Jukebox In My Head

Extinction is final. Or maybe not. Consider the ivory-billed woodpecker. Like the grizzly bear in the Southern Rockies, the ivory-bill, which once inhabited lowlands and deep forests across the Southeastern coastal plain, has been considered a vanished species for several decades.

So the announcement in 2005 of a sighting by a couple of respected birders in 2004 followed by a short video taken in the same Arkansas swamp that year of an apparent ivory-bill in flight authenticated by the prestigious Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology induced a kind of giddy euphoria among those who have held out hope against hope that America's largest woodpecker might have actually escaped the noose of extinction. It became international news.

The tale of the recent sightings is recounted in a 2006 book, The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Author Tim Gallagher, an editor at the Cornell Lab, and fellow birder Bobby Harrison were following up on what they felt was a credible IBWO sighting by Arkansan Gene Sparling in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in February 2004. Gallagher was working on an ivory-bill book.

Two months later, they watched a bird they identified as an ivory-bill fly over their canoe in the same area where Sparling saw his bird. That sighting was followed by a ten-second video from birder David Luneau's canoe-mounted camera in the same general area. Suddenly Gallagher had the perfect ending to his ivory-bill book.

Some felt it was too perfect, and not everyone in birding circles greeted the news with as much enthusiasm as Cornell, which staked its considerable ornithological reputation on the Gallagher/Harrison sighting and Luneau film. The grainy, four-second video has been analyzed almost as carefully as the Zapruder JFK assassination clip. Cornell even went back to the site and built models of the wings flapping to help prove its point.

David Sibley, noted illustrator and publisher of the popular bird guidebooks that bear his name, did his own study of the Luneau footage and published his results in a recent Science magazine. His conclusion: It's a pileated woodpecker, a slightly smaller species prominent in the area easily mistaken for an ivory-bill by any but the most trained eye.

And though Jerome Jackson, the foremost living researcher of ivory-bills whose own book, In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, preceded Gallagher's by a year, doesn't discount that a few ivory-bills might still inhabit some remote lowland in Florida, or Louisiana, or even Arkansas, he, too, along with other bird enthusiasts, doubts the veracity of the Cornell video analysis.

Another prominent dissenter is Tom Nelson, who produces Ivory-Bill Skeptic. Nelson includes daily updates and links to everything written about ivory-bills, a must-read for anybody interested in the current scrap.

The expensive, systematic three-year search in the White River refuge is finishing its third season, and except for some anecdotal sightings by researchers, there has been no actual evidence forthcoming to prove the ivory-bill's existence. The many recordings of the distinctive ivory-bill kent call are inconclusive at best.

Listening to a real ivory bill recorded in Texas’s Singer Tract in 1935 gives us a taste of why the ivory bill story sticks with us, why we want to believe it might still be alive. Its 46 seconds sound magical and mystical -- like primitive jazz played on a miniature trumpet and a log. Likewise, the photos on the same page evoke something lost.

An Auburn University team led by ornithology professor Geoff Hill said last year that it has been documenting sightings, capturing audio evidence and measuring and photographing nest cavities since 2005 in the Choctawhatchee river in the Florida panhandle. Several people in the study group claim multiple sightings of birds with ivory-bill markings.

"I'm looking out my bedroom window in Clearwater right now," a reader told the St. Petersburg Times in March. "There's one of those woodpeckers 12 feet away." After 60 years, suddenly everybody is seeing ivory-bills. That's not a good sign.

I read Gallagher and Jackson's books with great enthusiasm in the spring of 2006, but since then, the lack of evidence beyond murky recordings of woodland sounds and tales of cameras that wouldn't work has cooled any fervor about rediscovery I might have had. The paucity of real evidence is overwhelmingly against the bird’s rediscovery.

Not that it hasn't been worth the study. The birds’ story is so sad and strangely compelling. A woodpecker the size of a crow with a voice that sounded like a toy trumpet and a powerful rapping technique that echoed through the forest, ivory-bills lived on the beetles and larvae beneath the bark of fallen trees. They traveled far to forage and built roosts 40 feet up in sweetgum, oak and other trees in lowlands and swamps mostly inhospitable to any but the most fanatical human beings. As In Search of the Ivory-Bill Woodpecker points out, the ivory-bill was apparently never really bountiful.

