Audubon: Editor's Choice

(Reviews)

To Catch a Shadow

The ivory-billed woodpecker's disappearance has haunted ornithologists for decades. A few refused to believe it was truly gone. It's a good thing they never gave up the chase.

By Frank Graham Jr.

The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
By Tim Gallagher
Houghton Mifflin Company, 272 pages, $25

For more than 60 years the ivory-billed woodpecker had been staring out at us through little glass eyes from its certified niche in extinction. Now the bird has stirred, smoothed its black-and-white plumage, and stepped warily back into the dim light of a southern forest.

These glad tidings are set out in detail by Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird, the publication of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Gallagher has long been fascinated with the ivory-bill and took part almost from the beginning in the species' 2004 rediscovery. “I think I've always been the kind of person that gets caught up in obsessive quests,” he writes in The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. This compulsive drive bonded him with Bobby Ray Harrison, a teacher of art history and photography at Oakwood College in Alabama. Both read everything they could find about ivory-bills, believed their survival likely despite the clear-cutting of their Deep South forest habitats, and made plans to search promising areas for conclusive proof.

Skillfully, Gallagher uses the wisecracking, mishap-prone Harrison (who blunders into wrong turns and dangerous snakes) to keep the narrative moving through the first part of the book. He casts him as Sancho Panza against his Don Quixote as they probe dusty roads or cottonmouth-infested swamps to tilt at their own particular windmills. But as Gallagher describes the southern woodlands, the idiosyncrasies of fellow ivory-bill enthusiasts encountered, even the fare at local eateries (mostly burgers and Mountain Dew), the reader is aware of a shadow narrative running through these pages. This phantom keeps pace with Harrison's battered pickup and Gallagher's rented car, dropping into a watery hollow, now skipping over a roadside shack, hovering above their motel rooms at night. They live with it around the clock, determined to give it substance—flesh, bone, and feathers.

A break comes almost out of nowhere in February 2004. Gallagher hears of a website reference by Gene Sparling, a knowledgeable outdoorsman in Arkansas who reported seeing a large woodpecker, unknown to him, a week earlier at Bayou de View in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. Gallagher and Harrison talk to him and are convinced he saw the real thing. A week or so later Sparling leads them into the bayou in canoes. On the second day out, a large black-and-white bird flies into the sunshine from the tangle of a side channel.

“It started to bank,” Gallagher writes, “giving us a superb view of its back and both wings for a moment as it pulled up, as if it were going to land on a tree trunk. ‘Look at all the white on its wings!' I yelled. Hearing my voice, it veered away from the tree and continued to fly to the left. We both cried out simultaneously, ‘Ivory-bill!' ”

Its red crest identified the bird as a male. Gallagher returned to Cornell at once and reported his sighting to John Fitzpatrick, the Lab of Ornithology's director. News of the discovery was withheld during the two most recent winter–early spring survey seasons while the lab sent search teams into the area and the Nature Conservancy coordinated the purchase of critical habitat nearby. There have now been seven sightings in the refuge (no one knows whether all the observers spotted the same bird), while minute analyses of a blurry but “readable” video confirmed the woodpecker's identity.

The Grail Bird is a breezy, evocative read—an adventure story built around a historic discovery. The book is also a rebuke, however muted, to the ornithological establishment. A century ago, despite the precarious state of the species, scientists kept shooting ivory-bills even when they already had more study skins in their cabinets than there were survivors in the wild. When the well ran dry, they simply stamped the species “Extinct” and turned away. With a kind of dogmatic negativism, they dismissed new sightings, even those by experienced woodsmen, without investigation. As the years slipped by, chances were missed to save critical habitat and the ivory-bills themselves.

Of course, one male bird doesn't make a species, but if just a few of the previously ignored sightings are valid (hunters, fishermen, even loggers are more likely than most birders to rove in barely accessible swamps and forests), isolated pockets of ivory-bills may remain. It's all about habitat protection now. Can we save fragments of the once vast southern forests to provide the food, shelter, and nesting places the birds need? Large numbers of dead and dying trees are required to attract the beetles and other scavengers on which ivory-bills feed.

In an era of dispiriting news, this tale is one to inspire hope and hosanna.

