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 midday. But most impressive were the woodpeckers. Everywhere we turned, we saw a pileate, red-bellied, red-headed and downy woodpeckers, plus a few yellow-bellied sapsuckers. And then it happened. Less than one hundred 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!
This book is an outstanding example of the behind-the-recent-headlines genre. It tells the story of Tim Gallagher's obsessive quest to find the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was feared to be extinct (no confirmed sightings since 1944). Big, mysterious, iconic, the bird is a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with our relationship to the environment. In the 19th century, it was plundered by collectors, and in the 20th century, extensive habitat destruction seemingly drove it to extinction. Gallagher, editor of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's publication, Living Bird, has searched for the bird off and on for three decades. One day in February 2004 he read a posting on a canoe club web site about a strange woodpecker that a kayaker named Gene Sparling had seen on a float trip down a remote bayou in eastern Arkansas. Less than two weeks later, Gallagher and his fellow seeker, Bobby Ray Harrison, were in the swamp with Sparling, looking for the elusive bird. As readers of headlines know, they found it. The discovery gives us, Gallagher writes, one final chance to get it right, to save this bird and the bottomland swamp forests that it needs to survive.
