The Race to Save the Lord God Bird Read online

  Tanner pushed himself hard, learned rapidly, and won high marks. He flew through a four-year course in just three years. In the spring of 1934, when he was finishing his undergraduate studies and wondering what to do next, McGraw was buzzing with rumors and wagers about how Doc was going to spend his sabbatical leave. Doc had taught at Cornell for more than twenty years without a long break. In that time, he had made Cornell a world leader in the study of birds. At last he was going to get six months to study whatever he wanted.

  Most predicted it would have something to do with bird sounds. In 1929 a Hollywood movie studio had called Doc to see if Cornell could provide background birdsong for a film. Doc had no library of recordings to offer, but he had been so fascinated by the possibility of recording for the movies that he had invited the filmmakers to Cornell to try to record some birds. In those early days of talking movies, the only way to record sounds was by filming them on “motion picture sound film” with “sound recording cameras.” You actually played the sound back on a screen. That spring a Hollywood crew drove to Ithaca in a truck bulging with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of recording equipment. They picked Doc up at the Cornell campus and rumbled straight to a city park to see if they could record birds that were singing there.

  The men staggered around the park beneath heavy cameras and microphones, usually scaring the birds away before they could get near. But they did manage some film, and when they ran it back at McGraw, they could faintly make out the scratchy voices of a Song Sparrow, a House Wren, and a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Doc heard the future in those sounds.

  For the next few years, Doc and an ever-growing group of students kept experimenting with ways to record birdsong. At the center of the action was Albert Brand, a pudgy stockbroker from New York City who had quit his Wall Street job to study birds at Cornell. Brand used his wealth to buy recording machines that he, Doc, and three engineers tinkered with day and night. They cranked up the volume as loud as they could to make the faint bird voices come out. A professor whose office was next to the laboratory where the experiments were being carried out described hearing “the wildest of yells, roars, crashes and shrieks as dials are turned and films projected. Lowered in pitch and augmented in volume, the recording of a yellow warbler’s cheery little voice sounds for all the world like coal roaring down a chute into somebody’s cellar.”

  THE SOUND MIRROR

  One afternoon, Cornell ornithology student Peter Keane, in New York City on a break, wandered over to the construction site of Radio City Music Hall. He found it interesting that giant parabolic reflectors were being installed as part of the sound system. These huge, dish-shaped devices were used to concentrate and amplify sound, and to screen out unwanted noises.

  Keane asked himself if the reflectors might not work on a smaller scale. What if you built smaller, portable reflectors that you could carry by hand to a bird’s nest? The Cornell physics department just happened to have in its attic a mold that had been used to build parabolic reflectors during World War I to detect enemy planes. Keane and his fellow student Albert Brand used it to build a big, shiny dish they called a “sound mirror.”

  One morning they carried it out into a field, set it on a tripod, suspended a microphone in the middle of the dish, and aimed it at a singing bird. It worked. Most of the usual background noise, such as barking dogs and rushing rivers, was gone—and the birdsong was loud and clear.

  Within two years, Brand and fellow Cornell student Peter Keane had recorded forty bird species. It was Brand who finally came up with the winning idea for Doc’s sabbatical leave: why not tour the country, recording the voices and filming the behavior of America’s rarest birds? Then Americans could hear their songs and see them move before. they became extinct. A Cornell team could install the new sound equipment in a truck like the one from Hollywood. Brand himself would raise the money. They would work in the spring, when birds would be singing loudly to attract mates and defend their breeding territories.

  Doc loved the plan. He had long regretted that people could no longer hear the Passenger Pigeon’s coo, the toot of the Heath Hen, the Labrador Duck’s quack, or the Great Auk’s grunt. These were sounds Americans had once known well. Now, because these birds were extinct, their songs had passed forever from human memory. Other birds were in danger of slipping away, too. Brand’s idea could preserve their voices before they were lost. And if they succeeded, Cornell would be known as a world leader in sound.

