied the field marks of a perched Ivory-bill before our trip but not those of an Ivory-bill in flight,” Hill wrote in
Bird-Watching
magazine. Naturally, he saw the bird in flight and didn’t see the white bill, just “large patches of white only on the back (trailing) portion of both the upper and underwing.”

After a while, the team was hearing about ivory-bills all over the place. “Despite the small scale of our search, we amassed substantial evidence—including more than 300 sound recordings of
kent
calls and double-knocks—that Ivory-bills were in the forests along the Choctawhatchee River,” Hill wrote. And they had thirteen sightings, nearly twice as many as Cornell. Hill notes without irony or embarrassment: “All of the sightings were of flying birds.” And his “best sighting” occurred “as I watched an Ivory-bill fly away from me.”

It was as if the team had not read any of the counterarguments or accumulated wisdom of the amateur bloggers. How else could you
write something like this: “How could we detect birds so dependably for a full year and not get a photograph? My answer is that the woodpeckers do not want people close to them. They invariably detected us before we detected them.” No other bird in the world is as successful at avoiding trained bird-watchers as the Arkansas and Florida ivory-bills.

Hill’s team often catches sight of the “diagnostic shape, plumage pattern, or flight behavior characteristics of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers,” but never any of the definitive field marks. At an American Ornithologists’ Union meeting, Rolek presented “a grainy video of a bird that he identified in life as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.”

A grainy video? Well, that rounds out the story, doesn’t it? It’s like that scene in
Shrek
where all the stock characters of all the children’s fairy tales gather at the king’s palace, and you find yourself happily picking out the ones you recognize. Oh, there are the dwarfs. There is a troll. It is comforting when you recognize the ones you know are supposed to be there. When I heard that Hill had a blurry video, I felt oddly warmed by the flush of déjà vu. Of course there wasn’t enough enthusiasm this time, being so close to the Cornell sightings, to fluff interest in a festival. So donors to Hill’s search could only earn a “limited edition collector’s pin commemorating the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Florida panhandle” for $100 and Hill would throw in a “golf shirt with a specially-designed commemorative logo” for $250.