Capsule reviews

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder
By Richard Louv
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 336 pages, $24.95

There's something missing from the modern American childhood, says journalist Richard Louv. In Last Child in the Woods, Louv writes that unstructured outdoor play—the building of precarious tree houses, the lazy exploration of backyard forests—is fast becoming a thing of the past. Parental fear of strangers, schedules packed with activities, and the increasing availability of electronic toys, he claims, are keeping children indoors more than ever before. To Louv these “de-natured” children lack more than muddy shoes and scraped elbows; he cites studies showing that time in natural settings can reduce obesity, depression, and attention-deficit disorder. He also points to evidence that outdoor exploration fosters creativity, inspires new generations of naturalists and environmentalists, and even raises standardized test scores. To reunite children with nature, Louv offers practical advice to parents, suggesting modest joint expeditions into the natural world: “The dugout in the weeds . . . the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between a front yard and the road—all of these places are entire universes to a young child.” Louv's case for outdoor play is a convincing one, and the possibility of a drug-free “nature” cure for many modern ills is too tantalizing to ignore.

—Michelle Nijhuis

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
By David Dobbs
Pantheon Books, 306 pages, $25

Unbeknownst to many people, Charles Darwin was at the center of a debate that revolutionized science—and it did not involve how finches or humans evolved. In 1834 the 25-year-old Darwin left the crew of the H.M.S. Beagle and began collecting coral-rich rock high in the Chilean Andes. The endeavor excited him so much, he wrote his sister, that he “could hardly sleep at night for thinking over my days' work.” Darwin's “geologizing” led him to theorize that coral reefs and islands were remnants of a sinking landmass, solving (or so he thought) one of the greatest scientific mysteries of his day. In Reef Madness, journalist David Dobbs brings to life three great 19th-century scientists—Darwin; his nemesis, famed naturalist (and creationist) Louis Agassiz; and Agassiz's methodical, persistent son Alexander, who fought for decades to replace Darwin's theory on the origin of coral reefs with his own, which postulated that they developed on islands that rose from the seafloor, then eroded away to leave only the reefs. “The coral reef problem did not concern species origin or humankind's descent,” Dobbs writes. “But it posed again the evolutionary debate's confounding questions about the importance of evidence, the proper construction of theory, and the reliability of powerful but abstract ideas.” As such, the tale—which Dobbs compellingly re-creates—personifies Western science's slow coming of age in the 19th century, from a descriptive branch of theology that glorified God's creation to an empirical method that hatches and tests its own creation stories. This great leap, Dobbs recognizes, began not with Darwin's famous evolutionary theory but with “his coral reef history.”

—Dan Ferber

Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra
By Jordan Fisher Smith
Houghton Mifflin Company, 216 pages, $24

Nature Noir, Jordan Fisher Smith's memoir of his career as a park ranger, 14 years of which he spent patrolling 48 miles of Sierra Nevada river canyons for the state of California, reads like a cross between Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and any of Carl Hiaasen's novels. Smith's passion for this unruly stretch of wilderness and his outrage at its 150-year history of various depredations (mining, overgrazing, clear-cutting) is heartfelt. But it is the bizarre, true-life characters that Smith encounters during his workdays—such as armed gold miners and drug-addled squatters (who don't like to pay camping fees)—that make Nature Noir so readable. Given these experiences, Smith's credo of the modern-day park ranger is unsentimental: “You protect the land from the people, the people from the land, the people from each other, and the people from themselves. . . . If you're lucky, you get assigned to people who seem worth saving and land and waters whose situation is not hopeless. If not, you save them anyway. And maybe in time, saving them will make them worth it.”

—Keith Kloor

Art of the Wild

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell,” Aldous Huxley once said. For photographer Antonin Kratochvil, it's the perfect quote for the cover of his latest book, Vanishing (de.Mo, 248 pages, $54), which depicts humankind's most destructive tendencies, including war, strip-mining, and deforestation. Images of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster's dead zone in Belarus, and the gold mines of Guyana (shown here), interspersed with Michael Persson essays, go a long way toward supporting Huxley's opinion. Kratochvil shot his book—with its stark and depressing yet strangely beautiful photographs—during a 16-year period on five continents.

—Jesse Greenspan

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