The Race to Save the Lord God Bird Read online

  Behind the buildings were fields of cotton which, after the cotton bolls burst open, shone bleached white in the blazing sun. And just behind the cotton fields, always in sight, loomed the imposing trees of the nightmarish Tensas swamp. People believed that everything that crawled, howled, lurked, snapped, hooted, screamed, and slithered lived right back there, just beyond the fields. And they were right. After visiting the swamp in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “We saw alligators and garfish; and monstrous snapping turtles, fearsome brutes as heavy as a man with huge horny beaks that with a single snap could take off a man’s hand or foot … Thick-bodied water moccasins, foul and dangerous, kept near the water, and farther back in the swamp we found and killed rattlesnakes and copperheads.”

  THE TAENSA

  The Tensas swamp is laced with huge mounds that, from the air, look like welts in the muddy earth. They are burial mounds of the Taensa Indians, the group that occupied the area before whites appeared. When the French explorer Sieur René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle traveled down the Mississippi to explore the delta in 1682, he visited a Taensa village and was welcomed warmly. The French described the Taensa as a people who lived in large, well-made buildings. They worshipped the sun and kept a fire burning all the time in a temple that had a roof decorated with the carved likenesses of three birds. When a chief died, they sacrificed a number of his friends and relatives so that they could accompany him into the afterlife. Later, most of the Taensa Indian population was killed by smallpox and measles viruses carried by whites, against which the Indians had no defenses.

  In 1861 the Civil War broke out, and the following year Yankee troops seized control of much of the Mississippi River. Yankee soldiers descended upon the Tensas plantations, stealing horses, cattle, and food, freeing slaves, and terrorizing those remaining in the plantation homes, most of whom were women and children.

  Planter families faced a desperate choice: they could either stay at home and wait for the Yankees or flee to Texas through the dreaded swamp. Many said their prayers, set fire to their cotton crops, and plunged on foot and horseback into the dark trees.

  Seventy years later, in 1935, when the Cornell ornithologists hunted for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in this same swamp, there was little evidence of the cotton society or the Civil War. The ruins of a few plantation buildings lay smothered beneath fragrant flowering vines. Trees had sprouted back so quickly along the Tensas that they soon blended in with the giants behind them. It was as if no one had ever lived there.

  But the rest of the vast Mississippi delta had changed plenty. Railroads finally reached the Tensas River sometime around 1900, ushering in lumber crews and logging equipment. For about thirty years loggers had been steadily closing in on the Tensas swamp from the north and the south, like a giant set of alligator jaws. Soon it was the last big scrap left of the Mississippi River bottomland forest, once a green carpet that had stretched from Memphis, Tennessee, to the Gulf of Mexico.

  TR, BEARS, AND IVORY-BILLS

  In the fall of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt set out to kill a bear “after the fashion of the old Southern planters.” That meant tracking it on horseback and using dogs to sniff it out. TR’s huge hunting party chose the Tensas River swamp, notoriously thick with bears.

  The President thought he had seen big trees before, but he nearly got a cramp in his neck gawking up at the skyscrapers growing from the bottom of the swamp. “In stature, in towering majesty, they are unsurpassed by any trees of our eastern forests; lordlier kings of the green-leaved world are not to be found until we reach the sequoias and redwoods of the Sierras.”

  The wild creatures were just as amazing. TR saw minks, raccoons, possums, deer, black squirrels, wood rats, panther tracks, and, of course, bears, one of which he killed. But one creature impressed him above all. “The most notable birds and those which most interested me were the great Ivory-billed woodpeckers. Of these I saw three, all of them in groves of giant cypress; their brilliant white bills contrasted finely with the black of their general plumage. They were noisy but wary, and they seemed to me to set off the wildness of the swamp as much as any of the beasts of the chase.”

