Back to the Bayou

A place where ivory-bills and sublime moments live on

By Tim Gallagher

May 25, 2005: As we canoe deeper into the bayou, I am struck most by how dim the light is, even at midday. It's a different world here--slower somehow, the air thick, warm, and moist. Rounding the bend, I see a cottonmouth coiled loosely atop a nearby log, just above water level. It doesn't even raise its head to peer at us as we float past.

It's good to be here, good to be back in the swamp. This is my first time here since the big announcement on April 28, 2005, when we stood before an auditorium at the Department of the Interior and told the world that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker still lives. In some ways, it was anticlimactic. For Bobby Harrison and me the big moment had taken place some 14 months earlier when an unmistakable ivory-bill flew past at close range in front of our canoe. I've replayed that memory a thousand times in my mind, but the thought still sends shivers up and down my spine.

Tim Gallagher stands in front of the stretch of bayou where he and Bobby Harrison saw an ivory-bill on February 27, 2004.

Photo by Bobby Harrison

And now Bobby and I are floating together again down the same stretch of bayou. Up ahead I see the familiar fallen cypress and the bent tupelo that the huge woodpecker flew past, and it all clicks into place. Of course, it's much different now. The trees are leafed out--it was winter when we saw the ivory-bill--and the water level is much lower today, but I know I'll always recognize this place. I can close my eyes anytime and see it.

As we move closer to the exact spot where the bird flew over, Bobby turns the stern of the canoe and we paddle toward the side. We step out as we did on February 27, 2004, and start walking through the mud and over fallen limbs, but we don't have the sense of urgency we had then. We're just quietly enjoying the swamp--having a "sublime moment," as Gene Sparling would say.

I wish Gene were here now. His sighting, just two weeks before ours, was what brought us to this lonely bayou. And somehow, miraculously, it had all panned out; we had seen an ivory-bill. We had checked so many credible sightings during the past few years. This had been the third report we'd checked in Arkansas alone. What were the odds that you could actually go to a place where someone had seen an ivory-bill and see it yourself? Not very good. Even Gene has not seen an ivory-bill since his first glimpse.

After taking a few pictures of each other standing where we saw the ivory-bill, we load up the canoe and head downstream toward a raised area of land on the east side of the bayou where we always camped during our first season here. This swamp is still such a magical place to me, and I know it always will be.

Tim Gallagher is editor-in-chief of Living Bird. He was one of the first three people to see the ivory-bill in Arkansas and is author of The Grail Bird (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which chronicles his search for the bird across the South and its rediscovery in February 2004.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu