d av i d wa g o n e r

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I VO RY - B I L L E D WO O D P E C K E R

David Wagoner, The Author of American Ornithology

Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct (1979)
In his poem David Wagoner captures the spirit both of the bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and of the early ornithologists, such as Alexander Wilson (depicted here) and John
James Audubon, who attempted to catalog the still relatively unknownat least to Eu-

Figure 2.3 Illustration of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker from Birds of America by John
James Audubon. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, 1863.17.066.

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species in danger

ropean natural historiansbiological diversity of the United States. The work of these
naturalists is considered to be a high point in the fusion of art and science, but Wagoner
shows just what was sacrificed in achieving that goal.
The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct
(Alexander Wilson, Wilmington, N.C. 1809)
When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird hed hidden
Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,
High and plaintive and loud as the calls hed heard
While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared
And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.
And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern
Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.
Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,
His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker
As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.
Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,
It fell silent at last. He told at dinner
How devoted masters of birds drawn from the life
Must gather their ocks around them with a rie
And make them live forever inside books.
Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster
And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall
Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards
And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs
To a table leg, it started wailing again.
And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves
While the artist drew and tinted on ne vellum
Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes
From which a white edge owed to the lame wing
Like light ying and ended there in blackness.
He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming
Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming
Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,
Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,
Riddling his table, slashing his ngers, wailing.
He watched it die, he said, with great regret.

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Jonathan Rosen, from The Ghost Bird (2001)

The hope to prove a hypothesis of extinction wrong is one of the great hopes left for modern conservationists. Jonathan Rosen takes us to the swamplands of Louisiana on a personal journey of one who has that hope. His plaintive anthem, it has been only fifty
years since the last authenticated sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, cuts two
ways: how long fifty years is in the life of a single person and how short it is in the life
of a species.
The American Bird Conservancys eld guide All the Birds of North America lists the Ivorybill, along with the passenger pigeon, the great auk, and the
Carolina parakeet, in its Extinct Birds section. There is no entry for the bird
at all in the recently published Sibley Guide to Birds or in Kenn Kaufmans
new Birds of North America. My National Geographic guide refers to the
birds probable extinction, and my Peterson guidebook dutifully describes the
bird but then adds, cagily, very close to extinction, if, indeed, it still exists.
Extinction. It is the death not merely of an individual but of all the individualspast, present, and potentialthat make up a species. Once gone, there is
no retrieval. This, despite the fact that there are photographs of the Ivorybill,
recordings of its voice, and even a silent movie of its nesting habits, which was
made in the 1930s, when the bird was studied in one of its last redoubtsan area
of old-growth forest in Louisiana that, notwithstanding a ght waged by conservationists, was ultimately felled for timber.
The possibility that any bird said to be extinct might still be around is exhilarating, but the Ivorybill, in particular, has what environmentalists refer to as
charisma, a sort of magical personality that has affected bird-watchers since
they rst noticed the bird. For one thing, the Ivorybill isor wasvery big. At
twenty inches, it was Americas largest woodpecker and the biggest woodpecker
in the world after the now (presumably) extinct imperial woodpecker, which
lived in Mexico, and whose chances for rediscovery are even slimmer than the
Ivorybills.
The Ivorybill also has a reputation for indomitable deance, and that spirit
may have doomed it. Its habitat was exclusively old-growth foresttrees that
had lived for hundreds of yearsand it simply could not withstand the encroachments of man. . . .
The Ivorybill was not only tough; it was gorgeousboldly patterned in black
and white, with an ivory-white bill that measured three inches from base to tip.
The male had a brilliant, blood-red crest. One of the birds nicknames, the Lord
God bird, apparently refers to the fact that people who saw it were so impressed
that they cried out, Lord God!
John James Audubon, who was a far more gifted painter than [Alexander]
Wilson, saw the Ivorybill as somehow already existing in the realm of ne art. In
his Ornithological Biography, Audubon wrote:

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I have always imagined, that in the plumage of the beautiful Ivory-billed