  The giant oaks and ashes and sweet gums along the Tensas seemed doomed, too, until, one day in 1913, the dry scratch of a pen against paper in New York City froze the powerful jaws of development in midbite. On March 28 of that year, Douglas Alexander, a portly white-haired man in a business suit, stood beside his elegant wife, Helen, in a New York City courthouse and looked on as she signed her name to a deed that gave the Ivory-bill one last chance. She signed it not to help woodpeckers, but so that her husband’s company could sell sewing machines. For Douglas Alexander was president of the Singer Manufacturing Company, and Singer needed oak trees. Many Singer machines folded down into cabinets, becoming flat-topped tables when no one was sewing. Women around the world loved the oak cabinets because they were beautiful, and because they saved space in cramped tenements and crowded rooms. But America was running out of oak trees.

  THE BIG REDS

  In 1913, the year that the Singer Manufacturing Company bought a big chunk of the Tensas swamp, the company sold 2.5 million machines around the world to countries as far-flung as Spain, Russia, or Japan. Singer’s headquarters, the Singer Building, was the tallest building in the world, rising forty-seven stories above Broadway in New York City. As president of the Singer company, Douglas Alexander commanded one of the biggest business empires in the world. He was fabulously rich, and so admired that in a few years he would even be knighted.

  Alexander’s scouts had found one last forest of uncut hardwoods. It was for sale in the Mississippi delta, in northeastern Louisiana. Singer bought the Tensas swamp for about nineteen dollars an acre and immediately declared its new property a “refuge,” meaning that the trees were not to be cut without the Singer company’s approval. Hunting was forbidden. The forest began to appear on Louisiana maps as the Singer Refuge and was later called by conservationists the Singer Tract.

  But Singer soon found that it was much easier to get the word “refuge” put on a map than to keep hunters out of a game paradise. Families had been shooting their food in these woods for years, and powerful politicians like Mason Spencer often retreated to hunting cabins along the Tensas River where damp bottomlands teemed with bear, deer, and turkey. No one was going to quit hunting on account of a sewing-machine company.

  Finally, in 1920, the Singer company offered Louisiana’s Fish and Game Department the chance to manage Singer’s land as long as the state agreed to hire wardens to regulate hunters and tree poachers. J. J. Kuhn was employed as a Singer warden when Tanner, Allen, Kellogg, and Sutton showed up in Tallulah. At first he had seen his job simply as keeping hunters out. But for the past three years, ever since Mason Spencer had shot the big woodpecker, he had found himself guiding scientists through the forest looking for Ivory-bills. His curiosity about the great birds had grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where he not only knew where the birds were, but knew the entire forest by heart. What had seemed simply a game forest was now something more. Kuhn had come to realize that his place of work was a sort of forested oasis, an intact natural island surrounded by a rising tide of lawns, paved roads, and cotton fields.

  Paul Kellogg squints at Ivory-bills through a spotting scope while Jim Tanner listens to their sounds through recording equipment sheltered beneath the tent

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CAMP EPHILUS

  When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Singer Refuge, Louisiana—1935

  LATE INTO THE NIGHT AT KUHN’S CABIN, THE CORNELL RESEARCHERS WENT OVER their options for transporting the sound equipment five miles through the muck to the Ivory-bills’ nest. The choices all looked bad. Driving the trucks through the swamp would be impossible. The sound truck alone weighed nearly a ton, and the ground was like soup.

  Finally they hit on an ingenious plan. They would d
rive the trucks to some dry place in Tallulah and take the sound truck apart, disconnecting the instruments from the truck. Then they would rebuild the recording system in Ike’s farm wagon and turn it into the sound truck. Ike’s mules could pull it into the swamp. They’d build a camp on some dry spot near the Ivory-bills’ nest, and from there they could spend as much time as they needed to film, record, and study the birds. It just might work.

