42

IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER

Memoriesfrom the Singer TractMemoriesfrom the Singer TractMemoriesfrom the Singer Tract

In the pre-dawn hours of 19 December 1940, James T. Tanner drove his

1939 Chevy along Sharkey Road in the Singer Tract of northeastern

Louisiana. This was one of the last bottomland hardwood forests in the

South, and, even after scouring 45 sites and traveling 45,000 miles in search

of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, this was the only place he could find them. Jim

had spent the preceding three years studying the colony here, and he wanted

to show the birds to his fiancée, Nancy Burnham Sheedy.

When the couple arrived at John’s Bayou, Jim led Nancy into the woods. Theyslogged through the winter mud, hefted themselves over bulky logs, and shred them-selves through briars until Jim found a good place to wait for the woodpeckers.

In the darkness, Barred Owls called, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?”At sunrise Brown Thrashers, White-breasted Nuthatches, White-throated Spar-rows, and Carolina Wrens called. Then woodpeckers rapped and called.

“Finally, after the sun came up, we heard the Ivory-bill; but we didn’t see it,”Nancy, now 89, recalls.

They spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon searching for thatbird. But they never found it. However, Jim did find a fresh roost hole—a prom-ising sign of an Ivory-bill. The couple decided to return to nearby Tallulah and re-visit the forest the next morning before sunrise.

In the darkness of the next dawn, they repeated their muddy trek. Before thesun rose, they seated themselves thirty feet from the auspicious tree.

“We saw the male come out, go to the top of the tree, preen and stretch, andthen BAM bam,” Nancy says. She remembers that the woodpecker’s second bamstruck so quickly that it was more like an echo of the first than a bam all its own.

“The male was so gorgeous,” she recalls. After he called, the female, in responseto her mate’s summons, appeared from her roost hole in a nearby tree.

“They sort of cooed and gooed a little,” Nancy says of the communication be-tween the birds. She says their kent kent sounded as if it were a loud Red-breast-ed Nuthatch. After the two massive woodpeckers communed, they flew through

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Frank J. Severson7014 Stope Court

Placerville, California 95667

frankseverson@yahoo.com

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is based on interviews conducted in person and by telephone in January 2004.

Nancy Tanner. © Frank J. Severson.

To learn more about the painting, p. 43 (opposite), along with all of the other Ray Nelson artwork thatappears in this issue, please visit the ABA website <aba.org/pubs/birding/archives/vol39no2p43w1.pdf>.

Acrylic on Masonite by© Ray Nelson.

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the woods with the direct fast flight of a Northern Pin-tail. “Jim called them wooden wings, because it sound-ed like wood banging against the wind.”

“Stay there,” Jim said. He bolted after the birds.Nancy was alone in the primal forest. Alligators filled

bayous. Cougars hunted deer. And Spanish mosscloaked gargantuan cypress trees. She wondered whatshe would do if Jim failed to return.

During the hours that passed, Winter Wrens, WoodDucks, and a Wild Turkey entertained her. “Then I sawsomething as dark and tall as a horse,” she recalls. “I re-alized it was a wolf on top of a log. I thought, If I am reallucky, maybe I’ll see a panther and a bear and a bobcat.”

During their one-week visit in 1940, the Tannersspent every day in the tract and found a total of fiveIvory-bills. One was the legendary Sonny Boy [see p.29], a male Jim had banded in 1938 after the fledglinghad fluttered in terror from its nest hole upon seeing Jimstare in at it. Jim used the opportunity to slip on a legband. The Tanners also found a mated pair, their young,and another male.

The next December, in 1941, the Tanners spent twoweeks scouring the Singer Tract. They couldn’t find anymales and found only two females; one was a yearlingand the other was her mother.

The reason for the population reduction wasn’t diffi-cult to ascertain. Logging had intensified in the Singer

Tract. As the trees fell, so did the number of Ivory-bills.In the 1930s, the National Audubon Society wanted to

save the big woodpeckers. But they needed to knowmore about the Ivory-bills, what they required to sur-vive. Audubon granted Jim Tanner a fellowship to studythe species. For three years, he lived among the Ivory-bills. He documented what they ate, what trees theyroosted in, and what habitat they preferred. He drew uphis observations in a dissertation that earned him a doc-torate in ornithology from Cornell.

He found that Ivory-bills favored the larvae of the kindsof beetles that lay their eggs only under the bark of deadand dying trees in southern bottomland hardwoodforests. They used their bills like levers, wedged awaychunks of bark, and nibbled up the uncovered larvae. Butdead and dying trees are common only in large stands ofmature woods. As they disappeared, so did the nestingsites for the larvae and the Ivory-bills that ate them.