  Of course, there was another reason for Doc’s enthusiasm. He had never forgotten the two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers he and Elsa had seen in Florida back in 1924, the birds that had been shot soon after. There had been no more confirmed sightings of Ivory-bills since. But suddenly there was hope again. Doc had learned that in 1932 a lawyer named Mason D. Spencer had found and shot an Ivory-bill in a Louisiana swamp. Ornithologists had rushed to the scene and found several more Ivory-bills nearby. Recording the birds on film would give Doc a second chance, a different way to “collect” these beautiful phantoms without killing them. Doc wanted to study their life cycle and to see if somehow the species could be preserved in its natural setting before it was too late.

  Allen told reporters that the “Brand–Cornell University–American Museum of Natural History Ornithological Expedition” would be a new kind of “hunting” expedition whose members would “leave guns at home and would ‘shoot’ the birds with cameras, microphones, and binoculars.”

  The idea caught the imagination of both the public and the scientific world. According to one newspaper article, “Never before in the world’s history has any expedition started afield with so highly sensitive equipment.” Cornell was flooded with applications from scientists, curators, and bird-watchers who wanted to go along.

  While Brand raised funds and Cornell professor Peter Paul Kellogg installed the recording machines in a truck, Doc recruited the team he wanted: Doc himself would film and photograph the birds, Brand would pay the bills and help work on sound, and Kellogg would operate the equipment at the truck, while George Sutton, a sharp-eyed bird artist, would help identify birds and scout for sites.

  But Doc needed one more person. It had to be someone who knew birds and who possessed the strength and agility to do the heavy work of the project, someone who could climb trees like a monkey. Whoever it was would have to be cheerful enough to take orders from cranky professors at five in the morning. This person would have to be able to fit in with everyone, for surely the team would meet people around the United States whose views and ways clashed with theirs.

  In the end, it wasn’t a hard decision at all. As Doc put it in the press release that went to newspapers, “James Tanner, graduate student, was invited to accompany the expedition as handy man to act in any necessary capacity.”

  Jim Tanner operates Cornell’s newly designed sound reflector, or “sound mirror,” hoping to hear an Ivory-bill

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHOOTING WITH A MIKE

  With the expansion of vision beyond the gunsight, an entire new world unfolded like the opening of a bud of a most wonderful, beautiful flower.

  —Dr. Boonsong Lekagul, ornithologist from Thailand

  United States—1935

  THE CORNELL TEAM, MINUS BRAND, WHO WAS IN ILL HEALTH, ROLLED OUT OF ITHACA in two freshly polished black trucks on February 13, 1935. The smaller truck was stuffed with machines for recording sound. The bigger vehicle contained camping gear and photographic equipment, food, tents, and other supplies. Folded down into a wooden box on top of the bigger truck was an observation platform that could be cranked up like a giant jack-in-the-box to raise a photographer to bird’s-nest level, twenty-four feet above the ground.

  The team drove to Florida, where it searched without luck for Ivory-bills. But the members didn’t waste their time. Each morning they practiced recording, faithfully rising before dawn so that Florida’s milk trucks and tractors, roosters and barking dogs wouldn’t drown out the birds. They worked out a routine: after ar
riving at a field or swamp, Paul Kellogg would drag a stool around in front of the sound truck, clamp earphones to his head, and begin twisting the dials that adjusted sound levels. Meanwhile, Jim Tanner would hoist the sound mirror in front of him like a jouster with his shield and advance steadily on the birds, dragging his boots slowly through the prickly brown Florida scrubland. As Tanner approached with the great gleaming disk, the birds would turn to face him, puffing up their feathers and singing loud songs of warning, all of which would be recorded by Kellogg at the sound truck.

  In April, after a month in Florida and Georgia, the trucks passed over the wide, brown Mississippi River at Natchez, Mississippi, and pulled into Tallulah, Louisiana, a flat, dusty crossroads whose office buildings and houses were bunched around a town square with a courthouse in the middle. The team drove the trucks a few blocks past the square and got out in front of the law office of Mason D. Spencer, the man who had found and shot an Ivory-billed Woodpecker just three years earlier.

