Bayou with a View

Searching for a ghost in the swamps of Arkansas

by Tim Gallagher

You never know when you get up in the morning what earthshaking 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 white feathers of its lower back, perhaps from going in and out of a roost hole or nest.

When he got home a few days later, Gene posted a report about his float trip on a canoe club list-serve and 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 called him, and we spoke for about an hour. His sighting sounded better than a lot of the decadesold reports I'd 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 was what he had seen. What struck me most about his description was the way he said the bird seemed almost cartoonlike 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 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 south again, for the second time in a month.

It was bad when Bobby and I first started canoeing down Bayou de View--real bad. Without any preparation, we clambered down below the overpass, loaded up the canoe--which Gene had borrowed for us from his parents--and pushed off into the lattebrown river flowing into the swamp. I sat in front and Bobby in the stern, with all of our equipment piled high between us. I'd had some fairly recent experience canoeing in the Adirondacks with my kids, and I had floated to falcon nests in Canada and other far-northern places in the past, but I was rusty. Bobby hadn't touched a canoe since he was 12--and it showed. It was a real grind hauling ourselves through that morass, at times practically clawing our way down the bayou, scrambling up and over logs and cypress knees or blasting through little chutes where the water pushed together to form a swift-moving stretch. This is where you're in danger of flipping over. You bump into a submerged log or root, then overreact to compensate, and there you go, your canoe has flipped over and all your gear and supplies are bobbing downstream as you lie submerged with brown swamp water rushing into your mouth. Blech!

On that first day, it seemed like whenever we found ourselves rushing headlong into a treacherous area, Bobby and I couldn't seem to coordinate our movements to avoid the hazards. I'd point the canoe toward the one open passage I could see ahead, but Bobby would inevitably steer the stern in the other direction, and we'd wind up blasting sideways into the teeth of disaster. It was the wildest roller coaster ride I've ever been on. Somehow we managed not to swamp the canoe, but a couple of times I jumped overboard and had to horse the canoe in a different direction. Luckily I was wearing chest-waders. Unluckily, sometimes the water was deeper than the top of my waders, and the water came flooding inside.

Bayou de View is a magical place, where wildlife abounds. As we canoed through the endless swamp, Wood Ducks and flocks of Mallards would burst from the water around us. Herds of white-tailed deer, snorting a loud warning, would splash off across the shallow areas at the edge of the woods. We saw beavers swim past. We saw otters at play. The loud calls of Barred Owls and Great Horned Owls echoed through the dimly lit recesses of the swamp, even at midday. But most impressive were the woodpeckers. Everywhere we turned, we saw Pileated, Red-bellied, Red-headed, and Downy woodpeckers, plus a few Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. It excited us to remember Jim Tanner's words about how the woods in Louisiana's Singer Tract--where he had studied ivory-bills as a Cornell graduate student in the late 1930s (see "A Forest Alive," page 36)--had the most woodpeckers he'd ever seen. This bayou had the same feel. Although on the first day we hadn't seen any of the huge trees that Gene had described, we had passed some large cypress stumps, remnants of the logging done in the 1800s. And it seemed like there were trees in every state of decomposition, ranging from those with just a few dying limbs to those that had already tumbled to the swamp floor and were rotting away to nothing. It was perfect for woodpeckers, with lots of food and dead trunks and limbs in which to forage and dig roost and nest holes.

It was great waking up in the swamp the next morning. Bobby made his classic swamp breakfast-- Dinty Moore stew in special waterproof packages that you could boil. He would put three or four of them at a time into a bubbling cauldron of brown swamp water, completely unfit for human consumption, reasoning that the water couldn't get through to the stew. Of course, you'd never know if it did, because the stew is about the same color as the water. Gene said that the last time he was here, he'd run short of drinking water and had pulled out his special survival water purification straw. It had clogged up after a few quick slurps.

On the second day of our trip down the bayou, we passed an area where a long-abandoned railroad trestle--probably built shortly after the Civil War--cut through the trees. The rails and even the connecting rail bed were long gone, leaving only the stout wooden posts rising up from the swamp water. We were starting to feel like we were really out in the wilderness, far from civilization. We'd been clawing our way along all morning, and it was tough. Bobby and I tried our best to keep up with Gene, but his kayak was much lighter and more maneuverable than our canoe. He could slip easily through places that presented impossible barriers to Bobby and me: cypress knees, log jams, tangles of brush and debris. We often had to back up a long way and try a different route, fighting the current back upstream and weaving our way around obstacles.