Most of the blame for the bird's extinction is laid at the feet of whites, who clear-cut the immense forests of the Southeast with a particularly zealous efficiency. But the arrival of Europeans only hastened a process set in motion by Native Americans, who plundered the birds' colorful plumage for ornamentation, totems and trade items. Ivory-bill reproduction plummeted as the price of their eggs rose among early collectors.

After Europeans arrived, swamps were drained, forests of old-growth timber were cut, churning up ancient ivory-bill habitat and spitting it back out as farmland. Nobody seemed to care. "In the last years of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century, many observers commented on the ivory bill's imminent demise," Jackson writes. "Yet nothing was done to help the species."

Though they sit on opposite sides of the current ivory-bill rediscovery fence, Gallagher and Jackson have much in common; each has spent decades sifting through historical evidence, talking with people who saw the birds and exploring areas where ivory-bills were once seen, and their books are rich with ivory-bill lore.

Both pay tribute to and borrow liberally from James T. Tanner's The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, the only scientific study, first published in 1942 for the Audubon Society, is still in print. During two trips to the Singer Tract in Texas, Tanner came back with detailed information, including photos and a short video, on ivory-bill habits, behavior, reproduction, feeding habits and ecology.

Between Tanner, Gallagher and Jackson's books, you are privy to pretty much all the accumulated human knowledge and photos of a bird so striking that it was called the "Lord God Bird" or "Good God Bird" because that's what people said as they watched it pass over. Each chronicles a sad tale of extinction from a variety of causes, biological, ecological, political, agricultural, environmental and cultural.

So did Gallagher and Harrison really see an ivory-bill? Does Luneau's film show an icon of extinction come to life ? Can Hicks have seen an extinct bird more than 20 times?

The lust to find something again that has disappeared from the earth is hard-wired into our psyche. All birders, even skeptics like Tom Nelson, want the ivory-bill to be found. But only if it is based on actual proof, and unless you unequivocally believe the Luneau video and trust Cornell, we just don't have that now.

At least we have the books. Gallagher and Jackson, like Tanner before them, share the insatiable curiosity and obsession of the fanatic, wading in latte-colored water that seeps above their waders, shivering in chilly, wet sleeping bags and enduring chiggers, mosquitoes and water moccasins in pursuit of those ten seconds of ecstasy. That curiosity and obsession inform these books, making the ivory-bills story real for those of us who were never able to see one.

Reading their words, it is easy to conjure the ivory-bill of the imagination, roosting high in the sweetgum, rooting for grubs deep in the timber, sounding its trumpet, blissfully unaware of all around and below.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Billie & I celebrated our birthdays by spending a couple of days last week with the sandhill cranes on their migration north. We had never done it before, but we will do it again. Here is Part Two of my account.

Monte Vista, Colorado

Excited by last night's expedition, Billie is up at 5:30, and we're on the road about an hour later for the refuge, getting there about half an hour before actual dawn. We pull off the road at a turnout looking east just north of Road 8. You can see where we were last night across the field.

The red light just before sunrise over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains illuminates the cranes, silhouettes standing silently in water turned blood-red by the coming light. It is a gorgeous sight. As actual dawn approaches and waves of birds begin to take flight again, that peculiar energy level begins crackling. By 7:20, all 50 birds are gone, off in search of another field to pick through today.

Fossil records date cranes back millions of years, long enough to say it is the oldest-known surviving bird species. After that long, things certainly changed for the birds after irrigation ditches were built and farming in the valley became a reality. Birds destroyed crops and bird numbers steadily declined, leading to the creation of Monte Vista Refuge in 1952 and nearby Alamosa National Refuge on the Rio Grande ten years later.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife aggressively manages the wetlands refuge and the area around it, mostly through water-diversion rights, trying to keep a subtle balance between bird and landowner needs.

