"And so the ivory-billed woodpecker once more crossed into the nether regions between existence and extinction."
They say that Comedy is Tragedy plus time. That may be true, but sometimes if you wait long enough, it boomerangs back to Tragedy. Consider the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker, that giant among Piciformes that, for many years, was the Holy Grail of American birdwatchers. For decades, biologists have played the "is it or isn't it?" game, trying to figure out if this mysterious denizen of the Deep South still existed or if it was extinct. When I was a student, the consensus was that the bird was extinct - until it was dramatically (if controversially) "resurrected" by a small team of scientists in 2005.
Tim Gallagher of Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology was one of the scientists who trekked out into the swamps to seek out the ivory-bill. He recounts his quest for the woodpecker in The Grail Bird: The Rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. At the time of Gallagher's team's sighting, the bird was believed to have been gone for almost sixty years. The book offers an engrossing history of this species, the largest of American woodpeckers, and what has made it so special to so many people. Even without its rarity (both natural and human-induced) it was a very impressive animal. I've seen stuffed museum specimens, but those are only a somewhat suitable substitute for seeing animals in the flesh. Woodpeckers as a group are poorly represented in zoos and aviaries, and there are almost no records of ivory-bills in captivity. I say "almost" because Gallagher tells the story of one naturalist who tried keeping a newly-captured ivory-bill in his hotel room. It went... about as well as you'd expect. I'd hate to get stuck with that bill...
Apart from a few dramatic flashes of sightings, none of them super-great, Gallagher's account is largely one of the toil and drudgery of fieldwork. Lots of slogging through the muck, lots of spying out promising hiding spots, and lots of waiting, and waiting, and waiting. It doesn't always make for excitement, but it does offer fascinating look into the life of a field biologist, and the slow build-up makes the final reveal more exciting. It ends on a triumphant, hopeful note.
Now, about that...
Earlier this week, the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially took 23 species off of the Endangered Species List, declaring them extinct. The ivory-billed woodpecker was among them. This wasn't the case of the Carolina parakeet or the passenger pigeon, where we had our eyes on one last bird and knew the exact date that the light of this species winked out. Instead, the government basically said, "It's been long enough - we're saying that they're gone." And so it becomes official.
Official, but not necessarily universally accepted. As Gallagher reminds us in his book, the ivory-bill has been written off before, and plenty of people have refused to let go. There have always been sightings of the ivory-bill, and I suspect that those will continue to trickle in. Some of them will be from people who see pileated woodpeckers or other species, cases of mistaken identity. Some will be outright lies. Still, there will be some which will be just tantalizing enough to keep hope alive. And hope, as Emily Dickinson wrote (and as Tim Gallagher reminds us), is the thing with feathers.
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