  Spencer was a heavyset, red-faced politician who dressed in a white linen suit and wore a straw hat. He rolled his own cigarettes, exhaling clouds of blue smoke that clung to the ceiling of his cluttered office. After introductions, Spencer gathered the Cornell scholars around a table and unrolled a map. Pointing to the spot where he had shot the bird, he repeated the epic tale of his famous discovery. It all started during a meeting of Louisiana wildlife officials in New Orleans, when someone passed on a rumor that an Ivory-billed Woodpecker had been seen in the Singer Refuge near Tallulah, along the Tensas River. After the laughter died down, someone else cracked that the local moonshine must be pretty good up there if anyone believed that.

  But Mason Spencer wasn’t laughing. He had a hunting camp on the Tensas, and everyone knew it. They were goading him, waiting to see how he would react. “I’ve seen them myself,” he declared. The others challenged Spencer to prove it by shooting one and bringing it back to New Orleans. Spencer said he’d be delighted to, if they’d write him out a state permit. Spencer got his permit, shot his bird, and, in April of 1932, went back to New Orleans and tossed a freshly killed male Ivory-bill on a conservation official’s desk.

  After a respectful silence, Professor George Sutton worked up the nerve to say what was on the minds of Tanner, Allen, and Kellogg as well. Clearing his throat, he said, “Mr. Spencer, you’re sure the bird you’re telling us about isn’t the big Pileated Woodpecker?” The room fell silent as Spencer glared at Sutton. “Man alive!” he snorted. “These birds I’m tellin’ you all about is kints! … I’ve known kints all my life. My pappy showed ’em to me when I was just a kid. I see ‘em every fall when I go deer huntin’ … They’re big birds, I tell you, big and black-and-white; and they fly through the woods like Pintail Ducks!”

  That was good enough for the Cornell team, especially the part about the Pintail Ducks. That was exactly how Ivory-bills flew, and only someone who had seen them could know it. Spencer sketched out a map to a guide’s cabin in the swamp, and the team got hack in the trucks. Before long they were splashing through a flooded land, craning their heads out the windows to gawk up at giant trees that rose like cathedral walls from both sides of the road.

  After a few miles they were waved to a halt by a man driving an empty farm wagon behind a team of mules. He introduced himself simply as Ike, and said he’d been sent to help them. They gladly pulled the trucks to the roadside, transferred their gear into his wagon, and climbed aboard. The mules plunged into the trees, following a watery trail for five miles to the cabin of J. J. Kuhn, a local warden who had agreed to help them search for Ivory-bills. It was too late in the day to start out, so they unrolled their sleeping bags on his big screened-in porch and stacked their gear in the kitchen. They were glad to hear Ike’s son, Albert, already chopping wood for the fire that would cook their dinner.

  Ike’s wagon makes its way into the vast swamp

  “DID YOU SEE IT?”

  The next morning, Doc, Tanner, and Sutton filed out behind Kuhn into the great swamp forest. Kellogg stayed behind to work on the sound truck. A rainy March had turned the woods into an enormous puddle, and now only the highest ground was above water. Kuhn led the way with a long, swinging stride. Even in the muggy heat he wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and a hunter’s cap to protect his head. He rarely spoke. The always chatty Professor Sutton splashed behind in a crisply pressed shirt and a well-knotted tie. Young Tanner also dressed neatly and usually kept his thoughts to himself. Doc, always rumpled, brought up the rear.

  Soon all the men’s trousers—both rumpled and crisply pressed—were plastered to their legs. But, although soggy and uncomfortable, the men were enchanted by the vine-tangled wilderness they were passing through. The forest was fragrant with blossoms and spring warblers were singing. Best of all, it was still two weeks before mosquito season. They slipped along a narrow trail, then waded into a wide lake that Kuhn called John’s Bayou. Finally, Kuhn stopped before a towering oak whose bark appeared to have been peeled like a giant carrot. Long strips of dead wood dangled in loose sheets from the trunk; they must have been pried back by something very powerful. Everyone looked around for suspects, but there were none in sight.

  For two more days the men sloshed through the bayous. The forest was alive with hammering woodpeckers, but they heard no Ivory-bills, not even a call or a rap. By the third day Kuhn had grown anxious. He kept insisting that the birds were there, that he had seen them himself just weeks before. Finally, he decided the only choice was to head into deeper water. The team doubled back through John’s Bayou and, soaked to the skin now, turned due east, wading into what Sutton described as “a twilight of gigantic trees, poison ivy, and invisible pools.”