"Because of the importance of water to this region, water management on Monte Vista NWR is particularly important," reads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife website. "Many irrigation canals built during the 1880s provide water to Monte Vista NWR and other valley water users. Water levels can be manipulated to provide birds with adequate aquatic vegetation for food and escape cover. To provide much of the wetland habitat on both refuges, water is distributed and manipulated by refuge staff through an extensive system of ditches, water control structures, dikes, and levees."

I am forever skeptical of human efforts to control nature - our track record is atrocious bordering on lunatic -- but the balance appears to be working here for the time being. Aubudon.org wrote in 2001: "Researchers have surveyed 171 miles of waterfowl nesting transects at the refuge complex two to three times a year since 1965. San Luis Valley and refuge-wide crane counts are conducted each spring and fall at peak migration."

After breakfast in town, we're back in the refuge; we can't get enough of these birds. There are a couple of dirt roads in the refuge to explore. We find a few ducks in the wetlands on the road behind the headquarters buildings. We slowly drive a couple miles of dirt road farther east and watch a large hawk in a grove of trees for awhile; god, he looked lonely out there on his perch.

A couple of cars have pulled over up the road, so we join them and discover a large group of cranes in the high grass south of the road, their red heads bobbing up and down, their bodies occasionally rising vertically into the dance. It's a nice way to see the birds interacting and feeding. Listen to the birds here.

These cranes are heading north. Many will nest in Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge in southern Idaho; others will settle in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Canada. Some are coming from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico south of Santa Fe, others from as far away as northern Mexico.

The whole spectacle most resembles a crane Woodstock or a Burning Man festival. The birds love the wheat, barley and other grains in the fields around here, and apparently they bond here as well. Sandhill cranes bond for life with their mates, something I try to remember whenever we see two cranes flying together.

On our way out, we stop next to a bird perched on a telephone line singing a very distinctive song. We brought some Johnny Cash discs on the trip, and one contained his version of an old favorite, "Wichita Lineman," and the Jukebox in my Head is playing, in Cash's primordial voice, "I hear you singing through the wire." Every thirty seconds or so, its song bursts and echoes through the rental car. Our bird book isn't very intuitive, and we don't figure out until later that it is the western meadowlark.

Watching all this is so easy. With a decent pair of binoculars, you can see a lot, and we know enough to stop when we see a few cars parked along the side of the road and people with cameras and binoculars. All the serious activity comes at two distinct times, the half hour around either end of sunrise and sunset, when the birds are taking off and landing.

And though we are here mid-week just a few days after the Crane Festival in Monte Vista, there are just a few other crane-watching cars in the entire refuge.

Not much to do in the daytime unless you want to see the Jack Dempsey Museum in Manassas, the Alligator Farm north of Alamosa or the Sand Dunes another thirty minutes from Alamosa. Pagosa Hot Springs is an hour over Wolf Creek Pass.

Wifi access has been exceptional and helpful. We have read a lot about the cranes. We are able to outline our travels in the refuge with Google maps, even zeroing in on the turnout where we saw all the birds last night.

Web information about birds is generally good. Most ornithological sites agree on crane particulars like size and wingspan, but there are some widely differing opinions about crane lifespans.

WildBirdsSuite: 20-25 years
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: 20 years
Cornell Lab of Ornithology: 20 years
National Geographic: 20
KildeerVirtualWetlandsPreserve: 18-24
IFWIS: 12-15 years
Everything.com: 7-20
Wildprairiestatepark: 12 years
Elmwood (Pa.) Park Zoo: 7 years
Animaldiversity: 7 years

Nobody disputes that the oldest crane ever documented in the wild died at 21.7 years, so the higher averages seem suspect. But who knows?

We got out to the refuge earlier than last night. As it was this morning, the wetlands on the road behind the headquarters buildings is bereft of cranes. So we head for the turnout where we saw so many birds last night. There are a few sandhills in front of us and a larger group much farther away.

The wind is up, and we decide to drive down the county road where we saw the meadowlark and some cranes in a field this morning.

