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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

The Woodpecker in All of Us

By JONATHAN ROSEN

Published: May 3, 2005

I have a hard time imagining many people actually calling the ivory-billed 
woodpecker "the Lord God bird" - the name doesn't even make it onto the 
list of more than 20 common names recorded by the bird's intrepid 
chronicler, James T. Tanner, in 1942. But it makes a terrific headline for 
a bird reported last week to have been rediscovered after 61 years of 
official extinction (better than, say, "King woodchuck," one of its other 
nicknames). It somehow suggests that we have found more than just a missing 
bird and that God, whom we invoked when we conquered the wilderness, is 
also present in our effort to get it back.

"Second chances to save wildlife once thought to be extinct are rare," said 
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton. Of course, chances to save birds not 
yet believed extinct are common, if sadly less appealing. But who doesn't 
love the idea of a second act, especially in America, where we are far more 
fixated on resurrection and new beginnings than on death and dying?

The searchers have given us back a magnificent creature. Some 20 inches 
long, boldly patterned with black and white, the bird is so beautiful that 
Audubon likened it to a Van Dyck painting. I may never see it - though I 
certainly hope to - but it has new life for me and will live for other 
people who may never have even heard of the bird. They will want to protect 
its habitat and in doing so will, without even knowing it, protect the 
habitat of many other animals as well. All this is a great gift. Likening 
the bird, as Audubon did, to a work of art while it still haunted the 
forests of the South is charming; imagining that the bird is nothing but a 
work of art is overwhelmingly depressing. As Goethe said, art is long and 
life is short.

The discovery certainly brings with it a measure of hope - for the bird, of 
course, but also for us. Though it is unclear if a breeding pair exists, we 
have suddenly been acquitted of murder, even if we still face a lesser 
charge of reckless endangerment for having logged the old-growth trees 
right out from under the bird. Before last week, the last official sighting 
of an ivory bill came in 1944 in an area near the Tensas River in Louisiana 
known as the Singer Tract because it was owned by the Singer Sewing Machine 
Company. Despite protests from conservationists warning of the bird's 
extinction, the Singer Company leased the land to a logging company in 
1938. At times using German P.O.W.'s for labor, the company went on to raze 
the forest.

All birds live between worlds, but the ivory-billed woodpecker is like 
Persephone in Greek mythology, the goddess who spent half her time in the 
underworld and half on earth. This is not even the first time the bird has 
come back from the grave. Never abundant, the ivory bill was considered 
gone for good as far back as the 1920's, when a nesting pair was found in 
Florida in 1924. That pair was shot and stuffed by hunters. In 1932 an 
ivory bill was shot in the Singer Tract, which led to the discovery of a 
tiny population that survived until 1944. The bird's disappearances gave it 
a ghostly life that it now carries with it back into the world.

To a bird watcher, every bird has a kind of double existence. It is the 
bird you struggle to see and identify and gather into the scientific world 
of Linnaean nomenclature; and it is the wild, mysterious creature that 
lives beyond our ability to ever name or truly know it. The trick with 
birding is to see both things at once - the bird in the guidebook and the 
bird that lives beyond books. To see the Van Dyck painting as a bird that 
is also, as its lowly Latin name Campephilus principalis tells us, 
"principally, an eater of grubs."

The ivory bill has a third identity as well, one that grows out of our need 
for the natural world to play a symbolic role in our lives. Tanner, in his 
study, observed that the most common explanation given for the bird's 
disappearance was that it "could not stand the presence of mankind or 
association with advancing civilization." In other words it was a lot like 
us as we sometimes idealized ourselves. Huckleberry Finn lights out for new 
territory because the Widow Douglas wants to adopt and "sivilize" him. The 
paradox is that the thing that seemed to link us to the wild world, our 
ferocious independence and unrestrained freedom, was the very impulse that 
endangered the wild places nourishing our national soul.The great 
18th-century ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, tells a story about shooting, 
but not killing, an ivory bill in order to paint it. Wilson locked it in 
his hotel room and when he returned an hour later the bird had all but 
hammered its way to freedom. Wilson was so impressed with the bird, which 
also attacked him, that he was "tempted to restore him to his native 
woods." He resisted temptation, however, and the bird died after three days 
of refusing food.

This defiant, almost suicidal integrity has long been part of the bird's 
aura, but it has been accompanied by an almost opposite quality - a claim 
the bird makes on us, a refusal to disappear from our lives, almost a kind 
of haunting. One of the most stirring photographs in Tanner's landmark 1942 
study is a picture of an ivory-billed nestling perched on a researcher's head.

The ivory bill is a perfect emblem of our own paradoxical relationship to 
the American wilderness, of what is lost and what can be recovered, and of 
our own divided impulses. While carrying the ivory bill to his hotel room, 
Wilson noted the wounded creature's cries, "exactly resembling the violent 
crying of a young child." And with the bird hidden beneath his coat, Wilson 
asked the innkeeper for a room "for myself and my baby." His joke has 
painful meaning. Wilson shot a bird he longed to liberate and pretended a 
wild animal he was in the process of killing was his own child.

The urge to kill and the urge to conserve do live side by side; they are 
our heritage and the bird somehow carries our double burden on its back. 
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that David Luneau, whose 
videotape of the bird clinched the spectacular rediscovery, attributed the 
ivory bill's survival to "the lands that hunters and fishermen have 
conserved." It's worth recalling, too, that it was a young zoology major, 
David Kulivan, who touched off a frenzy among birders back in 1999 when he 
said he had seen a pair of ivory bills in a Louisiana swamp while he was 
out hunting for turkey.

Among its gifts to us, the ivory bill can help us see ourselves as we 
really are, torn between our own desire to be free - to shoot and develop 
and cut down and expand - and the desire to live among free things that can 
survive only if we are less free. With the double vision of birders, we 
still can recognize ourselves as the wild children of American fantasy, but 
also as the far less romantic, but equally biblical, stewards of the earth. 
The challenge now is to give the ivory-billed woodpecker a home - not 
merely in legend but on actual, American ground, where it can be both the 
metaphorical Lord God bird and also the literal eater of grubs. If we can 
pull this off, we will not merely be saving this bird, we will be saving 
ourselves.

Jonathan Rosen, the editorial director of Nextbook, is the author, most 
recently, of the novel "Joy Comes in the Morning."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/opinion/03rosen.html