the words weren’t mine

Among the birding community, from professional ornithologists to occasional backyard birders, the ivory-billed woodpecker’s extinction has been controversial. Credentials have been questioned. Reputations have been tainted. There have been alleged sightings, but every one of them seems impossible to verify. People swear upon unholy things that ivory-billeds have visited their backyard suet feeders. I’ve received secret phone calls and anonymous emails in which people refuse to give their names. Kent calls and diagnostic double-rap knocks are heard deep in mature forests only to be revealed as bridges’ joints “talking” with the passage of traffic, or maybe the ambitious call of a tiny nuthatch that wants to be Lord God itself.

The only film that exists was made in the mid-1930s by Arthur Allen, a Cornell researcher who chased the bird in Florida swamps, recording sights and sounds that few have heard since. Allen’s black-and-white film is haunting. Even in that colorless, flat reel-to-reel, the woodpeckers seem somehow otherworldly, their eyes and beaks gleaming, potential last lives of a species in a world where economic depression and rising fascism dominated the news. My grandparents would have been raising my parents as toddlers in a country where their color meant second-class citizenry. How many in those times even cared if the woodpecker vanished from existence? If my grandmother’s biblical mantra is true—“Faith without works is dead”—then in ornithology, a “specimen” is required for any faith in a sighting to be bona fide. Not one has been provided. read more

IMAGE: Renee Ruin