Sure enough, the same group of cranes is spread out across the high grass. Getting out of the car, it's just us and the birds in the middle of the refuge. We again get a chance to see them doing the ritual dance, although just for very short periods of time. At one point, their heads bob up at the sound of a coyote howling, soon joined by a chorus of his braying brethren. Soon the birds’ heads are back in the grass; they know better than us that the howls come from far away, and they probably also are aware more birds are killed by high wires than coyotes, anyway.

By 7:15, cranes are once again screeching and leaving en masse; large lines are snaking off in all directions. A group of about 50 takes off a couple hundred yards south and heads directly for us. They separate right in front of us. We can hear the precision beating of their wings, tuned like fine engines. It is easy to see their necks stretched out straight, a very un-crane action -- all other cranes curve their necks when flying. One individual gets swept off-balance as it rises and bangs into the crane next to it.

Once again it is complete cacophony and energy for ten wonderful sunset minutes as flocks begin taking off. The excitement the birds show as they all get ready to take off, their stately majesty and the sounds they make as they start their nightly search for a wetlands is mightily contagious and seriously addictive. We will return to see these birds again.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 06:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Billie & I celebrated our birthdays, including my 60th, by spending a couple of days last week with the sandhill cranes on their migration north. We had never done it before, but we will do it again. Here is Part One of my account.

Monte Vista, Colorado

I always love the drive over the passes along U.S. Highway 285 that takes us from the west end of Denver and finally drops us into the northern edge and takes us along the western side of the San Luis Valley.

It is just a great ride: through Morrison; down steep Crow Hill into Bailey, from whence most commuter traffic blissfully fades and where officers are giving out tickets to those going too fast downhill; through the valley before climbing up and over Kenosha Pass (10,001 feet) into the plains of South Park, over Red Hill Pass (9993 feet) and into Fairplay, with the distant, mighty Mosquito Range peaks to the west; over Trout Creek Pass (9346 feet) and down to Antero Junction, with the stirring view of Mt. Princeton and the Collegiate Peaks; over Poncha Pass (9020 feet) into the broad alpine San Luis Valley, itself at about 7500 feet.

Though we have stayed overnight in South Fork not far from here for a lynx release and driven across the valley on Highway 285 several times, this is our first time actually spending a couple of days here.

The valley is about 100 miles long and half that distance wide. The Rio Grande's headwaters are near Creede in the mountains west of here, and it flows through the valley, sometimes digging deep gorges on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. On the eastern side is Great Sand Dunes National Park, which plays an interesting part in this valley's geology and history.

We are here to see sandhill cranes, about 20,000 of whom are gathering here for three to four weeks on their annual migration north from Mexico and New Mexico to their winter homes farther north. Our friend Kathy Kaiser has been coming down here for a few years, and her descriptions of the birds were enough to make this trip my sixtieth birthday celebration.

We are staying at the Best Western Movie Manor motel, a drive-in theater turned motel/drive-in theater. Yes, during the summer you can watch movies on a giant screen from a big picture window in each room. The motel forms the outer back circle around the Star, a working drive-in theater built by the owner, a local drive-in freak. We're staying in the Stephen Segal room, right next door to the Paul Newman room. There are a couple of somewhat cheesy paintings of movie stars in each room. At 69 bucks a night, it's a fun place to stay, now part of the Best Western chain.

After a quick nap, we dine at Kelloff's, the restaurant adjoining the motel, before we head out to the refuge. Only three tables have diners, and we tell JoEllen, our waitress, that we are here to see the cranes. A couple minutes later, a woman from Ft. Collins comes over and says they are going to see the cranes, too. She tells us that a good location today is Road 8.

The Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge begins about six miles south of town on state road 15, known locally as Gunbarrel Road, which runs north/south in the middle of town. (From the motel, it's a right at the second light.) Once past the outskirts of town, the landscape becomes familiar to any Midwesterner: flat expanses, wetlands and open spaces dotted with fields, now mostly brown with elms, walnuts and cottonwood trees sans leaves. A lot of brush and cover. Standing water in some fields. Small farms dot both sides of the road. A giant American flag hangs at one. The ruins of a once-elegant stone home, ringed by trees, its tall chimney still leaning precariously after a fire, is decaying back into the earth.

