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Book Excerpt:The Grail BirdHoughton Mifflin Company, $25 (272p), ISBN 0-618-45693-7by Tim GallagherEditor, Living Bird Magazine
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Visit the publisher's web site for this book. “It sounds to me like you’ve seen an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.”Bobby Harrison, a professor at Alabama’s Oakwood College, speaking to Gene Sparling, who was the first person to see an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas in February, 2004. |
Part I
You never know when you get up in the morning what earth-shaking event might take place and change your life forever. For me, a chain of life-altering events began when I checked my email one day in February 2004. Just a few days earlier a kayaker named Gene Sparling had been taking a week-long float trip down a long, narrow bayou in eastern Arkansas when he spotted an unusual woodpecker foraging on the trunk of a cypress tree. Inconspicuous in his kayak, he pulled into a secluded spot out of the current and sat watching the bird. He knew immediately when he saw the bird’s unusual color pattern—brilliant white on the lower half of its back, with two white lines extending up the back to its crested head—that this was a bird he had never seen before. It was so close he could see the minute details of the feathers and even some staining on the lower part of its back, perhaps from going in and out of a roost hole or nest.
When he got home a few days later, Gene posted a long description of his float trip on a canoe club list-serve, and he included a couple of sentences about the bird. Mary Scott, a birder who’d had a credible ivory-bill sighting in Arkansas a year earlier, sent his report to me. I immediately called him up, and we spoke for about an hour. His sighting sounded better than a lot of the 30-plus-year-old reports I had been investigating, and it was less than a week old.
Gene has Pileated Woodpeckers nesting on his farm in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the western part of the state, so he is thoroughly familiar with this species. It seemed unlikely that this is what he had seen. What struck me most about his description was the way he said that the bird seemed almost cartoon-like because of its quick, jerky movements and general nervousness. Its neck looked thinner than a pileated’s, and its crest seemed to come to a point in the back.
I telephoned my friend Bobby Harrison—a professor at Alabama’s Oakwood College who had been searching for ivory-bills with me for a couple of years—and told him about the sighting. Then I asked if he’d mind talking with Gene. I was interested in getting his impression of Gene to see if it was the same as mine.
After a long talk with Gene, Bobby told him, “It sounds to me like you’ve seen an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.”
Before they got off the phone, Bobby was already planning a trip to the sighting area (about a five-hour drive from Bobby’s home near Huntsville, Alabama), and Gene was going to go with him. I mentioned this to my wife about an hour later, and she told me, “You should go along with him. You’ll never forgive yourself if he sees an Ivory-bill and you’re not there.”
I didn’t need much encouragement. I did a quick search on the Internet to find a good airline ticket price and then called up Bobby.
“Say, you think you could pick me up in Memphis on the way down?”
“No problem,” he said. “I go right through there.”
And that was it: the start of our adventure. A week later, I was on my way down south again, for the second time in a month.
For more information about the ivory-billed woodpecker:
- Postcard From the Field: Return to the Bayou
Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird and member of the ivory-billed woodpecker search team writes from the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in the Big Woods of Arkansas. - Found: The Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Learn about the timeline of the search for the ivory-bill, The Nature Conservancy's conservation efforts in the Big Woods of Arkansas, meet the search team, and more! - Where We Work: The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas
The Nature Conservancy's work in Arkansas helps protect and restore ecologically rich wetlands, threatened native prairies, caves, forests and waterways. - Places We Protect: The Big Woods of Arkansas
This 550,000-acre corridor of floodplain forest follows the bayous and rivers that flow into the Mississippi River and includes the most extensive example of natural shoreline along the lower Mississippi. For 41 miles, the banks on both sides of the river are lined with bottomland hardwoods, the habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker. - How You Can Help: Donate Online
Support our efforts to conserve this critical habitat for the ivory-bill and other species. - Ivory-billed Woodpecker News
See ivory-billed woodpecker photos, maps of the habitat of the ivory-bill, and other news and information about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Join The Nature Conservancy on