I Met a Man Who Has Seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and This Is What He Told Me

The Woods

The swamp forest is only a corridor between rice fields, but the ancient cypress tower there. Winds the week before had bared the trees, laying a carpet of tupelo golds, sweetgum reds, the rusty cypress needles. It was possible to walk dry-footed among the fluted trunks and spreading knees, the wet-season watermarks waist-high on a man.

Woodpeckers

The usual woodpeckers were all there: their bouncing flight, the sounds of rapping, scrabbling on bark. They called keer-uck and querrr-querrr, pik and peek, yucka, yucka yucka. The downy and the hairy were there, the red-bellied, the yellow-bellied sapsucker. The pileated was there, the largest of them, the red crest, drumming like the pounding of mallets, loud. It was a birdy place: the wildness of trees in every aspect of life and death, with pecked-out cavities, with beetles, with peeling bark.

Woodpecker!

This is the word he let out as he grabbed for his wife's arm. He knew what he was seeing, and he could not believe that he was, in fact, seeing it. If for 60 years something has been missing, it takes more than the sight of a large, utterly distinct flying bird to convince a man of what is possible.

Eight Seconds

One for the bird flying toward him from deep forest. Two for the bird landing 12 feet up a cypress trunk and clinging there in profile. Three for the bird sliding around to the back of the tree, hiding itself. Two for the bird flashing back the way it came, a single whomping wingbeat and all that white.

Color

The colossal male crest, of course—the brilliant flame so inescapably, unignorably red and pointedly tall. The white was more the surprise, down the neck and across the shoulders like a saddle, and the two large wedges shaped by folded wings. And the black, the black that was not charcoal, not ebony, only the absolutest of all blacks, and blacker still beside white.

Sound

He never heard the bird, not the henk, henk of its call, not its tooting, staccato song, not the double rap that distinguishes its tree knocking from any other woodpecker's. The early naturalists described ivory-bills as social and raucous, but whatever birds have survived have had to be shy and wary, as quiet as bark. They live by stealth.

What He Missed

Not the bill, not the length, which he showed me, holding his fingers apart—"Three inches." Not the thickness of the bill—this time, making a fat circle of forefinger and thumb. What he forgot to notice was the pale color of the bill, the look of ivory. In the blitz of recognition, he missed that, as he missed the very yellow eye.

The Quote

No puny pileated but a whacking big bird, he said, quoting Roger Tory Peterson, who witnessed the ivory-bill in 1941 and called that occasion the greatest birding moment of his long birding career. Peterson kept a page for the bird in his guidebooks, hope against hope, for years after others had shifted it to the extinct category. But a decade ago, even Peterson concluded that the bird had reached its end, like the woodlands it had inhabited, and no longer existed except in memory.

After

For a long time, he had to sit on a log and not say anything. He played the image of the bird over and over and over in his mind. It was too great a thing to comprehend—that he was there, and the bird was there, and he and the bird were breathing the same air. After the descriptions and illustrations by Catesby, Audubon, and Wilson; and after the photos and films from the Louisiana swamps in the 1940s; and after the late but extensive Tanner scholarship about life history and habitat; and after Peterson's passion and despair; and after the fleeting white of new video and all the talk about the ghost bird and the grail bird and the...