Woodpecker, there is something very closely allied to the style of coloring
of the great Vandyke. The broad extent of its dark glossy body and tail, the
large and well-dened white markings of its wings, neck, and bill, relieved
by the rich carmine of the pendent crest of the male, and the brilliant yellow of its eye, have never failed to remind me of some of the boldest and noblest productions of that inimitable artists pencil.
Audubon, who was born in 1785, died in 1851, before the frontier had been
closed and when there were still American birds that had not been named. Today,
it requires imagination not to see the Ivorybill as a painting, since artistic representations of it are virtually all we have. The birds scientic name does more
than Audubons poetic description to put the Ivorybill back into natureCampephilus principalis, or the principal eater of grubs.
There has always been an impulse to make symbols of birds. Hail to thee,
blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert Shelley sang to his skylark. The Ivorybill has become an emblem of the now vanished American wilderness. The white
bill of the bird was used in trade by Native Americans, and it has been discovered
in their gravesas currency, perhaps, for the world to come. Ivory-billed woodpeckers continue to have an almost totemic force for birders today.
It is easy to see why birds, which mediate between earth and sky, are the repository of high poetic hopes. But it is precisely because birds arent spirits that they
are so compelling to look at. For me, the thrill of bird-watching is catching the
glint of an alien consciousnessthe uninected, murderous eye, the aura of reptilian toughness under the beautiful, soft feathers, the knowledge that if I were
the size of a sparrow, and a sparrow were as big as I am, it might rip my head off
without a seconds hesitation. . . .
Big trees play an important role in the life of Ivorybills. The ornithologist
James T. Tanner, who, between 1937 and 1939, studied the last signicant population of the birds, noted that they fed on the grubs that attacked recently dead
trees. The birds scaled off the bark with their massive bills to get to the bugs beneath. To enjoy a steady supply of dying trees, they required the sort of oldgrowth forests in which trees are mature enough to die on a regular basis, and an
area warm and moist enough to promote rapid decay. The bottomlands of the
Mississippi Delta were ideal, as were parts of East Texas and the Florida Panhandle. The birds in Tanners study lived in a region of Louisiana that is known
today as the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge. Tanner referred to the area
as the Singer Tract, because it was then owned by the Singer Sewing Machine
Company, which, despite protests, sold its logging rights to a Chicago lumber
company that began leveling the forest in 1938.
The Ivorybills feeding requirements are a perfect example of specialization;
its restricted habitat eliminates the competition of other birds. The price a species pays for specializing, though, is vulnerability to changes in the environment.

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For example, the Kirtlands warbler, which breeds exclusively in a few counties
of Michigan, requires young jack pine trees with interconnected lower branches.
Such nicky behavior has nearly cost the warbler its life. Fewer forest res over
the years have meant that fewer young pine trees sprout up, and the bird has been
kept alive only by the efforts of environmentalists to plant new trees. But it is
easier to plant new trees than to conjure up old ones. The fate of the Ivorybill
may have been sealed some fty years ago, when the last stands of virgin forest
were logged out of existence in the Deep South.
According to Christopher Cokinos, in Hope Is the Thing with Feathers,
one of the last ofcial observers of an ivory-billed woodpecker was the Audubon
Societys Richard Pough, who, in 1943, went to the Singer Tract while it was
being logged. After much searching, Pough found the lone female of the species
that had been reported to still be in the area. She was sitting near her roosting
tree and, despite the encroachment of loggers, refused to y away. From Poughs
description, one gets the feeling that the bird was simply awaiting its doom. In
his report to the Audubon Society, Pough conjectured that there may have been
psychological factors involved. Like the bird that Alexander Wilson had captured, it appeared willing to die rather than compromise.
This tragic, romantic view of the bird may be misleading. There are ornithologists, like [ J. V.] Remsen at Louisiana State, who speculate that Ivorybills
can live in recently dead trees that are only a hundred years oldinstead of the
virgin timber they have been known to favor. If that is true, there are areas where
logging stopped some fty or sixty years ago which are once again producing
trees that are congenial to the Ivorybills habits. There are also areas, like the
Pearl [River], where, because of their frequent inaccessibility, enough large trees
may have been left uncut to give the birds a place to roost and breedprovided,
of course, that they are still around.
The question divides ornithologists, naturalists, and bird-watchers. It is notoriously difficult to prove the absence of something. The birds may have a life
span of twenty years, and even the most pessimistic ornithologists concede that
a few renegades could have dodged detection, like those Japanese soldiers hidden in the jungle who didnt hear the order to surrender after the Second
World War.
It is also possible that the birds were more adaptable than anyone imagined,
and that they are quietly reproducing in remote regions. It has been only fty
years since the last authenticated sighting, and there have been numerous unauthenticated ones, many delivered years after the bird was seen, by locals who may
have been afraid that their land would be conscated by the government if an endangered bird was discovered nesting there. Remsen told me that he has been
shown credible photographs from the 1970s of nesting Ivorybills by a man who
believed that he would lose his land if their presence was made known. (More
than once I heard a local adage: Theres no such thing as an endangered species
on private property.) As for why bird-watchers never seem to be the ones to re-