The Singer Sewing Machine Company owned theSinger Tract. They had owned forests then so they couldharvest timber to make wooden cabinets for theirsewing machines. But the company had never cut in theSinger Tract. In fact, they had barred logging there, andwardens patrolled the area. But Singer sold the forest tothe Chicago Mill and Lumber Company in 1937. Thisnew owner, with its focus on lumber sales, unleashedthe saws. They felled every tree that had market value.What had been, only a few years before, one of the lastvirgin bottomland forests in the South—and the onlyone where Jim had seen Ivory-bills—was transformedinto soybean fields and slash.

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The Ivory-bill wasn’t the only animal eradicated fromthe tract. Farmers and ranchers perceived cougars andwolves as a threat to livestock and people, and theysnared and shot all of them.

D. D. Arnold, now 84, grew up in Warsaw, Louisiana,only a few miles from the Singer Tract. Although therewere “No Trespassing” signs and wardens, D. D. used tosneak in to hunt deer, turkeys, raccoons, and squir-rels—anything that he and his family could eat.

“We went to the grocery store to buy coffee and sug-ar,” he remembers. “But you didn’t buy much of whatyou eat, because you killed it out in the woods.”

Sometimes, while he was hunting, he’d see the Ivory-bills. “Sometimes you’d see one flyin’ from tree to tree.But I wasn’t too interested in him, ’cause I wasn’t fixin’to kill him and eat him.”

He saw the Ivory-bills until he enlisted in the Army in

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Although there was considerable interest at the time in protecting Louisiana’s SingerTract, the lure of big timber would prove simply too great. Photograph courtesy of©Hermione Museum, Tallulah, Louisiana.

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1942. “When I come back (in1947), there wasn’t none left; theydone cut the timber.”

He recalls when wolves andcougars and Ivory-bills roamedthe Singer Tract. He remembersthe last wolf he saw, a black-col-ored one, caught in a leg traparound 1950. “He’d been in therefor several days...I got down offmy horse, got me a stick, andknocked him in the head, andthrow’d him, trap and all, out inthe thicket.”

D. D. remembers shooting a panther with a .22-caliberrifle on the dummy line—a secondary train track—inthe late 1930s “because it was there, and I was.”

He saw his last panther in the tract in the early 1950safter returning on Sharkey Road from the grain elevatorin Tallulah, where he had dropped off a load of beans.

These days, D. D. drives tractors and cleans up aroundthe Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge—what usedto be the Singer Tract—which is now open to hunters,birders, and other visitors.

At the refuge, you can stand in many of the sameplaces where the Tanners and others stood. But youwould not see what the Tanners and their contempo-raries saw more than 65 years ago. There are saw pal-metto forests and Spanish moss draping trees; and thereare water tupelo, cypress, and sweet gum; and there arePileated Woodpeckers, deer, and bear. But there is alsoa noisy silence, one that echoes the powerful missingvoices: the vanished virgin stands of decades ago, andthe banished calls of wolves, cougars, and Ivory-bills.

The South still has Pileated Woodpeckers, and so domany other parts of the country; but the Ivory-bill—afterthe extinction of the Imperial Woodpecker in Mexico—was the largest woodpecker in North America. It was upto 20 inches long, had a 31-inch wingspan, and couldweigh more than a pound-and-a-quarter. The Ivory-billwas up to 15 percent longer, had a wingspan almost 15percent wider, and could weigh 80% more than the Pileat-ed. The difference between the two birds was profound.

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Roger Tory Peterson was the twentieth century’s JohnJames Audubon. During his lifetime, Peterson saw twoIvory-bills, and he saw them both in the Singer Tract in1942. He went there then because he wanted to see thembefore they vanished forever.

More than forty years later and thousands of bird ex-periences after he saw the Ivory-bills, he wrote in his fa-mous Birds Over America, “This was no puny Pileated;this was a whacking big bird...” He went on to write, ina reminiscence that Nancy Tanner recently came across,“What then was my most exciting bird experience?Without question it involved the Ivory-billed Wood-pecker...”

The Singer Tract did not fall without protest. Jim Tan-ner, the National Audubon Society, the governors ofLouisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, theRoosevelt administration, and several federal agenciesobjected. Louisiana even offered to buy $200,000 worthof the forest as a preserve for the remaining Ivory-bills.But the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company refused theoffer and logged without restraint.

