To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] The Woodpecker in All of Us
Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 10:56:23 -0700
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."