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species in danger

port Ivorybill sightings, it is often observed that birders, unlike huntersand

birdsdo not stray far from marked paths. . . .
Audubon, toward the end of his life, developed dementia. The birds he had so
painstakingly documented began to y out of his head. Extinction is like that
desolation amplied, as if the earth itself could forget the animals that inhabit it.
It is difcult to talk about the Ivorybill without resorting to the language of longing: Ive heard many birders routinely refer to the Ivorybill as the Grail.

United States Fish and Wildlife Service,

Recovery Outline for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (2005)
In a simplified ecological scheme, species can be divided into two categoriesspecialists and
generalists. As with the northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest, the ivory-billed
woodpecker was a specialist on old-growth trees, and only dead and dying ones at that.
When habitats are disrupted, specialists are far more likely to become endangered or extinct than generalists, who are more able to find substitutes for their lost habitat. One byproduct of human habitat modification is that we are losing specialists and finding ourselves more and more sharing the planet only with generalists, such as cockroaches, rats,
and pigeons.
On 28 April 2005, the United States Department of the Interior announced that
sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker had been verified in the Cache River National
Wildlife Refuge in east-central Arkansas. The Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency of
the Department of the Interior responsible for endangered species protection, released a
preliminary plan for the birds recovery, the section on factors of endangerment of which
is presented here.

H A B I TAT L O S S A N D D E G R A D AT I O N ( FA C T O R A )

The primary reason for the decrease in Ivory-billed numbers throughout its
range appears to be a reduction in suitable habitat (and indirect destruction of
their food source) due to large scale conversion of forest habitats. Essential features of Ivory-billed Woodpecker habitat include: extensive, continuous forest
areas, very large trees, and agents of tree mortality resulting in a continuous supply of recently dead trees or large dead branches in mature trees. According to
Tanner, In many cases their [Ivory-billed Woodpeckers] disappearance almost
coincided with logging operations. In others, there was no close correlation, but
there are no records of Ivory-billed inhabiting areas for any length of time after
those have been cut over.1 Noel Snyder argues that the close correlation between timber harvesting activities and the decline of the Ivory-bill may reect
an increased exposure to poaching and collecting rather than food limitation in
logged over forests. . . .

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Habitat loss has probably affected Ivory-billed Woodpeckers since the original cutting of virgin forest, with some losses being gradual and others occurring
very rapidly. Jackson estimated that by the 1930s only isolated remnants of the
original southern forest remained.2 Forest loss continued with another period of
accelerated clearing and conversion to agriculture of bottomland hardwood
forests of the Lower Mississippi Valley during the 1960s and 1970s. The combined effect of those losses has resulted in reduction and fragmentation of the remaining forested lands. The conversion rate of forest to agricultural lands has reversed in the past few years. Currently, many public and private agencies are
working to protect and restore forest habitat. Nevertheless, until more is learned
about the Ivory-bills habitat requirements, the extensive habitat loss and fragmentation and the lack of information on specic habitat requirements remain a
threat to this species.
O V E R U T I L I Z AT I O N F O R C O M M E R C I A L , R E C R E AT I O N A L ,
S C I E N T I F I C , O R E D U C AT I O N A L P U R P O S E S ( FA C T O R B )