Don Eckelberry was a wildlife artist with the AudubonSociety. He is cited as the last naturalist to have seen anIvory-bill in the Singer Tract. He sketched that lastknown bird during two weeks in April 1944 at John’sBayou, one of the places where Tanner had studiedthem. Although Eckelberry died six years ago, there

The death knell for the Singer Tract was the 1937 transfer of the property from the Singer Sewing Machine Company,which had actually barred logging at the site, to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. Photograph courtesy of© Hermione Museum, Tallulah, Louisiana.

Once the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company began operations at the SingerTract, the site was quickly cleared of old-growth timber. Photograph courtesyof© Hermione Museum, Tallulah, Louisiana.

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were two boys who had tagged along with him one day,and they remember their experience.

Bill Fought and Bob Faught—a paperwork snafu atbirth created the different spellings of their familynames—were 14 and 9, respectively, in 1944. Their dadworked as a locomotive engineer for the Chicago Milland Lumber Company. The family lived at the loggingcamp, which had homes, machine shops, a boardinghouse, a commissary, car shops, and a water tank alongSharkey Road. The boys were playing at the camp oneApril day, when Jessie Laird, a game warden with theLouisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, whopatrolled the Singer Tract, pulled up in his Jeep. He in-troduced the boys to his passenger, Don Eckelberry,who was 23 at the time. Eckelberry wore a western-styleoutfit, whipcord riding pants, and tall lace-up ridingboots. Jessie said Mr. Eckelberry was on his way to seethe Ivory-bill, and he asked the boys if they wanted tocome along. They did.

The boys followed Don to the roost tree, which wasonly a quarter mile from the logging camp. “He had areal bad limp,” Bob recalls. Eckelberry appeared self-conscious about this disability, which barred him fromservice in the military during World War II.

They had to walk a short way off the road, wadingthrough water up to their ankles, to get to the roost tree.“We must have got there around one o’clock,” Bill, now76, says. “It was after lunch.” While they waited, Dontold them about the Ivory-bill, and he sketched an imageof Bob, and drew pictures of wolves and other animals.

“I hear her,” Don said. “Let’s be quiet now;let’s stop our talking. Let the bird come onin.”

The hen Ivory-bill landed on a tree about60 feet away. She didn’t stay long before sheflew off again. After a few minutes, she re-turned to her roost snag. Unsettled, the birdflew again into the woods. Finally, she re-turned to the snag one last time that night,just below her roost hole. She pecked a cou-ple of times, then hitched up the snag, anddisappeared into her hole. She poked herhead out, and then retired for the night.

“By then it was getting late,” Bill remem-bers.

Don told the boys, “Unfortunately, this issomething that not everybody gets a chanceto witness; it may be the last of a species, thelast one of a kind.”

“I just thought it would be a sad thing tobe the last of anything on earth,” Bill states.

Bob, who is now 72, says the logging camp seemed tobe along the Ivory-bills’ route. “They flew across therailroad tracks on a regular basis,” he remembers. Whenthey pecked, it sounded like “a ball-peen hammer rap-ping on trees.”

Before Don’s visit, Bob couldn’t have said what the dif-ference was between the Ivory-bills and the Pileateds,but he had always noticed that the two species made adifferent noise. “When he slammed the trees, it was likea gun going off,” Bob says. “A Pileated is loud, but notlike that... When you got the two together—the Ivory-bill and the Pileated—there is no doubt it was a differ-ent bird.”

Gene Laird, 76, is Jessie’s oldest child. The Lairdslived near Methiglum Bayou, not far from John’s Bayou.Jessie, who died in 2000, had asked Gene to check onthe Ivory-bill several times a week. Gene would some-times see the female flutter around the topless andnaked snag, go into her roost hole, and poke her headout. One day, after a small storm, Gene rode to the snagand noticed that it had toppled.

“It wasn’t much of a storm, just a little wind,” he says.Gene never saw the Ivory-bill after that.

After Don Eckelberry left the Singer Tract, Gene cleanedout the Cochran camp house on Sharkey Road, where theartist had stayed. Eckelberry had left a pile of sketches, ofgray wolves, Wild Turkeys, and Downy Woodpeckers. “Ijust put everything on a bonfire,” Gene says.

Of the last Ivory-bill, Gene says, “She was importantbecause she was the last of the Mohicans, so to speak.”

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The tradeoff: soybean fields or breeding Ivory-bills? As we all know, the impossibly wrong decisionwas made. Photograph courtesy of© Hermione Museum, Tallulah, Louisiana.