  They drove their trucks into town, and Doc went to ask the mayor for a work site. He gave them a choice location. A few minutes later, puzzled prisoners at the town jail peered out through the bars of their cell windows at two heavy black trucks pulling up onto the lawn. Then three well-dressed strangers got out, greeted them pleasantly, and began to jerk wires from the inside of one truck, placing them neatly on the ground. When word got around about what they were doing, one of the prisoners hollered out, “Hey! I know right where the peckerwoods are if you can get me out of here!”

  By the dawn of Monday, April 8, all the instruments were rebuilt in Ike’s farm wagon, and the four mules clopped off for the swamp. Having finished his sketches of Ivory-bills, Professor Sutton had departed for Texas to scout out other rare birds, leaving Allen, Kellogg, and Tanner to observe the woodpeckers. It took all day to reach the nest, with Kellogg and Allen riding the two lead mules and Tanner, Kuhn, and Ike’s son, Albert, scrambling behind on foot. They finally stopped in front of a giant oak tree about three hundred feet from the Ivory-bills’ nest.

  The Cornell team transports its sound equipment to Camp Ephilus

  The men flung a wide canvas tent, like a circus big top, over the sound truck, and then propped it up with small saplings, lashing the canvas to nearby trees. They stocked up palmetto fans between the roots of a tree and spread their sleeping blankets on top, hoping the pile would be high enough off the ground to keep them dry at night. Mounting a pair of binoculars on a tripod, they aimed it at the nest hole and scooted a lawn chair behind it so that one of them could sit and watch the nest during daylight. Then they pointed the sound mirror toward the nest hole and built a cooking site. They called their new home “Camp Ephilus,” a pun on the Ivory-bill’s genus name, Campephilus.

  The next afternoon both Ivory-bills briefly left the nest. Jim Tanner scrambled up an elm that stood just twenty feet from the nest tree and hammered a plank between two limbs. He quickly added to it a small frame over which he draped a scrap of canvas. He backed down the tree again, nailing boards into the trunk as he descended. Now they had a “blind” that would give them a closer look if the birds would accept such near neighbors.

  The men settled down to the nuts and bolts of an ornithologist’s work. They worked in shifts, never taking their eyes off the nest hole during daylight, recording in their journal even the most ordinary behavior of the birds. As Doc’s notes from April 11 show, the Ivory-bills eyed their new neighbors nervously:

  [8:45 a.m.] Tanner went up to the blind and pulled up the camera. The female once flew to the nest hole but became alarmed and flew away after climbing to the top of the stub. While Tanner was setting his camera, the male came and entered the nest. [I] frightened the male from the nest by rubbing the tree. In about twenty minutes it returned, climbed to the hole, looked around and looked in, but after about half a minute or more it became alarmed by the rattle of the camera and flew off. Ten or fifteen minutes later it returned and … finally entered the hole.

  Doc Allen takes his turn at the spotting scope

  Doc, Tanner, and Kellogg knew they were taking a risk. If they scared the birds off, there was no assurance there were any more to be seen. Even worse, the disturbance could disrupt the birds’ breeding season. On the other hand, saving the species from extinction depended on knowing enough about it to make recommendations. This was the best chance anyone would probably ever have. Their expedition had become more than a sound-recording experiment; now they were on a rescue mission as well.

  The male Ivory-bill arrives at the nest hole as the female appears at the opening. The Cornell team took this close-up from a blind built in a nearby tree

  The Ivory-bills’ pattern was the same every day: the male and female took turns incubating—sitting on—the eggs inside the nest hole. The male took the night shift, staying with the eggs until about 6:30 a.m. At that hour he rapped on the inside of the hole, delivering an impatient message that echoed through the forest. If his mate was late in arriving, he stuck his head out of the hole and uttered a few “yaps” or “kents,” but he never left his post until she got back. When she did, the two birds seemed to chatter for a while, and then the male remained at the nest for about twenty more minutes, preening his feathers, before zooming off somewhere, probably to find food or to sleep. For the rest of the day, the couple took turns incubating in shifts of about two hours. The female always left at about 4:30 in the afternoon, and stayed away all night.