It reminds me of western Kansas during pheasant season -- with one exception. This great plain is enclosed on three sides by mountains. The mysterious and magnificent Sangre de Cristos come into view along Poncha Pass, their northern terminus, and form a long line of green trees and white peaks all the way to Santa Fe, if we were going that far.

The local landmark along the range is Blanca Peak, actually a series of peaks just north of La Veta Pass and south of the Great Sand Dunes, which are also easily visible from the whole valley. The western range isn't on the same scale here as the Sangres. However, the peaks represent the eastern end of the San Juan Mountains, and on the other side is the largest wilderness area in the state. Over Wolf Creek Pass, now embroiled in a nasty fight over a proposed 10,000-person village, is Pagosa Springs, Durango and Mesa Verde.

We get to Road 8 and turn east to a circular turn-out that faces north where a few cars have pulled in. We are immediately in the presence of a large group of birds. As we pan the glasses out along to the north, we see more, and more, and more birds, all cranes, stretched out to the north. My journalist quick-count says there must be a couple of hundred in front of us and four or five times as many more behind them. We spend some quality time watching them in our lenses.

Sandhill cranes (grus Canadensis) are large birds that stand three to four feet in height. Their bodies are evolutionary works of art. Their wings, which make up much of their body and can easily spread to seven feet, allow the birds to take off and land with elegant ease and engage in their ritual mating dance.

The first thing you notice is the chatter, a cacophony of cranespeak: the low, almost frog-like contact call, the high-pitched, trilling unison songs and insistent guard calls quickly obliterate the senses. (Later, we find a website that has recordings of the different sounds and explains why researchers think they are used - I played the unison call as loud as my laptop can go as an alarm clock to wake Billie up on Friday.)

To see cranes and hear their distinctive sounds, click to this page and scroll down to vocalizations.

Besides the clatter, birds are jumping lightly up and down, wings fluttering. Mostly though, the birds are pecking at the ground with their graceful, powerful bills, another well-evolved feature that has kept cranes around here for millions of years.

Like humans and bears, cranes are omnivores, and they eat grain, insects, grubs, snakes or anything else that they find in their endless poking. Cranelife revolves around eating and socializing all day and roosting together in shallow water.

Their graceful, nimble legs and powerful, three-pronged toes are agile enough to traverse tall prairie grasses and mucky ponds and muddy banks with equal aplomb. Watching them carefully pick their way in water or on land is kind of magical.

Plumage varies from brownish to gray and a rusty color, the same shades that distinguish the fields and vegetation this time of year, and their long necks and heads are topped with a distinguishing and prominent red crest. We observe some ritual dancing. I saw one leave the ground and stick its head straight up to the sky in wild abandon that reminded me of a photo of a hippie at a Acid Test in 1968.

A woman stops by and tells us to turn our binoculars to the north. Wispy clouds or trails of smoke can be seen over the white peaks. Soon the wisps become snaking, long lines of cranes and finally flocks of birds settling into marshes around us. It's an optical illusion (the birds are only a couple of miles away at most, the mountains at least 60 miles), but when I first see that they are bird flocks in the binoculars, I keep thinking they are actually coming over the mountains! And they keep coming.

As sunset nears, about 7:10, flocks begin to rise all over the refuge and sweep around us. As they take flight, they make this high-pitched call, as if urging the ones on the ground to join them. You can sense the energy building as the group in front of us watch their airborne compadres. Soon, birds in front of us start to take off in small groups, their wings flapping, a blur of kinetic energy. (Type “sandhill crane” into Google Images to see cranes and crane behaviors.)

A couple of times, through the crane cacophony, I hear a "who" sound behind us. I remember that Anne told us to look for owls here, but I can't make out anything in the brown brush and tree limbs. I hear it a couple of times before noticing that another guy has his binocs trained into the trees.

I join him, and we spend some time looking at the largest Great Horned Owl I have ever seen. The giant bird flies to another perch, which lets us look up at it sitting on a branch about thirty feet above us. I am not very experienced at owl watching, but this would appear to be a serious predator; it looks large enough to carry off a coyote or a medium-sized dog. Its two tufts are prominent above its ears. Whew!

Posted by Leland Rucker at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)