"I think this issue of extinction is just huge."
Director George Butler Tracks the Bird of Lost Paradise

Sunday, March 9, 2008

On April 28, 2005, elite bird-watchers announced they had found the ivory-billed woodpecker in the primordial forests of Arkansas. It was the rediscovery of an iconic bird that almost everyone believed extinct. "This is dead solid confirmed," said John W. Fitzpatrick, head of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Ah, were it so. For three years, hundreds of birders, deploying remote-controlled cameras and audio recorders, have slogged though swamps to return with no definitive proof. It is this search that drew documentary filmmaker George Butler to make "The Lord God Bird," which premieres Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the National Geographic Society as part of the Environmental Film Festival ( http://www.dcenvironmentalfilmfest.org).

-- William Booth

The search for this woodpecker has been described as a fever. How did you catch it?

After I made "Pumping Iron" [the 1977 documentary that introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger to the mainstream], I got to know George Plimpton, who wanted me to go to Cuba with him to try to find the bird. I couldn't; I was making another film. But I really began following the bird, and every few years there would be a report on NPR that the bird had been found in Texas or Louisiana or Florida. I would tell young filmmakers, there's a great film to be made on the ivory-billed woodpecker, and they would look at me like I were daft.

Does it exist? We want to believe.

My best answer is so many really fine ornithologists have sighted the bird. It's hard to imagine that so many world-class birders have wishfully seen the bird. The last sighting I heard of was in north Florida by John Ruthven, one of the great bird painters.

But everyone who has seen the bird has been obsessed with finding it, especially some of the characters in your film, who confess they have dreamed of the ivory-bill since they were children and believed the discovery would make them famous.

Everything you said is possible. You're absolutely right in every degree.

But?

How many people have been sent to death row based on eyewitness accounts?

Good point. Your film is beautiful and sad.

I think this issue of extinction is just huge. Did you know that 75 percent of the indigenous birds in New Zealand will go extinct? . . . The ivory-bill is a symbol of our lost trees, our lost American forests. These woods had as much beauty as any place. All of it going, all of it going. There were 50 million acres of bottomland forest, now there's a half million. Even in the swamp in Arkansas, I could always hear the highway in the background.