  Another forest creature who slept little and took off at night was Jim Tanner. Now he knew what Doc had meant by describing him as the team’s “handy man” who would “act in any necessary capacity.” At Camp Ephilus, Tanner was the cook, the builder, the climber, the porter, and the acrobat who was able to get the camera and the sound mirror closest to the birds. He could soon operate all the equipment. Since there was only room for two to sleep at the camp, every night Tanner sloshed two miles to Ike’s home, crawled into bed with Albert, and fell into a brief, deep sleep. He was up at 4:30 each morning and back in camp, hauling water through the darkness and chopping wood to get a fire going and cook for his professors. After scrubbing pots, he took up his morning watch of the Ivory-bills, which usually began at about 6 a.m. Far from feeling used, he was thrilled. What did sleep matter when you had the chance to study North America’s rarest bird close-up? Dirty, sticky, bug-bitten, always a little tired, and still not yet twenty-one, Jim Tanner figured he was one of the luckiest people on earth.

  THE SPRINT WEST

  After five days of observing the birds, the team came to a crossroads. Though they longed to stay with the Ivory-bill family until the eggs hatched and the young were raised, they had other rare birds to record, birds scattered throughout the whole country. Kuhn hiked in with a telegram for Doc, a reminder from a colleague that if they didn’t get to western Oklahoma by May 1, they would lose their chance to record another of America’s rarest birds, the Lesser Prairie Chicken.

  Once again a late-night talk produced a plan. If all went as they hoped, they could dash to Oklahoma, record the prairie chickens, and make it back to Camp Ephilus in two weeks. By then, the young Ivory-bills should have hatched and still be in the nest, not quite ready to fly and still being fed by their parents. J. J. Kuhn volunteered to check in on the nest while they were gone. That seemed the best they could do.

  ECOLOGICAL DISASTER

  During World War I, prairie farmers plowed under their deep-rooted native grasses and planted shallow-rooted wheat in their place to feed troops overseas.

  Prosperity followed until, for some reason, it simply stopped raining. By the time the Cornell team got to Oklahoma, there hadn’t been a soaking rainstorm for four years. But the wind blew unceasingly, whipping the unbound, powdery soil into towering clouds of dust that blotted out the sun, covered machinery, and suffocated farm animals. People slept with masks on, tried to keep the dust out of their food, and prayed constantly.

  Doc sent for Ike and the mules, the sound truck was reassembled, and the team rumbled west—straight into the worst dust storm in U.S. history. Sunday, April 14, 1935, began as a day with a piercingly blue sky, but when the wind started blowing, it swept up the soil of Oklahoma and Kansas into a terrifying black wall of dust seven thousand feet high. The dust blew eastward all the way across the country, even dumping prairie soil onto ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Reports of the mighty storm kept the Cornell team stalled for three days in western Louisiana. When they began to drive again, they saw a landscape that seemed as strange as the moon’s. With the windshield wiper going all the time
, they coughed their way across the prairie.

  You can hear the wind’s bleak howl in the background of their recordings of the Lesser Prairie Chicken, finally accomplished on the eighth day. With Camp Ephilus and the family of Ivory-bills always on their minds, they drove almost nonstop to Colorado and Kansas, making more recordings, and then raced back to Louisiana. There was no way to telephone Kuhn. They only hoped they weren’t too late.

  CRAWLING SAWDUST

  Little things rule the world.

  —Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson

  The team didn’t make it back to the Ivory-bill nest until May 9, nearly a month after they had left. They had missed their chance; the birds were gone. Kuhn had visited the nest late in April and found the pair behaving strangely. Each bird spent most of its time nervously poking its head into the nest hole, then entering the nest for just a few minutes, and then flying off to another nearby tree. They preened themselves almost constantly, and after a while they stopped bringing food to the nest altogether. Then they disappeared.