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COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
It had a long neck, and the head--it had a red topknot that came to point, and it had a big white bill--it looked real cartoonish." Gene Sparling, a kayaker from Hot Springs, Arkansas, was on the phone, eagerly describing his encounter with a woodpecker on February 11, 2004, in the Arkansas bottomlands. Sparling had been kayaking on the bayou when the bird "flew overhead and landed on a cypress tree less than seventy feet in front of me." He thought he had seen a "superlarge" pileated woodpecker, "with white in the wrong places." But every feature he described seemed to fit another bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird many people thought had gone extinct in the mid-twentieth century. When he said "cartoonish," goose bumps popped up on my arms, and the little bit of hair I still have on my head stood on end. I had never heard anyone use the word "cartoonish" to describe an ivory-bill, but it was perfect.
That was the moment I began to think Gene's superlarge pileated might instead be the ghost bird I had sought for more than three decades. At the time of Gene's call, I had already been preparing to check out a lead on an ivory-bill sighting in Louisiana. Now Arkansas was looking like a better destination.
Eleven months earlier, another report had come in about a bird in Arkansas whose description matched that of the ivory-bill. That bird, from the White River National Wildlife Refuge, was reportedly a large black woodpecker with a prominent white shield on its lower back. The shield was divided into two parts, as if the wings were held slightly apart to reveal a black back underneath. The crest was red. But the sighting, like Gene's, was similar in another respect to a host of such sightings in the past few decades--they were always made by a single individual, with no corroborating witness. In other words, there was no proof that the bird they saw was really an ivory-bill.
I e-mailed Tim Gallagher, longtime editor of Cornell University's Living Bird magazine and a friend of mine for almost twenty years, my plans had changed, I told him, and I was going to Arkansas. His curt reply: "Pick me up in Memphis. I'm going with you."
The ivory-billed woodpecker once ranged over a wide swath of the southeastern United States, from the Carolinas westward to Houston, Texas, and as far north as southern Illinois, as well as in Cuba. For...
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