  The four explorers spread out and advanced in a straight line like beaters on an African safari, shouting frequently since they couldn’t see each other. After they had gone a few hundred yards, Sutton thought he heard Kuhn yelling excitedly, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. Sutton took off in pursuit, calling back over his shoulder for Tanner to follow, and Tanner began sprinting as he shouted back to Allen. When they all caught up with Kuhn, his face was red with excitement. “Right there, men,” he said as he jabbed his finger into the forest. “Didn’t any of you hear it?” They cupped their hands to their ears. All they could hear was Pileated Woodpeckers.

  So they advanced again, this time more slowly and closer together. Kuhn and Sutton were the first to hop onto a huge cypress log, teetering along it with their arms out so they could see and hear more clearly. Suddenly Kuhn stopped and whispered, “There it goes, Doc! Did you see it?” He grabbed Sutton’s shoulder and whirled him around, nearly sending them both toppling off the log. Kuhn was shouting now. “A nest! See it! There it is, right up there!” Sutton was uncertain. He had seen something, an arrow-like shadow of some kind, fly to a dead tree, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Gradually his eyes began to focus on a big oval hole high up in that same tree.

  Kuhn, overjoyed, grabbed the distinguished Ivy League professor and led him in a jig as Tanner arrived in a rush, nearly knocking them both off the log. Then Doc Allen entered the picture, crashing through the woods like a bear. The four of them, laughing, danced on the log, mostly to honor Kuhn, since they still hadn’t seen what he had. And then, as they were dancing, a bird began to call. They froze in place. “The cry was strange, bleatlike,” Sutton wrote. “The moment I heard the sound I knew I had never heard it before.”

  At that moment a large black-and-white spear went streaking toward the tree. Crouching low, Tanner and Sutton finally got their first look at the legendary bird, and Allen beheld an old friend again at last. A female Ivory-bill flew into the nest, poked her head out, and flew away again. “Much white showed in her wings,” Sutton remembered. “Her long black crest curled jauntily upward at the tip. Her eyes were white and fiercely bright. Her flight was swift and direct.”

  An Ivory-bill, like the one seen by Allen, Sutton, and Tanner, flies awa
y from its nest

  Then she returned with her mate. The male was a little bigger, with a backward-sweeping red crest instead of a forward black one. The male caught sight of the men and turned his head to look at them directly. He flew to a limb overhead and looked down with head cocked, through first one brilliant amber eye and then the other. “What a splendid creature he was!” wrote Sutton. “He called loudly, preened himself, shook out his plumage, rapped defiantly, then hitched down the trunk to look at me more closely. As I beheld his scarlet crest and white shoulder straps I felt that I had never seen a more strikingly handsome bird.”

  So there it was. After years of rumors, dead ends, and false alarms, Doc had his second chance and the Cornell team had its star bird for the sound project. Not just a single bird, either, but a mated pair with a nest. That night, back at Kuhn’s cabin, they turned their attention to the next task. They had found the Ivory-bill; now the job was to record its voice. But how in the world would they ever haul 1,500 pounds of America’s most sensitive sound equipment into the spongy middle of nowhere?

  THE NIGHTMARE SWAMP

  The wilderness in which the Cornell team now found themselves was a patch of the Mississippi River’s delta, a vast area formed when the great river, swollen from melting snow and rains from as far north as Minnesota, flooded its hanks each spring, carrying with it a load of riverbottom soil known as silt. Thousands of years of floods had spread the silt like a rich layer of brown frosting over an area five hundred miles long and fifty miles wide. Mississippi delta silt was some of the best soil in the world for growing trees. The bottomland forest, as it was called, was prime Ivory-bill country.

  Most of the delta had been cleared and settled, but there was one great wilderness forest southwest of Tallulah still standing. The Tensas River, an old, slow-moving channel of the Mississippi, snaked lazily back and forth through its trees as it had long before human memory. In the 1830s a few pioneers had arrived to clear away trees and plant cotton along the river’s banks. After a levee was built to hold the Mississippi’s spring floods, more families came, building grand white-columned houses. Set apart from the big houses were clusters of crude shacks, quarters for Negro slaves who soon outnumbered whites nine to one along the river.