Return of the King

In the Arkansas swamps, Tim Gallagher tracks the majestic ivory-billed woodpecker, until recently believed lost forever

June 26, 2005

The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
By Tim Gallagher
Houghton Mifflin, 272 pp., illustrated, $25

In a world where tell-all books seem to appear within days of major news events, it should not be a surprise that the astonishing announcement of recent ivory-billed woodpecker sightings in Arkansas is accompanied by a book billed as ''the true story of the rediscovery." Bird study, or at least ivory-billed woodpecker study, it seems, is mainstream.

I was as stunned as nearly everyone else with the news on April 28 that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered. This spectacular bird is an icon whose ghostly spirit hangs over the remnants of Southern swamp forest that used to stretch from Texas to the Carolinas. The last undisputed sighting was in 1944, and in the decades since there has been a string of more or less believable reports. Thousands of bird-watchers have invested countless hours searching likely places and following up on tantalizing reports and rumors, but in all that time there were no verified and universally accepted sightings.

I, too, have searched for the ivory-billed, and like many other bird-watchers I have an insatiable appetite for information about the species. So when Tim Gallagher's sighting, and several others, were announced by the unimpeachable Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, with a video (brief and poor quality, but some tangible proof at long last), it was front-page news worldwide, and I was anxious to learn more.

Now the old questions like ''Could it still be out there?" have been augmented by questions like ''How did they find it?" or ''Why Arkansas?" and of course ''What was it like to see one?" Although the woodpecker's decline is covered in more detail in Phillip Hoose's book ''The Race to Save the Lord God Bird," and everything known about ivory-billeds, from habits to history to recent sightings, is covered in Jerome Jackson's authoritative ''In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker," I couldn't wait to read this book.

''The Grail Bird" by Gallagher begins with a brief summary of the bird's history, with some well-selected anecdotes from early ornithologists like John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson (including the classic story of Wilson's comically ill-conceived attempt to keep an ivory-billed woodpecker in his room at an inn).

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