Hunt And Peck

"It's just been so spooky, how hard the bird is to find," says Barksdale, floating in his canoe through the murk of Bayou de View, not too far from the spot where the ivory-billed was sighted, the last time in February. "Somewhere Elvis is out there doing his thing, sitting on a dead branch, preening and calling, and we cannot find him."

It seems the natural world still holds mysteries for those who tune in, and a delicious one is this: Why is the ivory-billed woodpecker so wonderfully, so maddeningly elusive?

Elvis Lives!

On a bright sunny Saturday at the end of May in the little town of Clarendon, about halfway between Little Rock and Memphis, the locals hosted their annual Big Woods Birding Festival. But this year, with the rediscovery, it was all about the woodpecker. They were selling ivory-billed posters, books and T-shirts that read "Got Pecker?" Penny Childs would cut your hair to look like a woodpecker for 25 bucks. There was an Elvis impersonator crooning "don't be cruel." Federal and state wildlife agents set up tables piled with information about woodpeckers and how to identify the ivory-billed from its cousin, the relatively common pileated woodpecker, as phone calls were coming in from around Arkansas from people who thought they spied an ivory-billed at their bird feeders (which they almost assuredly did not).

There are high hopes among the Chamber of Commerce types that the woodpecker rediscovery would draw throngs of bird nuts carrying telescopes on tripods and fistfuls of cash to the poor Arkansas Delta. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was concerned enough about a birder invasion that the refuge manager posted a couple armed officers at the Highway 17 bridge, the closest put-in for a canoe and smack dab in the middle of the two-mile stretch where the sightings have occurred, to keep the hordes out of the restricted area. Alas, it was not to be: The birders have (mostly) stayed away.

There are a couple of reasons why: The ivory-billed remains the rarest of the rare. Incredibly difficult to glimpse in the best of seasons -- the winter months, when the trees are bare of leaves -- and in the spring and summer, when the swamps explode with green, it is nearly impossible to find. That, and the consensus among responsible birders is that the wary woodpecker might need quiet time after its return to the world stage. The researchers still are not certain whether there is just one male bird out there -- the last of his species -- or, at best, a few adult pairs and their young.

'Too Beautiful'

The Birding Festival was a good excuse for the ivory-billed woodpecker search team to reunite and tell their stories -- a crack SWAT-style team composed of some of the best birders in the world, under the auspices of the Cornell University Ornithology Laboratory and the Nature Conservancy. The Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental organization, has been working for years to preserve Big Woods habitat, along with state and federal wildlife agencies, long before anyone even suspected that an ivory-billed might be lurking out there in 500,000 acres of forest.

Over at the American Legion Hall, the room was packed to the rafters. On a table at the front, enclosed in a glass case, was a stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker, perched on a branch by its taxidermist. It is the closest to the living bird most people will ever come. The bird's long bill is a wickedly powerful weapon that it employs, as one naturalist put it, "to hammer like an angry man with an ax" at the dead and dying trees while searching for the beetle grubs that live beneath the bark. The dead bird's eye is big and egg white, and there's a Z-shaped swoosh of white that runs from its cheek to back, like a flamboyant mark of Zorro. But there is no vibrancy in the museum specimen, a kind of sad mummy.

Hoose, author and Nature Conservancy staffer, explains to the audience that the ivory-billed woodpecker has been elusive from the beginning of scientific enquiry. The tale he tells makes you feel by turns hopeful and depressed. Early in the 1800s, John James Audubon, who painted two portraits of the bird, was already worried about its survival. Indians coveted its feathers and beak for ceremonial dress, and early settlers used its body for gunshot pouches. "It was too big, too bold, too beautiful," Hoose says, for its own good.

But the real end times for the woodpecker began in the post-Reconstruction era, from the 1880s to the 1940s, when a nation hungry for timber logged the old woods and everything else along the rivers of the American Southeast. Once the Mississippi Delta bottomlands ran from Memphis to the Gulf of Mexico, 60 miles across and many hundreds of miles long. Gone, gone. Only the seeds and stems remain. But that is an old story.

Less known is the role that science and fashion played -- as collectors for amateur naturalists and the nation's foremost museums sought the last of the last woodpeckers, shooting them for their skins, and hunters gathered the feathers for the hat trade for the haute couture of ladies from Boston to Savannah (the so-called Plume Wars, which gave rise to today's Audubon Society, which was formed to fight the slaughter).

By 1920, the ivory-billed woodpecker was thought to be toast -- a goner after the extermination of the passenger pigeon (1914) and the Carolina parakeet (1918). But in 1924, Cornell ornithologist Arthur Allen found a pair in Florida. After he and his wife left camp, somebody shot the creatures.

Later, the final redoubt was thought to be a tract of remnant wood in northeast Louisiana owned by the Singer sewing machine company, where the "last" population was studied, first by Allen in 1935, and then by his protégé, the young and dogged James Tanner, who did the intensive fieldwork that today forms almost the entire corpus of knowledge about the bird and its lifestyle. (Turn-ons: beetle larvae and fast flight. Turn-offs: lumber companies and swamp drainers.) The Singer Tract was so wild and woolly and the woodpecker there so precious that earlier conservationists appealed to Congress to turn the place into a national park. It was not to be. The Chicago Mill and Lumber Co. mowed it down to make ammunition crates and caskets in World War II.