Historical records indicate that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (bills and the

plumage) were collected and used for various purposes by native and colonial
Americans. Collection of Ivory-bills for scientic purposes has been documented since the 1800s. Jackson presented data indicating that such collecting
resulted in the taking of over 400 specimens, mostly between 1880 and 1910.3
By itself, overutilization may not have caused the widespread decline of Ivorybill numbers. However collecting in combination with the concurrent habitat
loss likely hastened the decline of the species. It is possible that local populations could have been extirpated by collecting. For example, Ivory-bills are believed to have been reduced by excessive collecting, rather than as a result of the
conversion of forest habitats in a small area of the Suwannee River region of
Florida. In addition, Tanner indicated that many Ivory-bills were killed merely
to satisfy curiosity. . . .
S M A L L P O P U L AT I O N S I Z E A N D L I M I T E D D I S T R I B U T I O N
( FA C T O R E )

Ivory-billed Woodpecker populations appear to have been in a state of continuous fragmentation and decline since the early 1800s. Early accounts gave no
accurate or denite estimates of abundance, but populations were probably
never large and were limited to habitats subject to high tree mortality, e.g., areas
that were regularly ooded or burned. The small population size and limited distribution of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker place this species (previously thought
to be extinct) at risk from naturally occurring events and environmental factors.
The Ivory-bill is currently known to occur in only one area in southeastern
Arkansas. While a substantial amount of habitat is protected in the area in which

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the species was rediscovered, threats exist from normal environmental stochasticity. For example, sporadic natural events such as tornados or ice storms could
destroy the only remaining nest or roost trees or severe weather conditions could
result in nesting or edging failures. Additionally, the exact number and genetic
health of remaining birds is unknown. Ivory-bill populations are at risk from genetic and demographic stochastic events (such as normal variations in survival
and mortality, genetic drift, inbreeding, etc.).
Notes
1. J. T. Tanner, The Ivory-billed Woodpecker. National Audubon Society Research Report No. 1 (New York:
Audubon Society, 1942).
2. J. A. Jackson, In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books,
2004).
3. Ibid.

T H E B ROW N T R E E S N A K E
A N D T H E AV I A N FAU N A O F G UA M

Alan Burdick, from Its Not the Only

Alien Invader (1994)
Two of the causes of species extinction, overhunting and habitat destruction, are easy to
stopif we have the will. The third, the introduction of non-native species, is intractable.
Even if there were consensus among all humans that such introductions must stop, the rat
is out of the bag, so to speakweve already moved too many species around, both knowingly and unknowingly. Alan Burdicks essay highlights this difficulty in the case of the
brown tree snake and its effect on the bird species of Guam.
Three mornings a week, Danielle Kitaoka rises at 3:00 A.M. and drives twenty
minutes from her home in Kaneohe, on the island of Oahu, to Honolulu International Airport, where she works as an inspector for the Hawaii Department of
Agriculture. She makes a few calls from her ofce, then swings by the departments dog kennel near the airport to pick up an eager beagle named Columbo.
Her main task for the day begins promptly at 6:00 with the arrival from Guam
of Continental Flight 934.
Im on the shift because the other inspector started to burn out, Kitaoka said
recently as she stood on the Tarmac at the appointed hour, watching the jetliner
pull up to its gate. A small, freckle-faced woman in her late twenties, Kitaoka did
not sound pleased at her assignment. Im not a morning person, she muttered.
Kitaoka owes her job to an unsettling discovery. At 7:25 A.M. on 3 September
1991, workers at Honolulu International found a three-foot brown tree snake,
dead with its head crushed, on one of the runways. At noon that same day, a sec-

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