Exploring the Edges of Texas

9. Ivory-bills on Buffalo Bayou

ChaPTEr 9 ivory-bills on buffalo bayou Its meanderings and beautiful curvatures seem to have been directed by a taste far too exquisite for human attainment. J. C. Clopper, “Journal of J. C. Clopper, 1828” from roCkPorT anD CoPano bay we drive inland to Victoria , pick up U.S. 59, and turn northeast toward Houston. Our route takes us through the heart of the Gulf Prairies and Marshes ecological region and across the lower reaches of the Colorado and Brazos rivers. Nearing the outskirts of the city,we are drawn into a torrent of traffic coursing through a landscape dominated by concrete and glass. We have been lured into one of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas by something John James Audubon saw here in 1837. The capital of the Republic of Texas was less than a year old when the artist visited and recorded his impression of Buffalo Bayou. It was a deep, sluggish stream winding through dark woods where Audubon found ivory-billed woodpeckers “in abundance.”1 Of all the places to find the holy grail of the birding world, Houston seems one of the most unlikely. Back in the early seventies, the stretch of Buffalo Bayou that had become the Houston Ship Channel was so polluted Houstonians were afraid that a spark might touch off a firestorm rivaling the San Francisco disaster of 1906. Docks and warehouses crowded its banks, effluent poisoned the water, and trees of any kind were scarce. Ivory-billed woodpeckers on Buffalo Bayou? We will need Great egret on Buffalo Bayou, Houston ChaPTEr 9 { 122 } hard evidence to convince us that Campephilus principalis once lived in a place that is now one of the busiest seaports in the United States. J In Audubon’s day, Houston and its fledgling port were primitive outposts on the edge of civilization. Getting there was not easy, but the artist arranged through contacts in Washington to “borrow” a fifty-five ton revenue cutter, the Campbell, and her twenty-one man crew. The ship’s captain, Napoléon Coste, was an old friend with whom Audubon had explored the east coast of Florida. Audubon’s son John Woodhouse Audubon and their friend Edward Harris completed the party that set out from New Orleans on April 1, 1837, bound for Texas.2 The Campbell arrived in Galveston Bay twenty days later“having had a fine run from Atchafalaya Bay.” Four days after that, Audubon reported that a “heavy gale blew all night, and this morning the thermometer in the cabin is sixty-three degrees.Thousands of birds, arrested by the storm in their migration northward, are seen hovering around our vessels and hiding in the grass, and some are struggling in the water, completely exhausted.”3 When the storm abated, the three naturalists waded into the shallow bay to collect shorebirds and herons. On May 2, while stalking roseate spoonbills on a sandbar, they encountered something unexpected. “The back fins of a large fish resembling those of a shark appeared meandering above the surface of the shallow waters. We called to John, and he, wishing to kill the monster, which moved but slowly, rammed home a couple of bullets, and lodged them in the body of the fish.”4 Soon a boatload of sailors joined the chase, beating the wounded fish with oars and cutting off its tail. A crowd gathered round as the sailors dragged the creature to shore with a gaff-hook through the eye. Only then did they realize that their prize was not a shark. “It proved to be a sawfish, measuring rather more ivory-bills on buffalo bayou { 123 } than twelve feet in length. . . . From her body we recovered ten small sawfish, all of them alive and wriggling about as soon as they were thrown on the sand. The young were about thirty inches in length, and minute sharp teeth were already formed.”5 Clearly, the study of living things was a death-dealing discipline in the nineteenth century. Audubon knew if he reported a bird (or a sawfish ) in an unusual location, the sighting would be disregarded without the body as proof. Before photography was widely available, artists had to immobilize their subjects long enough to sketch or paint them. For Audubon, this meant shooting the bird and arranging the limp form on a web of wires to simulate a lifelike pose. New technologies have radically changed the way scientists and...