It was an amazing experience spending time with Gene. He's a remarkable outdoorsman and has spent his entire life doing things like this: going out for days or weeks at a time hiking, backpacking, horse-packing, or kayaking in areas as close to wilderness as he could find. He used to lead kayak tours in Baja California, paddling out among the gray whales. He now owns a farm with a lot of acreage in the mountains near Hot Springs, Arkansas, and leads horseback tours. Grizzled and bearded with receding red hair and crow's feet etched deeply into his weathered face, he looks older than his 48 years. He has a deep, resonant voice and a slow delivery. He's at his best threading his way silently through the bayou. I'll never forget watching him moving stealthily in his kayak. He would always range 100 feet or more in front of us, pulling into little hiding places and sitting silently--watching, waiting for something to happen. Gene's patience was boundless, and he had such a low profile in the kayak, he didn't look human. If anything, animals seemed curious when they saw him. We'd come along behind him in our canoe and watch Wood Ducks, beavers, and otters flush from just a few yards in front of him. I had a feeling he'd much rather be out there alone, but he so wanted someone to confirm his sighting, he put up with us.

Just as we were thinking what a wild place Bayou de View is, we started to hear the roar of highway traffic less than a mile downstream. As we approached the bridge where the road crossed the bayou, the din of trucks was almost unbearable. Bobby told me that whenever he had looked down on canoeists like this while he was driving past on a highway, he always envied the people. He wished he could be down there instead of driving. And now here he was, one of the lucky canoe people. The only problem was that it was now a good hour past noon, and he hadn't eaten so much as a Snickers bar since breakfast.

"Man, we gotta stop soon," said Bobby. "I'm starving to death." Looking around, I couldn't see any dry spots. The woods up and down the bayou in this area were inundated with water. Gene said he remembered some places downstream, a little past the highway, where we could stop for lunch. I said that was fine with me. Bobby didn't seem too happy, but we continued on.

We paddled the length of the narrow lake south of the highway and then turned right into a narrower channel leading through the trees. Gene had gone well ahead of us and was going to wait for us there. He said if it seemed like we might get lost, he'd come back and find us.

As we paddled through the bayou, we talked and joked about floating through the trackless swamp. Then Bobby started to grouse that we were being way too noisy to see any ivory-bills.

"We don't need to worry about that," I said. "The road's so loud, they'll never hear us coming. And who knows, maybe Gene'll chase one back to us."

And then it happened. Less than 70 feet away, a large black-and-white bird that had been flying up an offshoot of the bayou to the right came out into the sunshine and flew across the open stretch of water right in front of us. It started to bank, giving us a superb view of its back and both wings for a moment as it pulled up like it was going to land on a tree trunk. "Look at all the white on its wings," I yelled. Hearing my voice, it veered away from the tree and continued to fly to the left. We both cried out simultaneously, "Ivory-bill!"

Bobby reached for his camcorder while I tried to keep track of the bird. I kept pointing as it flew. I'm sure it landed on a tree trunk about 50 feet away because I lost it for about three seconds, then I had it again, moving in a straight line through the woods, going up the bayou for another 50 or 60 feet, then landing again. It must have hitched around the trunk each time, because I couldn't see it. When we were almost to shore, I caught another glimpse of it flying at the same altitude in the middle of the woods. I lost it after about 10 feet. We clambered ashore, dragging the canoe onto the mud, and took off after the ivory-bill, our camcorders running. We staggered through boot-sucking muck and mire, over fallen trees and through tangled roots and branches. It was impossible to move quietly. We didn't see anything.

We walked back to the canoe about 15 minutes later, just as Gene was paddling to shore, looking for us. I glanced at my watch. It was 1:30 on February 27, 2004. I said to Bobby that we should sit down separately right away and jot down our field notes, before we had a chance to talk and influence each other. At least we'd have some kind of documentary evidence, even if we couldn't get a photograph.

My first impressions of the bird were that it was definitely a woodpecker and looked larger than a crow. I know it had white on the trailing edge of the wing, because that's what I honed in on when I mentally evaluated the bird. The white was much whiter than I thought it would be and the black much blacker--coal black, beautiful. I didn't notice any red on the bird, and I did not have a distinct impression of the bill, because my total focus had been first on the wing pattern and then on keeping track of the bird. This is a bird that no knowledgeable person could have misidentified. It was definitely not a Pileated Woodpecker. It looked completely different. And we'd been seeing dozens of pileateds and pointing them out right and left, commenting on their field marks and other characteristics, constantly asking ourselves whether we could ever possibly mistake this bird for an ivory-bill. No way. This was a different animal.

A short time after he finished writing up his field notes, Bobby sat down on a fallen log in the swamp and started sobbing. "I saw an ivory-bill," he said. "I saw an ivory-bill." Gene and I looked away, too choked with emotion to speak. I saved my tears for a few days later as I was driving home from the airport.

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"A Bayou with a View" is an excerpt from Tim Gallagher's latest book, The Grail Bird (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which chronicles his search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and the bird's recent rediscovery in eastern Arkansas.

 

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Jennifer Smith, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-2497. email: jls39@cornell.edu