10 A BAYOU WITH A VIEW
You never know when you get up in the
morning what earth-shaking event
might take place and change your life
forever. For me, a chain of such events
began when I checked my e-mail one day
in February 2004. Just a few days
earlier, a kayaker named Gene
Sparlingthe same man Larry Mallard had
told me about a few weeks earlierhad
spotted an unusual woodpecker
foraging on a huge cypress tree in a
long, narrow bayou in eastern Arkansas.
When he saw the bird"s unique color
patternbrilliant white on the lower half
of its back, with two white lines
extending up the back to its crested head
he knew immediately that he had never
seen this kind of bird before.
Inconspicuous in his kayak, he pulled
into a secluded spot and sat watching
it for almost a full minute.
The
woodpecker was so close he could see the
minute details of the feathers and even
some greenish staining on the lower
part of its back, perhaps from going in
and out of a roost hole or nest.
When he got home a few days later, Gene
posted a long
description of his trip on a canoe club
listserver, and he included a couple of
sentences about the woodpecker, buried
toward the end of the piece. His e-
mail report was forwarded to me, and I
immediately called him up. I grilled
him for about an hour. His sighting
sounded better than a lot of the
thirty-year-
old reports I had been investigating,
and it was less than a week old.
Gene has pileated woodpeckers nesting
on his farm in Hot
Springs, in the western part of
Arkansas, so he is thoroughly familiar with
that species. It seemed unlikely that a
pileated was what he had seen. What
struck me most about his description was
that 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 Bobby and told him about
the sighting. Then I asked
if he would mind calling Gene and
talking to him. I was interested in getting
his impression, 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."
"You think so?" said Gene. "I don"t
have enough confidence to
make that call, but I"m glad to hear you
say that."
Before they got off the phone, Bobby
was already planning a trip
to the sighting area, at Bayou de View
in the Cache River National Wildlife
Refuge, and Gene was going to go 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.
Gene Sparling told us to meet him on a
small country road near Clarendon,
Arkansas. He wanted to look at a place
where we could haul out at the end
of our several-day-long float down the
bayou. He had arranged with a local
man called Frank to drop us off at a
bridge crossing several miles north of
where Gene had seen the strange
woodpecker and to pick us up at the haul-
out point.
We spotted Gene"s red Toyota pickup,
unmistakable with the
canoe and kayak strapped to the top, a
few minutes after turning off the main
road. Gene greeted us enthusiastically,
and we stood on the side of the road
discussing the bird he had seen and our
plans for the next few days.
Gene is an affable man with a deep,
resonant voice and a slow
delivery that reminds me a little of
Eeyore"s. Grizzled and bearded, with
receding red hair and crow"s feet etched
deeply into his weathered face, he
looks older than his forty-eight years.
When we finished talking, Gene told us
to follow him into Clarendon to pick up
Frank.
As we drove along behind him, I said to
Bobby, "You know, he
either saw an ivory-bill or he's lying.
And I really don't think he's a liar."
Bobby nodded. "I don"t either," he
said. "His story is completely
believable."
Gene got confused on the way to Frank's
house, and we went
driving around and around in a
residential area where everything looked
the
same. He finally found the correct
house. Gene leaves his car at Frank's
house every time he goes kayaking in
this area. On this trip, Bobby parked
his old van in front of Frank's house
and left him with the keys.
Frank is a large, jovial man of about
sixty-five who wears cowboy
boots and a leather belt with a huge
silver buckle. He teased Gene
mercilessly as he drove us to our
drop-off point, claiming that Gene must
have a she-bear stashed somewhere in the
bayou that he was always
visiting. "No one would come out here
just to look at a damn bird," he said. "I
know you got a she-bear."
It was bad when Bobby and I first
started canoeing along Bayou de View
real bad. Without any preparation, we
clambered down below the overpass,
loaded up the canoewhich Gene had
borrowed from his parentsand
pushed off into the latte-brown river
flowing into the swamp. I sat in front and
Bobby in the stern, with all our
equipment piled high between us. I had 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 twelve,
and it showed. It was a real grind
hauling ourselves through that morass, at
times practically clawing our way
through the bayou, scrambling up and over
logs and cypress knees and blasting
through little chutes where the water
pushed together to form a swift-moving
stream. 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 goyour canoe
has turned 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 that
whenever we found ourselves
rushing into a treacherous area, Bobby
and I couldn"t coordinate our
movements to avoid the hazards. I would
point the canoe toward the one
open passage I could see ahead, but
Bobby would inevitably steer in the
other direction, and we would 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 had to jump
overboard and horse the canoe in a
different direction. Luckily, I was wearing
chest waders. Unluckily, the water was
sometimes deeper than the top of my
waders and came flooding inside.
