The View From Sapsucker Woods

John W. Fitzpatrick

Sixty-seven years ago, Arthur Allen - founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology - sat in a northern Louisiana swamp forest and trained binoculars on two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers at their nest. Accompanying Allen were the Lab's codirector, Peter Paul Kellogg, and a Cornell student, James Tanner. To this day, their haunting photographs and remarkable recordings from the Singer Tract forest remain the last indisputable evidence of the species in North America.

Tanner returned to the Singer Tract to conduct the definitive study of these magnificent birds.* In 1938, four pairs of ivory-bills occupied the Singer Tract, a number that Tanner suspected was inflated by immigration from surrounding forests as they were felled. By 1941, the 300-square-mile Singer Tract itself was falling to the timber-saw, and only three birds remained. By the time a regenerating remnant was preserved as the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge in 1980, the species was long gone. Despite scattered reports from Louisiana to Florida ever since, no definitive proof exists that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers persisted beyond the doomed birds studied by Tanner.

How could we do this? Today's renewed interest in the Ivory-billed Woodpecker should kindle much more than dim hopes of a dramatic rediscovery. Whether or not the bird still exists (odds are strongly against it), the ivory-billed story demands our full attention as a vivid symbol of the most comprehensive conservation failure of 20th-century America. By 1900, millions of acres of virgin pine and hardwood still existed in the southeastern United States. Who could have predicted that in our individual, corporate, and public lusts for materials and revenue, we would lack the foresight or collective will to save even a single tract of this primary forest? Quite simply, we cut it all.

For years, I've lived with frustration about this inexcusable mistake. Now, I've even wept about it along the banks of a Louisiana bayou. With a hand resting on a four-foot-diameter water oak trunk, my mind flooded with black-and-white images of men standing at the base of trees nearly four times as wide. I'll never see such a sight. Nor will my children. Nor will theirs. The 20th-century frenzy consumed trees that had been alive since before Columbus arrived. Will anyone ever be allowed to see such a forest again?

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker existed because forests were vast and the trees immense. By taking literally every stand of big trees, we drained the woodpecker's lifeblood. Today in a few places, the forest regenerates and even faintly recalls the forest primeval. If the Ivory-billed Woodpecker did survive the bottleneck of our thoughtless, century-long massacre, then it could flourish again, for there are places like the Pearl River where conditions are steadily improving. But they still have a long way to go … and they are still at our mercy.

If the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is extinct, we should nevertheless vow to resurrect its ageless habitat of giants as a monument to that landscape's greatest bird, and allow a generation of Americans far distant from our own to walk under those forests once again.

*Tanner, J. T. 1942. Research Report Number 1 of the National Audubon Society. New York: National Audubon Society.

Suggested citation: Fitzpatrick, John W., The View From Sapsucker Woods. Birdscope, newsletter of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Spring 2002. <www.birds.cornell.edu>