Bayou de View is a magical place where
wildlife abounds. As we canoed
through the swamp, wood ducks and flocks
of mallards burst from the water
around us. Herds of white-tailed deer,
snorting a loud warning, splashed off
across the shallow water at the edge of
the woods. We saw beavers
swimming past and otters playing. The
loud calls of barred owls and great
horned owls echoed through the dim
recesses of the swamp, even at mid-
day. 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 that Jim Tanner had
written that the woods in the Singer
Tract had the most woodpeckers he had
ever seen. This bayou had the same feel.
Although on the first day we didn"t
see any of the huge trees that Gene had
described, we passed some
massive stumps, remnants of the logging
done in the 1800s. And it seemed
that there were trees in every state of
decomposition, ranging from those that
had just a few dying limbs to those that
had 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.
The three of us found a nice place to
camp on some high ground
near an area of open water. As I was
pitching the tent, though, it began to
dawn on me that I would not spend a
pleasant night here. I had left home so
quickly that I had forgotten to bring my
good tent, down sleeping bag, and
camp pad. They were packed in a bag back
home.
I had said to Bobby when we met in
Memphis that we should stop
at a sporting goods store so I could buy
the equipment I would need before
we hit the swamp.
"Don't worry," he told me. "I've got an
extra tent and sleeping bag
in my van."
"You sure?" I asked. "It'd be no
problem to stop and buy some
more equipment."
"No, no," he told me. "I've got
everything."
I wish I had gone with my instincts. As
it turned out, the tent
wasn't quite waterproof or bugproof and
the sleeping bag had a broken zipper.
And it was much colder than I had
thought it would be. After sleeping
fitfully
for a couple of hours, I woke with a
start at the nearby splash of a beaver
pounding its tail flat on the water
right next to us, and I never got back to
sleep. No matter what I did with that
sleeping bag, the cold air just flooded in,
and it was too difficult to get more
clothes from my bags in the middle of the
night. They were packed securely in the
canoe, and I couldn"t even find my
flashlight. The darkness of that swamp
in the middle of the night was like
nothing I had ever experienced. I
couldn"t even see my finger an inch from my
eye. So I hunkered in the fetal position
and shivered all night.
Still, it was great getting up the next
morning. Bobby made his
classic swamp breakfast, Dinty Moore
stew in special waterproof packages
for boiling. He 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 the
pouches to the food. Of course, we would
never know if it did, because the stew
was about the same color as the
water. Gene said that the last time he
was here, he had run short of drinking
water and had pulled out his special
survival water purification straw, but it
had clogged up after a few quick sips.
He didn't say what the water tasted
likeit was probably a bit like Dinty
Moore stew.
On the second day of our trip, we passed
an area where a long-abandoned
railroad trestle, built shortly after
the Civil War, cut through the trees. The
rails and even the rail bed were long
gone, and only stout wooden posts rose
up from the swamp water. We were
starting to feel as if we were really
out in
the wilderness, far from civilization.
We had been grinding 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 us:
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
around obstacles.
It was an amazing experience spending
time with Gene. He is a
remarkable outdoorsman and has spent his
life doing things like thishiking,
backpacking, horse packing, or kayaking
for days or weeks at a time, in
areas as close to wilderness as he can
find. He used to lead kayak tours in
Baja California, paddling out among the
gray whales. He now owns a big farm
in the mountains near Hot Springs and
leads horseback-riding tours.
Gene was at his best threading his way
stealthily through the
bayou in his kayak. He would always
range a hundred feet or more in front of
us, pulling into little hiding places
and sitting silently watching, waiting for
something to happen. His 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 would 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 would
much rather have been out there alone,
but he wanted someone to confirm his
ivorybill sighting so much that he put
up with us.
Just as we were thinking what a wild
place Bayou de View was, we started to
hear the loud roar of highway traffic
less than a mile downstream. As we
approached the bridge at Highway 17, the
din from semis was almost
unbearable. Bobby told me that whenever
he looked down on canoeists while
he was driving past on a highway, he
always envied them, wishing 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," he said. "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. 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 "lake"
south of 17 (it was more like
what we would call a pond in New York)
and turned right into a narrow
channel leading through the trees. Gene
had gone well ahead of us and was
going to wait for us when he found a
good place to stop for lunch. If it seemed
that we had gotten lost, he would come
looking for us.
As we paddled along, 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 will chase one
back to us."
And then it happened. Less than eighty
feet away, a large black-
and-white bird that had been flying
toward us from a side channel of the
bayou to the right came out into the
sunshine and flew across the open
stretch of water directly 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, as if it were
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
fifty 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 fifty or sixty
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 ten feet.
We clambered ashore, dragged the canoe
onto the mud, and took
off after the ivory-bill, our camcorders
running. We staggered through boot-
sucking mud and mire, over fallen trees,
and through tangled brush and
briars. It was impossible to move
quietly. We didn't see the bird.
About fifteen minutes later we walked
back to the canoe, 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 about what we had seen and
influence each other. At least we would
have some kind of documentary evidence,
even if we couldn't get a
photograph. (Later, when I was back in
Ithaca, Bobby faxed me his field
notes and a sketch he had drawn right
after seeing the bird; it was virtually
identical to my sketch.)
My first impression of the bird was
that it was definitely a
woodpecker and looked larger than a
crow. I know that it had white on the
trailing edge of the wing, because
that"s what I honed in on and was looking
for when I mentally evaluated it. The
white was much whiter than I thought it
would be, and the black much
blackercoal black, beautiful. I didn"t
notice
any red on the bird, and I did not have
a distinct impression of the bill,
because I had focused at first on the
wing pattern and then on keeping track
of the bird. No knowledgeable person
could have misidentified it. It was
definitely not a pileated woodpecker. It
looked completely different to me.
And we had 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
possibly mistake them for an ivory-bill. No
way. The bird we saw was a different animal.
I'm glad that both Bobby and I saw the
ivory-bill together. He has
always been the most skeptical person
about ivory-bill sightings I know.
Although he did not believe that these
birds were extinct, he rarely gave
much credence to the reports that came
in from time to time.
About half an hour after the sighting,
he called Norma on his cell
phone. She suffered from diabetes and
asthma, and the medicines she took
for both conditions often worked against
each other and made her sicker. He
was always concerned about her and
usually called her whenever he got to
an area with decent cell-phone
reception. This time, he engaged in
small talk
for about ten minutes, asking how she
was doing, how her latest tests at the
hospital had gone. Then he stopped
abruptly and let out a deep sigh. "I saw
an ivory-bill," he said, and then he
broke down and sobbed. "I saw an ivory-
bill." Gene and I looked away, and it
was all we could do to keep from crying
ourselves. I saved my tears for a few
days later, as I was driving home from
Rochester airport in the dark.
Gene was ready to leave the bayou right
away and start telling
people about the sighting. He thought
that people at the local office of the
Nature Conservancy should know, and the
officials at the Cache River and
White River National Wildlife Refuges.
"If we tell these people about the bird,
they"ll be able to save this whole
bayou," he said.
"We can"t do it," I told him. "You have
no idea what could happen here. I mean,
how would you like it if a couple of
thousand birders showed up next week to
look for the bird? We have to do this
right, Gene. And besides, we've got
nothing right nowno proof that the bird
really exists."
"What do you mean?" he said. "You both
saw ityou said it couldn"t have been
anything else."
"Yeah, but who the hell are we?" I said.
"You're the experts, right? You're from
Cornell. That's why I brought you here."
"Look, Gene, I'm a bird magazine
editor, and Bobby teaches art and
photography. We're not scientists, and
even if we were, we would still need
solid proof."
Gene was fuming. "We have three
eyewitnesses who saw this bird. Three!
What more do we need?"
"We need a picture or a video. Believe
me, even if the director of the Lab of
Ornithology had been in the canoe with
us, he would say the same thing. We've
got nothing. But we still have a few
more days to spend out here. Let"s set
up camp somewhere close and start
searching. This is the second sighting
of the bird in this area in two weeks.
We really ought to be able to nail it on
film."
We agreed to keep things cool for a
couple of days. We could always revisit
this conversation in a few days if we
couldn"t find the bird. We floated
downstream about a quarter of a mile and
pulled out on a nice piece of higher
ground on the east side of the bayou. A
massive cypress tree, well over a
thousand years old, towered high above
us nearby, surrounded by tupelos, and
second- growth oaks and other bottomland
hardwoods grew above the waterline. It
seemed to be an excellent place for an
ivory-bill. Who could say? Maybe we
would wake up the next morning and find
a nest right outside of camp. We put up
our tents and dubbed the place Camp
Ephilus II, in honor of the camp Arthur
Allen set up within sight of an active
ivory-bill nest in the Singer Tract in 1935.
At dusk we fought our way back upstream
to the place we had seen the bird.
Another great old cypress, perhaps seven
feet in diameter, stood not far from
where the ivory-bill had been. We could
see at least one excellent woodpecker
hole. Could it possibly be an
ivory-billed woodpecker"s roost hole? Or
maybe it was a nest. Anything seemed
possible and perhaps even probable to us
that day. We sat silently tucked away at
the side of the bayou, waiting for a
bird to fly into the hole or make a kent
call or a double rap. In the quiet of
the swamp, with its thick, damp air, we
watched and waited for over an hour.
Nothing showed up. When it was too dark
to see, we headed back to camp, shining
our tiny flashlight beams into the abyss
of darkness ahead. Gene had hung little
strips of white toilet paper on branches
to mark the way, and we followed them in
the darkness like Hansel and Gretel.
Copyright © 2005 by Tim Gallagher.